by Sara Shepard
Aria pushed Ezra away and jumped up. “I have to go.” She felt sweaty, as if someone had jacked up the thermostat about fifty degrees. She quickly gathered up her things, heart thumping and cheeks blazing.
“Thanks for the extension,” she blurted out, pushing clumsily through the door.
Out in the hall, she drew in a few deep breaths. Down the corridor, a figure slipped around the corner. Aria tensed. Someone had seen.
She noticed something on Ezra’s door and widened her eyes. Someone had erased all the old white-board messages, replacing them with a new one in an unfamiliar hot pink marker.
Careful, careful! I’m always watching!
—A
And then, in smaller letters, down at the bottom:
Here’s a second hint: You all knew every inch of her backyard. But for one of you, it was so, so easy.
Aria pulled her blazer sleeve down and quickly wiped the letters away. When she got to the signature, she wiped extra hard, scrubbing and scrubbing until there was no trace of A left.
21 WHAT DOES H-O-L-Y C-R-A-P SPELL?
Thursday evening, Spencer settled into the red plushy seats at the Rosewood Country Club restaurant and looked out the bay window. On the golf course, a couple of older guys in V-neck sweaters and khakis were trying to get in a few more holes before the sun went down. Out on the deck, people were taking advantage of the last few warm days of the year, drinking gin and tonics and eating rock shrimp and bruschetta squares. Mr. and Mrs. Hastings stirred their Bombay Sapphire martinis, then looked at each other.
“I propose a toast.” Mrs. Hastings pushed her blond bobbed hair behind her ears, her three-carat diamond ring glinting against the setting sun streaming through the window. Spencer’s parents always toasted before they took a drink of anything—even water.
Mrs. Hastings raised her glass. “To Spencer making the Golden Orchid finals.”
Mr. Hastings clinked. “And to being on the front page of this Sunday’s Sentinel.”
Spencer raised her glass and clinked it with them, but the effort was halfhearted. She didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be at home, protected and safe. She couldn’t stop thinking about her strange session with Dr. Evans this morning. The vision she’d seen—the forgotten fight with Ali the night she disappeared—was haunting. Why hadn’t she remembered it before? Was there more to it? What if she’d seen Ali’s killer?
“Congrats, Spencer,” her mother interrupted her thoughts. “I hope you win.”
“Thanks,” Spencer mumbled. She worked to fold her green napkin back into an accordion, then went around the table and folded all the others, too.
“Nervous about something?” Her mother nudged her chin at the napkins.
Spencer immediately stopped. “No,” she said quickly. Whenever she shut her eyes, she was right back in the Ali memory again. It was so clear now. She could smell the honeysuckle that grew in the woods that paralleled the barn, feel the early summer breeze, see the lightning bugs spatter-painting the dark sky. But it couldn’t be real.
When Spencer looked up, her parents were gazing at her peculiarly. They’d probably asked her a question she’d completely missed. For the first time ever, she wished Melissa were here monopolizing the conversation.
“Are you nervous because of the doctor?” her mother whispered.
Spencer couldn’t hide her smirk—she loved that her mom called Dr. Evans “the doctor” instead of “the therapist.” “No. I’m fine.”
“Do you think you’ve gotten a lot…” Her father seemed to search for his words, fiddling with his tie pin.
“…accomplished, with the doctor?”
Spencer rocked her fork back and forth. Define accomplished, she wanted to say.
Before she could answer, the waiter appeared. It was the same waiter they’d had for years, the short little baldish guy who had a Winnie-the-Pooh voice. “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Hastings.” Pooh shook her father’s hand. “And Spencer. You’re looking lovely.”
“Thanks,” Spencer mumbled, although she was pretty sure she wasn’t. She hadn’t washed her hair after field hockey, and the last time she’d looked in the mirror, her eyes had a wild, scared look to them. She kept twitching, too, and looking around the restaurant to see if someone was watching her.
“How is everyone tonight?” Pooh asked. He fluffed up the napkins Spencer had just refolded and spread them on everyone’s laps. “Here for a special occasion?”
“Actually, yes,” Mrs. Hastings piped up. “Spencer’s a finalist in the Golden Orchid competition. It’s a major academic prize.”
