Flawless (5 page)

“Uh…fine.” Emily croaked. She stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were wide and hollow, and her reddish-blonde hair was disheveled. When she finally emerged from the bathroom, the bedroom lights were off and the shades were drawn.

“
Psssst,
” Maya called from the bed. She’d laid seductively on her side.

Emily looked around. She was pretty sure Maya hadn’t even locked the door. All those Rosewood kids were eating brunch downstairs….

“I can’t do this,” Emily blurted out.

“What?” Maya’s dazzlingly white teeth glowed in the dimness.

“We’re friends.” Emily plastered herself against the wall. “I like you.”

“I like you, too.” Maya ran a hand over one bare arm.

“But that’s all I can be right now,” Emily clarified. “Friends.”

Maya’s smile disappeared in the dark.

“Sorry.” Emily shoved on her loafers fast, putting her right shoe on her left foot.

“It doesn’t mean you have to leave,” Maya said quietly.

Emily looked at her as she reached for the doorknob. Her eyes were already adjusting to the dim light, and she could see that Maya looked disappointed and confused and…and beautiful. “I should go,” Emily mumbled. “I’m late.”

“Late for what?”

Emily didn’t answer. She turned for the door. Just as she suspected, Maya hadn’t bothered to lock it.

4

THERE’S TRUTH IN WINE…OR, IN ARIA’S CASE, AMSTEL

As Aria Montgomery slipped into her family’s boxy, avant-garde house—which stuck out on their typical Rosewood street of neoclassical Victorians—she heard her parents talking quietly in the kitchen.

“But I don’t understand,” her mother, Ella—her parents liked Aria to call them by their first names—was saying. “You told me you could make it to the artists’ dinner last week. It’s important. I think Jason might buy some of the paintings I did in Reykjavík.”

“It’s just that I’m already behind on my papers,” her father, Byron, answered. “I haven’t gotten back into the swing of grading yet.”

Ella sighed. “How is it they have papers and you’ve only had two days of class?”

“I gave them their first assignment before the semester started.” Byron sounded distracted. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise. How about Otto’s? Saturday night?”

Aria shifted her weight in the foyer. Her family had just returned from two years in Reykjavík, Iceland, where her dad had been on sabbatical from teaching at Hollis, Rosewood’s liberal arts college. It had been a perfect reprieve for all of them—Aria needed the escape after Ali went missing, her brother, Mike, needed some culture and discipline, and Ella and Byron, who’d begun to go days without speaking, seemed to fall back in love in Iceland. But now that they were back home, everyone was reverting back to their dysfunctional ways.

Aria passed the kitchen. Her dad was gone, and her mom was standing over the island, her head in her hands. When she saw Aria, she brightened. “How you doing, pumpkin?” Ella asked carefully, fingering the memorial card they’d received from Ali’s service.

“I’m all right,” Aria mumbled.

“You want to talk about it?”

Aria shook her head. “Later, maybe.” She scuttled into the living room, feeling spastic and distracted, as though she’d drunk six cans of Red Bull. And it wasn’t just from Ali’s funeral.

Last week A had taunted Aria about one of her darkest secrets: In seventh grade, Aria caught her father kissing one of his students, a girl named Meredith. Byron had asked Aria not to tell her mother, and Aria never had, although she always felt guilty about it. When A threatened to tell Ella the whole ugly truth, Aria had assumed A was Alison. It was Ali who’d been with Aria when she caught Bryon and Meredith together, and Aria had never told anyone else.

But now Aria knew A couldn’t be Alison, but A’s threat was still out there, promising to ruin Aria’s family. She knew she should tell Ella before A got to her—but she couldn’t make herself do it.

Aria walked to the back porch, winding her fingers through her long black hair. A flash of white zoomed by. It was her brother, Mike, racing around the yard with his lacrosse stick. “Hey,” she called, getting an idea. When Mike didn’t answer, she walked out onto the lawn and stood in his path. “I’m going downtown. Wanna come?”

Mike made a face. “Downtown’s full of dirty hippies. Besides, I’m practicing.”

Aria rolled her eyes. Mike was so obsessed with making the Rosewood Day varsity lacrosse team, he hadn’t even bothered to change out of his charcoal gray funeral suit before starting drills. Her brother was so cookie-cutter Rosewood—dirty white baseball cap, obsessed with PlayStation, saving up for a hunter-green Jeep Cherokee as soon as he turned sixteen. Unfortunately, there was no question they shared the same gene pool—both Aria and her brother were tall and had blue-black hair and unforgettable angular faces.

