by Sara Shepard
They floated over Alison DiLaurentis’s old house. From up here, it seemed so untroubled. Next to that was Spencer’s house, with its windmill, stables, barn, and rock-lined pool. A few houses down was Mona’s, a beautiful redbrick bordered by a grove of cherry trees with a garage off to the side of the yard. Once, right after their makeovers, they’d painted HM + MV = BBBBBFF in reflective paint on the roof. They never knew what it actually looked like from above. She reached for her BlackBerry to text Mona the news.
Then she remembered. They weren’t friends anymore. She sucked in a breath.
“You all right?” Lucas asked.
She looked away. “Yeah. Fine.”
Lucas’s eyebrows made a V. “I’m in the Supernatural Club at school. We practice mind reading. I can ESP it out of you.” He shut his eyes and put his hands to his temples. “You’re upset because of…how Mona’s having a birthday party without you.”
Hanna suppressed a snort. Like that was hard to figure out. Lucas had been in the bathroom right after it happened. She unscrewed the top to the smoothie carafe. “Why are you in, like, every Rosewood Day club imaginable?” He was like a dorkier version of Spencer in that way.
Lucas opened his eyes. They were such a clear, light blue—like the cornflower crayon from the 64-Crayola box. “I like being busy all the time. If I’m not doing anything, I start thinking.”
“About what?”
Lucas’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “My older brother tried to kill himself a year ago.”
Hanna widened her eyes.
“He has bipolar disorder. He stopped taking his medication and…something went wrong in his head. He took a whole bunch of aspirin, and I found him passed out in our living room. He’s at a psychiatric hospital now. They have him on all these medications and…he’s not really the same person anymore, so…”
“Did he go to Rosewood Day?” Hanna asked.
“Yeah, but he’s six years older than us. You probably wouldn’t remember him.”
“God. I’m so sorry,” Hanna whispered. “That sucks.”
Lucas shrugged. “A lot of people would probably just sit in their room and get stoned, but keeping busy works better for me.”
Hanna crossed her arms over her chest. “My way of staying sane is to eat a ton of cheese-based snacks and then throw them up.”
She covered her mouth. She couldn’t believe she just said that.
Lucas raised an eyebrow. “Cheese-based snacks, huh? Like Cheez-Its? Doritos?”
“Uh-huh.” Hanna stared at the balloon basket’s wooden bottom.
Lucas’s fingers fidgeted. His hands were strong and well proportioned and looked like they could give really great back rubs. All of a sudden, Hanna wanted to touch them. “My cousin had that…problem…too,” Lucas said softly. “She got over it.”
“How?”
“She got happy. She moved away.”
Hanna stared over the basket. They were flying over Cheswold, Rosewood’s wealthiest housing development. Hanna had always wanted to live in a Cheswold house, and up here, the estates looked even more amazing than they did at street level. But they also looked stiff and formal and not quite real—more like an idea of a house instead of something you’d actually want to live in.
“I used to be happy,” Hanna sighed. “I hadn’t done…the cheese thing…in years. But my life’s been awful lately. I am upset about Mona. But there’s more. It’s everything. Ever since I got that first note, things have gone from bad to worse.”
“Rewind.” Lucas leaned back. “Note?”
Hanna paused. She hadn’t meant to mention A. “Just these notes I’ve been getting. Someone’s teasing me with all this personal stuff.” She peeked at Lucas, hoping he wasn’t interested—most boys wouldn’t be. Unfortunately, he looked worried.
“That sounds mean.” Lucas furrowed his brow. “Who’s sending them?”
“Don’t know. At first, I thought it was Alison DiLaurentis.” She paused, pushing the hair out of her eyes. “I know that’s moronic, but the first notes talked about this thing that only she knew.”
Lucas made a disgusted face. “Alison’s body was found, what, a month ago? Someone’s impersonating her? That’s…that’s freaky.”
Hanna waved her arms. “No, I started getting the notes before Ali’s body was found, so no one knew she was dead yet….” Her head started to hurt. “It’s confusing and…don’t worry about it. Forget I said anything.”
Lucas looked at her uneasily. “Maybe you should call the cops.”
Hanna sniffed. “Whoever it is isn’t breaking any laws.”