“Mom,” Spencer hissed. She hated how her mother broadcast family accomplishments. Especially since Spencer had cheated.
“That’s wonderful!” Pooh bellowed. “It’s nice to have some good news, for once.” He leaned in closer. “Quite a few of our guests think they’ve seen that stalker everyone’s been talking about. Some even say they saw someone near the club last night.”
“Hasn’t this town been through enough?” Mr. Hastings mused.
Mrs. Hastings worriedly glanced at her husband. “You know, I swore I saw someone staring at me when I met Spencer at the doctor’s on Monday.”
Spencer jerked her head up, her heart racing. “Did you get a look at him?”
Mrs. Hastings shrugged. “Not really.”
“Some people are saying it’s a man. Others, a woman,” Pooh said.
Everyone tsked in distress.
Pooh took their orders. Spencer mumbled that she wanted the ahi tuna—the same thing she’d been getting ever since she stopped ordering off the kids’ menu. As the waiter trundled away, Spencer looked blearily around the dining room. It was done up in a ramshackle-Nantucket-boat theme, with dark wicker chairs and lots of life buoys and bronze figureheads. The far wall still had the ocean mural, complete with a hideous giant squid, a killer whale, and a merman that had flowing blond hair and a broken, Owen Wilson–style nose. When Spencer, Ali, and the others used to come here to eat dinner alone—a huge deal, back in sixth and seventh grades—they loved sitting next to the merman. Once, when Mona Vanderwaal and Chassey Bledsoe came in here by themselves, Ali demanded that Mona and Chassey both give the merman a big French kiss. Tears of shame had run down their cheeks as both girls stuck their tongues to the painted merman’s lips.
Ali was so mean, Spencer thought. Her dream floated back. You can’t have this, Ali had said. Why did Spencer get so angry? Spencer thought Ali was going to tell Melissa about Ian that night. Was that why? And what did Dr. Evans mean when she said that some people edit out things that happen to them? Had Spencer ever done that before?
“Mom?” Suddenly Spencer was curious. “Do you know if I ever, like, randomly forgot a whole bunch of stuff? Like…experienced temporary amnesia?”
Her mother held her drink in midair. “W-why are you asking?”
The back of Spencer’s neck felt clammy. Her mother had the same disturbed, I don’t want to deal with this look she’d had the time her brother, Spencer’s uncle Daniel, got too drunk at one of their parties and prattled off a few deeply protected family secrets. That was how Spencer found out her grandmother had a morphine addiction, and that her aunt Penelope had given away a child for adoption when she was seventeen. “Wait, I have?”
Her mom felt the plate’s scalloped edge. “You were seven. You had the flu.”
The cords in her mother’s neck stood out, which meant she was holding her breath. And that meant she wasn’t telling Spencer everything. “Mom.”
Her mother ran her hands around the martini glass edge. “It’s not important.”
“Oh, tell her, Veronica,” her father said gruffly. “She can handle it.”
Mrs. Hastings took a deep breath. “Well, Melissa, you, and I went to the Franklin Institute—you both loved that walk-through heart exhibit. Remember?”
“Sure,” Spencer said. The Franklin Institute heart exhibit spanned five thousand square feet, had veins the size of Spencer’s for
earm, and throbbed so loudly that when you were inside its ventricles, the beating was the only sound you could hear.
“We were walking back to our car,” her mother went on, her eyes on her lap. “On our way, this man stopped us.” She paused, and took Spencer’s father’s hand. They both looked so solemn. “He…he had a gun in his jacket. He wanted my wallet.”
Spencer widened her eyes. “What?”
“He made us get down on our stomachs on the sidewalk.” Mrs. Hastings’s mouth wobbled. “I didn’t care that I gave him my wallet, but I was so scared for you girls. You kept whimpering and crying. You kept asking me if we were going to die.”
Spencer twisted the end of the napkin in her lap. She didn’t remember this.
“He told me to count to one hundred before we could get up again,” her mother said. “After the coast was clear, we ran to our car, and I drove us home. I drove nearly thirty miles over the speed limit, I remember. It’s a wonder I didn’t get stopped.”