“Well, I’m going to get bombed,” she told him. “You
sure
you want to practice?”

Mike narrowed his grayish-blue eyes at her, processing this. “You’re not secretly dragging me to a poetry reading?”

She shook her head. “We’ll go to the skankiest college bar we can find.”

Mike shrugged and laid down his lacrosse stick. “Let’s go,” he said.

Mike fell into a booth. “This place rocks.”

They were at the Victory Brewery—indeed the skankiest bar they could find. It was flanked by a piercing parlor and a store called Hippie Gypsy that sold “hydroponic seeds”—nudge, nudge. There was a puke stain on the sidewalk out front, and a half-blind, three-hundred-pound bouncer had waved them right through, too engrossed in
Dubs
magazine to card them.

Inside, the bar was dark and grubby, with a dingy Ping-Pong table in the back. This place was pretty much like Snooker’s, Hollis’s other grimy student bar, but Aria had vowed to never set foot in Snooker’s again. She’d met a sexy boy named Ezra at Snooker’s two weeks ago, but then he wound up being less of a boy and more of an AP English teacher—
her
AP English teacher. A sent Aria taunting texts about Ezra, and when Ezra accidentally saw what A had written, he assumed that Aria was telling the whole school about them. So ended Aria’s Rosewood faculty romance.

A waitress with enormous boobs and Heidi braids came up to their booth and looked at Mike suspiciously. “Are you twenty-one?”

“Oh, yeah,” Mike said, folding his hands on the table. “I’m actually twenty-five.”

“We’ll have a pitcher of Amstel,” Aria interrupted, kicking Mike under the table.

“And,” Mike added, “I want a shot. Of Jaeger.”

Heidi Braids looked pained, but she came back with the pitcher and the shot. Mike downed the Jaeger and made a puckered, girlish face. He slammed the shot glass on the chipped wooden table and eyed Aria. “I think I’ve cracked why you’ve become so loco.” Mike had announced last week that he thought Aria was acting even freakier than usual, and he’d vowed to figure out why.

“I’m dying to know,” Aria said dryly.

Mike pushed his fingers together in a steeple, a professorly gesture their father often made. “I think you’re secretly dancing at Turbulence.”

Aria laughed so forcefully, beer flew up her nasal passages. Turbulence was a strip club two towns over, next to a one-strip airport.

“A couple of guys said they saw a girl going in there who looked
just
like you,” Mike said. “You don’t have to keep it a secret from me. I’m cool.”

Aria pulled discreetly at her knitted mohair bra. She’d made one for herself, Ali, and her old friends in sixth grade, and had worn hers to Ali’s memorial as a tribute. Unfortunately, in sixth grade, Aria’s measurements were about a cup size smaller, and the mohair itched like hell. “You mean you don’t think I’m acting strange because a) we’re back in Rosewood and I hate it here, and b) my old best friend is dead?”

Mike shrugged. “I thought you didn’t really like that girl.”

Aria turned away. There had been moments when she really didn’t like Ali, that was true. Especially when Ali didn’t take her very seriously, or when she hounded Aria for details about Byron and Meredith. “That’s not true,” she lied.

Mike poured more beer into his glass. “Isn’t it messed up that she was, like, dumped in the ground? And, like, concrete was poured on top of her?”

Aria winced and shut her eyes. Her brother had zero tact.

“So you think someone killed her?” Mike asked.

Aria shrugged. It was a question that had been haunting her—a question no one else had asked. At Ali’s memorial, no one came out and said Ali had been
murdered
, only that she’d been
found
. But what else could it have been but murder? One minute, Ali was at their sleepover. The next, she was gone. Three years later, her body showed up in a hole in her backyard.

Aria wondered if A and Ali’s killer were linked—and if the affair was tangled up in The Jenna Thing. When Jenna’s accident happened, Aria thought she saw someone
besides
Ali at the base of Toby’s tree house. Later that night, Aria was startled awake by the vision and decided she needed to ask Ali about it. She’d found her and Spencer whispering behind the closed bathroom door, but when Aria asked to come in, Ali told her to go back to sleep. By morning, Toby had confessed.