“You don’t know who you’re dealing with, though,” Lucas said.
“It’s probably some dumb kid.”
Lucas paused. “Don’t the cops say that if you’re being harassed, like getting prank calls, it’s most likely from someone you know? I saw that on a crime show once.”
A chill went through Hanna. She thought of A’s note—One of your old friends is hiding something from you. Something big. She thought again about Spencer. Once, not long after Ali vanished, Spencer’s dad had taken the four of them to Wildwater Kingdom, a water park not too far from their house. As Hanna and Spencer were climbing the steps to the Devil’s Drop, Hanna had asked her if she and Ali were mad at each other about something.
Spencer’s face had turned the exact shade of her merlot-colored Tommy Hilfiger string bikini. “Why are you asking that?”
Hanna frowned, holding her foamy raft to her chest. “I was just curious.”
Spencer stepped closer. The air became very still, and all splashing and squealing sounds seemed to evaporate. “I wasn’t mad at Ali. She was mad at me. I have no clue why, okay?” Then she did a 180 and started marching back down the wooden staircase, practically knocking over other kids as she went.
Hanna curled her toes. She hadn’t thought of that day in a while.
Lucas cleared his throat. “What are the notes about? The cheese thing?”
Hanna stared at the skylights on top of the Rosewood Abbey, the site of Ali’s memorial. Screw it, she thought. She’d told Lucas about A—why not everything else? It was like that trust exercise she’d done on her sixth-grade camping trip: a girl in her bunk named Viviana Rogers had stood behind her and Hanna had to fall into her arms, having faith that she would catch Hanna instead of letting her clunk to the grass.
“Yeah, the cheese,” she said quietly. “And…well, you may have heard some of the other things. Plenty of stuff is going around about me. Like my father. He moved out a couple years ago and now lives with his beautiful stepdaughter. She wears a size two.”
“What size do you wear?” Lucas asked, confused.
She took a deep breath, ignoring that question. “And I got caught stealing, too—some jewelry from Tiffany, and Sean Ackard’s father’s car.”
She looked up, surprised to see that Lucas hadn’t jumped over the side of the balloon in disgust. “In seventh grade, I was a fat, ugly spaz. Even though I was friends with Alison, I still felt…like a nothing. Mona and I worked hard to change, and I thought we’d both become…Alison. It worked for a while, but not anymore.”
Hearing her problems out loud, she sounded like such a loser. But it also felt like the time she’d gone with Mona to a spa in the country and had a colonic. The process was gross, but afterward she felt so free.
“I’m glad you’re not Alison,” Lucas said quietly.
Hanna rolled her eyes. “Everyone loved Alison.”
“I didn’t.” Lucas avoided Hanna’s startled look. “I know that’s terrible to say, and I feel horrible about what happened to her. But she wasn’t very nice to me.” He blew a plume of fire into the balloon. “In seventh grade, Ali started a rumor that I was a hermaphrodite.”
Hanna looked up sharply. “Ali didn’t start that rumor.”
“She did. Actually, I started it for her. She asked if I was a hermaphrodite at a soccer game. I said I didn’t know—I had no idea wha
t a hermaphrodite was. She laughed and told everyone. Later, when I looked it up, it was too late—it was everywhere.”
Hanna stared at him in disbelief. “Ali wouldn’t do that.”
But…Ali would do that. It was Ali who had gotten everyone to call Jenna Cavanaugh Snow. She’d spread the rumor that Toby had fish gills. Everyone had taken everything Ali said as gospel.
Hanna peered over the edge of the basket. That rumor about Lucas being a hermaphrodite had started after they found out he was going to send Hanna a heart-shaped box on Candy Day. Ali had even gone with Hanna to buy new glitter-pocketed Sevens to mark the occasion. She’d said she loved them, but she was probably lying about that, too.
“And you shouldn’t say you’re ugly, Hanna,” Lucas said. “You’re so, so pretty.”
Hanna stuck her chin into the collar of her shirt, feeling surprisingly shy.
“You are. I can’t stop looking at you.” Lucas grimaced.
“Yikes. I probably way overstepped the friends thing, huh?”