She paused and sipped her drink. Someone dropped a bunch of plates in the kitchen, and most of the diners craned their necks in the direction of the shattering china, but Mrs. Hastings acted as if she hadn’t even heard it. “When we got home, you had a horrible fever,” she went on. “It came on suddenly. We took you to the ER. We were afraid you had meningitis—there had been a case of it a few towns over. We had to stay close to home while we waited for the test results, in case we had to rush you back to the hospital. We had to miss Melissa’s national spelling bee. Remember when she was preparing for that?”
Spencer remembered. Sometimes, she and Melissa would play Bee—Melissa as the contestant, Spencer as the judge, lobbing Melissa words to spell from a long list. That was back when Melissa and Spencer used to like each other. But the way Spencer remembered it, Melissa had opted out of the competition because she had a field hockey game that same day. “Melissa went to the bee after all?” she sounded out.
“She did, but she went with Yolanda’s family. Remember her friend Yolanda? She and Melissa were in all those knowledge bowls together.”
Spencer crinkled her brow. “Yolanda Hensler?”
“That’s right.”
“Melissa was never Yolanda’s—” Spencer stopped herself. She was about to say that Melissa was never Yolanda Hensler’s friend. Yolanda was the type of girl who was sweetie-pie around adults but a bossy terror in private. Spencer knew that Yolanda had once forced Melissa to go through every knowledge bowl sample question without stopping, even though Melissa told her a zillion times that she had to pee. Melissa had ended up peeing in her pants, and it seeped all over Yolanda’s Lilly Pulitzer comforter.
“Anyway, a week later, your fever broke,” her mother said. “But when you woke up, you’d forgotten the whole thing ever happened. You remembered going to the Franklin Institute, and you remembered walking through the heart, but then I asked if you remembered the mean man in the city. And you said, ‘What mean man?’ You couldn’t remember the ER, having tests run, being sick, anything. You just…erased it. We watched you the rest of that summer, too. We were afraid you might get sick again. Melissa and I had to miss our mother-daughter kayak camp in Colorado and that big piano recital in New York City, but I think she understood.”
Spencer’s heart was racing. “Why hasn’t anyone ever told me this?”
Her mother looked at her dad. “The whole thing was so strange. I thought it might upset you, knowing you’d missed a whole week. You were such a worrier after that.”
Spencer gripped the edge of the table. I might have missed more than a week of my life, she wanted to say to her parents. What if it wasn’t my only blackout?
She shut her eyes. All she could hear was that crack from her memory. What if she had blacked out before Ali disappeared? What had she missed that night?
By the time Pooh set down their steaming plates, Spencer was shaking. Her mother cocked her head. “Spencer? What’s wrong?” She swiveled her head to Spencer’s father. “I knew we shouldn’t have told her.”
“Spencer?” Mr. Hastings waved his hands in front of Spencer’s face. “You okay?”
Spencer’s lips felt numb, as if they’d been injected with novocaine. “I’m afraid.”
“Afraid?” her father repeated, leaning forward. “Of what?”
Spencer blinked. She felt like she was having the recurring dream where she knew what she wanted to say in her head, but instead of words coming out of her mouth, out came a shell. Or a worm. Or a plume of purple, chalky smoke. Then she clamped her mouth closed. She’d suddenly realized the answer she was looking for—what she feared.
Herself.
22 THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE ROSEWOOD—FROM 3,000 FEET UP
Friday morning, Hanna stepped out of Lucas’s maroon Volkswagen Jetta. They were in the parking lot of Ridley Creek State Park, and the sun was barely up.
“This is my big surprise that’s supposed to make me feel all better?” She looked around. Ridley Creek Park was full of undulating gardens and hiking trails. She watched as a bunch of girls in running shorts and long-sleeved T-shirts passed. Then a bunch of guys on bikes in colorful spandex shorts rode by. It made Hanna feel lazy and fat. Here it was, not even 6 A.M., and these people were virtuously burning off calories. They probably hadn’t binged on a whole box of cheddar-flavored goldfish crackers last night, either.
“I can’t tell you,” Lucas answered. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a surprise.”