“I bet the killer’s, like, someone out of left field,” Mike said. “Like…someone you’d never guess in a trillion years.” His eyes lit up. “How about Mrs. Craycroft?”

Mrs. Craycroft was their elderly neighbor to the right. She’d once saved up $5,000 worth of coins in Poland Spring jugs and tried to redeem them for cash at a nearby Coinstar. The local news did a story on her and everything. “Yep, you cracked the case,” Aria deadpanned.

“Well, someone like that.” Mike drummed his knobby fingers on the table. “Now that I know what’s going on with
you
, I can focus my attention on Ali D.”

“Go for it.” If the cops weren’t adept enough to find Ali in her own backyard, Mike might as well try his hand at it.

“So I’m thinking we need to play some beer-pong,” Mike said, and before Aria could answer, he had already collected some Ping-Pong balls and an empty pint glass. “This is Noel Kahn’s favorite game.”

Aria smirked. Noel Kahn was one of the richest kids at school and
the
quintessential Rosewood boy, which basically made him Mike’s idol. And, irony of all ironies, he seemed to have a thing for Aria, which she was trying her hardest to squelch.

“Wish me luck,” Mike said, holding the Ping-Pong ball ready. He missed the glass, sending the ball rolling off the table onto the floor.

“Chug it down,” Aria singsonged, and her brother wrapped his hands around his beer and poured the whole thing down his throat.

Mike tried for the second time to get the Ping-Pong ball in Aria’s glass but missed again. “You suck!” Aria teased, the beer beginning to make her feel a little buzzy.

“Like you’re any better,” Mike shot back.

“You wanna bet?”

Mike snorted. “If you don’t make it, you have to get me into Turbulence. Me
and
Noel. But not while you’re working,” he added hastily.

“If I make it, you have to be my slave for a week. That means
during
school, too.”

“Deal,” Mike said. “You’re not going to make it, so it doesn’t matter.”

She moved the glass to Mike’s side of the table and took aim. The ball careened off one of the table’s many dents and landed cleanly in the glass, not even bumping its sides on the way in. “Ha!” Aria cried. “You are
so
going down!”

Mike looked stunned. “That was just a lucky shot.”

“Whatever!” Aria snickered gleefully. “So, I wonder…should I make you crawl on all fours behind me at school? Or wear mom’s
faldur
?” She giggled. Ella’s
faldur
was a traditional Icelandic pointed cap that made the wearer look like a deranged elf.

“Screw you.” Mike grabbed the Ping-Pong ball out of his glass. It slipped out of his hands and bounced away from them.

“I’ll get it,” Aria offered. She stood, feeling pleasantly tipsy. The ball had rolled all the way to the front of the bar, and Aria bent down on the floor to get it. A couple swept past her, squeezing into the discreet, partially blocked seats in the corner. Aria noticed that the girl had long dark hair and a pink spiderweb tattoo on her wrist.

That tattoo was familiar.
Very
familiar. And when she whispered something to the guy she was with, he started coughing maniacally. Aria straightened up.

It was her father. And Meredith.

Aria bolted back to Mike. “We have to go.”

Mike rolled his eyes. “But I just asked for a second shot of Jaeger.”

“Too bad.” Aria grabbed her jacket. “We’re leaving. Now.” She threw forty bucks on the table and pulled on Mike’s arm until he stood. He was a little wobbly, but she managed to push him toward the door.

Unfortunately, Byron chose that very moment to let out one of his very distinctive laughs, which Aria always said sounded like a dying whale. Mike froze, recognizing it too. Their father’s face was turned to the side, and he was touching Meredith’s hand across the table.

Aria watched Mike recognize Byron. He knitted his brow. “Wait,” he squeaked, looking confusedly at Aria. She willed her face to look unworried, but instead, she felt the corners of her mouth wiggle down. She knew she was making the same face Ella did when she tried to protect Aria or Mike from things that might hurt them.

Mike narrowed his eyes at her, then looked back at their father and Meredith. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, taking a step toward them. Aria reached out to stop him—she didn’t want this happening right now. She didn’t want this happening
ever
. Then Mike steeled his jaw, turned away from their dad, and stormed out of Victory, bumping into their waitress as he went.

Aria pushed through the door after him. She squinted in the bright afternoon light of the parking lot, looking back and forth for Mike. But her brother was gone.

5

A HOUSE DIVIDED