“It’s okay.” Heat spread over her skin. It made her feel so good to hear she was pretty. When had someone last told her that? Lucas was as different from perfect Sean as a boy could get. Lucas was tall and lanky, and not in the slightest bit cool, with his Rive Gauche job and ESP club and the sticker on the back of his car that said, SCISSOR SISTERS, which could be a band or a salon or a cult. But there was something else there, too—you just had to dig down to get to it, like how Hanna and her dad had once plundered the New Jersey beaches with their metal detector. They’d searched for hours and had found not one but two diamond earrings hiding under the sand.
“So listen,” Lucas said. “I’m not invited to Mona’s party, either. Do you want to get together on Saturday and have an anti-party? I have a negative-edge pool. It’s heated. Or, you know, if that’s not your thing, we could…I don’t know. Play poker.”
“Poker?” Hanna glanced at him askance. “Not strip.”
“What do you take me for?” Lucas put his hand to his chest. “I’m talking Texas Hold ’Em. You’d better watch it, though. I’m good.”
“All right. Sure. I’ll come over and play poker.” She leaned back in the balloon, realizing she was looking forward to it. She gave Lucas a coy smile. “Don’t change the subject, though. Now that I’ve made an ass out of myself, you’ve got to fess up about some embarrassing stuff, too. What else are you avoiding by joining all your activities?”
Lucas leaned back. “Let’s see. There’s the fact that I’m a hermaphrodite.”
His face was dead serious. Hanna widened her eyes, caught off guard. But then Lucas grinned and started laughing, so Hanna laughed, too.
23 THE ROSEBUSHES HAVE EYES
Friday at lunch, Emily sat in the Rosewood Day greenhouse, where tall, leafy plants and a few species of butterflies flourished in the humidity. Even though it was hot and smelled like dirt, a lot of people were eating lunch in here. Maybe it was to escape the drizzly weather—or maybe they just wanted to be near Rosewood Day’s new It Girl, Emily Fields.
“So are you going to Mona’s party?” Aria’s brother, Mike, gazed expectantly at Emily. He and a few other boys on the lacrosse team had plopped down on a bench across from her and were hanging on her every word.
“I don’t know,” Emily replied, finishing the last of her potato chips. It was doubtful her mom would let her go to Mona’s, and Emily wasn’t sure if she wanted to.
“You should come hang out in my hot tub afterward.” Noel Kahn scribbled his number on a piece of lined notebook paper. He tore it off and handed it to her. “That’s when the real party’s going to start.”
“Bring your girlfriend, too,” Mike suggested, a hungry look in his eye. “And feel free to make out around us. We’re very open-minded.”
“I could even get my photo booth back out for you,” Noel offered, giving Emily a wink. “Whatever turns you on.”
Emily rolled her eyes. As the boys sauntered off, she leaned over her thighs and let out a frazzled breath. It was too bad she wasn’t the exploitative type—she could probably make a lot of money off these sexed-up, girl-on-girl-loving Rosewood boys.
Suddenly, she felt someone’s small hand curl around her wrist. “You dating a lax boy?” Maya whispered in her ear. “I saw him slip you his number.”
Emily looked up. Her heart swooped. It felt like she hadn’t seen Maya in weeks, and she couldn’t stop thinking about her. Maya’s face swam before her whenever she shut her eyes. She thought about the feel of her lips during their make-out sessions on the rock by the creek.
Not that those make-out sessions could ever happen again.
Emily pulled her hand away. “Maya. We can’t.”
Maya stuck out her bottom lip. She looked around. Kids were sitting on the fountains or on the wooden benches next to the flower beds or near the butterfly sanctuary, calmly talking and eating their lunches. “It’s not like anyone’s watching.”
Emily shivered. It felt like someone was. This whole lunch, she’d had the most eerie feeling that there was someone right behind her, spying. The greenhouse plants were so tall and thick, they provided easy coverage for people to hide behind.
Maya unclipped her pink Swiss Army knife from her backpack and snipped off a rose from the lush bushes behind them. “Here,” she said, handing it to Emily.
“Maya!” Emily dropped the rose on her lap. “You can’t pick flowers in here!”
“I don’t care,” Maya insisted. “I want you to have it.”
“Maya.” Emily forcefully slapped her palms on her thighs. “You should go.”