Hanna groaned. The air smelled like burning leaves, which Hanna always found spooky. As she crunched through the parking lot gravel, she thought she heard snickering. She whipped back around, alert.
“Something wrong?” Lucas said, stopping a few paces away.
Hanna pointed at the trees. “Do you see someone?”
Lucas shaded his eyes with his hand. “You worried about that stalker?”
“Something like that.”
Anxiety gnawed at her belly. When they’d driven here in semi-darkness, Hanna felt like a car had been following them. A? Hanna couldn’t stop thinking about the bizarre text from yesterday about Mona going to Bill Beach for plastic surgery. In some ways, it made sense—Mona never wore anything that revealed too much skin, even though she was way thinner than Hanna was. But plastic surgery—anything but a boob job, anyway—was kind of…embarrassing. It meant genetics were against you, and you couldn’t exercise your way down to your ideal body. If Hanna spread that rumor about Mona, her popularity quotient might sink a few notches. Hanna would have done it to another girl without batting an eye…but to Mona? Hurting her felt different.
“I think we’re okay,” Lucas said, walking toward the pebbly path. “They say the stalker only spies on people in their houses.”
Hanna rubbed her eyes nervously. For once, she didn’t need to worry about smudging her mascara. She’d put on next to no makeup this morning. And she was wearing Juicy velour pants and a gray hoodie she often wore to run laps around the track. This was all to show they were not on some queer early morning date.
When Lucas showed up at the door, Hanna was relieved to find that he was wearing ratty jeans, a scruffy tee, and a similar gray hoodie. Then he’d flopped into a leaf pile on their way to the car and squirmed around like Hanna’s miniature Doberman, Dot. It was actually kind of cute. Which was totally different from thinking that Lucas was cute, obviously.
They entered a clearing and Lucas turned around. “Ready for your surprise?”
“This better be good.” Hanna rolled her eyes. “I could still be in bed.”
Lucas led her through the trees. In the clearing was a rainbow-striped hot air balloon. It was limp and lying on its side, with the basket part tipped over. A couple of guys stood around it as fans blew air up into the balloon, making it ripple.
“Ta-daaa!” Lucas cried.
“Okaaay.” Hanna shaded her eyes with her hand. “I’m going to watch them blow up a balloon?” She knew this wasn’t a good idea. Lucas was so lame.
“No
t quite.” Lucas leaned back on his heels. “You’re going up in it.”
“What?” Hanna shrieked. “By myself?”
Lucas knocked her upside the head. “I’m going with you, duh.” He started walking toward the balloon. “I have a license to fly hot air balloons. I’m learning to fly a Cessna, too. But my biggest accomplishment is this.” He held up a stainless steel carafe. “I made smoothies for us this morning. It was the first time I’d used the blender—the first time I’ve used a kitchen appliance at all, actually. Aren’t you proud of me?”
Hanna smirked. Sean had always cooked for her, which always made Hanna feel more inadequate than pampered. She liked that Lucas was boyishly clueless.
“I am proud.” Hanna smiled. “And sure, I’ll go up in that deathtrap with you.”
After the balloon got fat and taut, Hanna and Lucas climbed in the basket and Lucas shot a long plume of fire up into the envelope. In seconds, they started to rise. Hanna was surprised her stomach didn’t lurch as it sometimes did on an elevator, and when she looked down, she was amazed to see that the two guys who had helped inflate the balloon were tiny specks on the grass. She saw Lucas’s red Jetta in the parking lot…then the fishing creek, then the winding running path, then Route 352.
“There’s the Hollis spire!” Hanna cried excitedly, pointing at it off in the distance.
“Cool, huh?” Lucas smiled.
“It is,” Hanna admitted. It was so nice and quiet up here. There were no traffic sounds, no annoying birds, just the sound of wind. Best of all, A wasn’t up here. Hanna felt so free. Part of her wanted to fly away in a balloon for good, like the Wizard of Oz.
They flew over the Old Hollis neighborhood, with its Victorian houses and messy front lawns. Then the King James Mall, its parking lot nearly empty. Hanna smiled when they passed the Quaker boarding school. It had an avant-garde obelisk on the front lawn that was nicknamed William Penn’s Penis.