Maya scowled at her. “You’re seriously doing the Tree Tops thing?” When Emily nodded, Maya groaned. “I thought you were stronger than that. And it seems so creepy.”
Emily crumpled up her lunch bag. Hadn’t she already gone through this? “If I don’t do Tree Tops, I have to go to Iowa. And I can’t—my aunt and uncle are crazy.”
She closed her eyes and thought of her aunt, her uncle, and her three Iowa cousins. She hadn’t seen them in years, and all she could picture were five disapproving frowns. “The last time I visited, my aunt Helene told me that I should eat Cheerios and only Cheerios for breakfast because they suppressed sexual urges. My two male cousins went on extra-long runs through the cornfields every morning to drain their sexual energy. And my cousin Abby—she’s my age—wanted to be a nun. She probably is one now. She carried around a notebook that she called Abby’s Little Book of Evil—and she wrote down everything she thought was a sin. She recorded thirty sinful things about me. She even thought going barefoot was evil!”
Maya chuckled. “If you have really ganked-up feet, it is.”
“It’s not funny!” Emily cried. “And this isn’t about me being strong or thinking Tree Tops is right or lying to myself. I can’t move there.”
Emily bit her lip, feeling the hot rush she always got before she was about to cry. In the past two days, if her family passed her in the halls or the kitchen, they wouldn’t even look in her direction. They said nothing to her at meals. She felt weird about joining them on the couch to watch TV. And Emily’s sister Carolyn seemed to have no idea how to deal with her. Since the swim meet, Carolyn had stayed away from their shared bedroom. Usually, the sisters did their homework at their desks, murmuring to each other about math problems, history essays, or random gossip they’d heard at school. Last night, Carolyn came upstairs when Emily was already in bed. She changed in the dark and climbed into her own bed without saying a word.
“My family won’t love me if I’m gay,” Emily explained, looking into Maya’s round brown eyes. “Imagine if your family woke up and decided they hated you.”
“I just want to be with you,” Maya mumbled, twirling the rose between her hands.
“Well, me too,” Emily answered. “But we can’t.”
“Let’s hang out in secret,” Maya suggested. “I’m going to Mona Vanderwaal’s party tomorrow. Meet me there. We’ll ditch and find
somewhere to be alone.”
Emily chewed on her thumbnail. She wished she could…but Becka’s words haunted her. Life is hard already. Why make it harder? Yesterday, during her free period, Emily had logged into Google and typed, Are lesbians’ lives hard? Even as she typed that word—lesbian—her right hand pecking the L key and her left the E, S, and B, it seemed strange to think that it applied to her. She didn’t like it, as a word—it made her think of rice pudding, which she despised. Every link in the list was to a blocked porn site. Then again, Emily had put the words lesbian and hard in the same search field.
Emily felt someone’s eyes on her. She glanced around through the whirling vines and bushes and saw Carolyn and a few other swim team girls sitting by the bougainvillea. Her sister glared right at them, a disgusted look on her face.
Emily leapt up from the bench. “Maya, go. Carolyn sees us.”
She took a few steps away, pretending to be fascinated by a planter of marigolds, but Maya didn’t move. “Hurry!” Emily hissed. “Get out of here!”
She felt Maya’s eyes on her. “I’m going to Mona’s party tomorrow,” she said in a low voice. “Are you going to be there or not?”
Emily shook her head, not meeting Maya’s eye. “I’m sorry. I need to change.”
Maya violently yanked up her green-and-white canvas tote. “You can’t change who you are. I’ve told you that a thousand times.”
“But maybe I can,” Emily answered. “And maybe I want to.”
Maya dropped Emily’s rose on the bench and stomped away. Emily watched her weave through the rows of planters past the foggy windows for the exit and wanted to cry. Her life was a horrible mess. Her old, simple life—the one she’d had before this school year started—seemed like it belonged to a different girl entirely.
Suddenly, she felt someone’s fingernails trace the back of her neck. A chill ran up her back, and she whirled around. It was only a tendril from another rosebush, its thorns fat and sharp, the roses plump. Then, Emily noticed something on one of the windows a few feet away. Her mouth fell open. There was writing in the condensation. I see you. Two wide-open, heavily lashed eyes were drawn next to the words. It was signed A.