Pretty Little Liars (5 page)

He handed the cigarette back to her. “I hope it's okay that I'm going to be staying in your house.”

“Um, yeah. Whatever.”

Wren licked his lips. “Maybe I can get you to kick your smoking addiction.”

Spencer stiffened. “I'm not addicted.”

“Sure you're not,” Wren answered, smiling.

Spencer shook her head emphatically. “No, I'd never let that happen.” And it was true: Spencer hated feeling out of control.

Wren smiled. “Well, you certainly sound like you know what you're doing.”

“I do.”

“Are you that way with everything?” Wren asked, his eyes shining.

There was something about the light, teasing way he said it that made Spencer pause. Were they…flirting? They stared at each other for a few seconds until a big
group of people came whooshing off the boat onto the street. Spencer lowered her eyes.

“So, do you think it's time we go back?” Wren asked.

Spencer hesitated and looked at the street, full of taxis, ready to take her wherever she wanted. She almost wanted to ask Wren to get in one of the cabs with her and go to a baseball game at Citizens Bank Park, where they could eat hot dogs, yell at the players, and count how many strikeouts the Phillies' starting pitcher racked up. She could use her dad's box seats—they mostly just went to waste, anyway—and she bet Wren would be into that. Why go back in, when her family was just going to continue to ignore them? A cab paused at the light, just a few feet from them. She looked at it, then back at Wren.

But no, that'd be wrong. And who would fill the vice president's post if he died and she was murdered by her own sister? “After you,” Spencer said, and held the door open for him so they could climb back aboard.

“Hey! Finland!”

On Tuesday, the first day of school, Aria walked quickly to her first-period English class. She turned to see Noel Kahn, in his Rosewood Day sweater vest and tie, jogging toward her. “Hey.” Aria nodded. She kept going.

“You bolted from our practice the other day,” Noel said, sidling up next to her.

“You expected me to watch?” Aria looked at him out of the corner of her eye. He looked flushed.

“Yeah. We scrimmaged. I scored three goals.”

“Good for you,” Aria deadpanned. Was she supposed to be impressed?

She continued down the Rosewood Day hallway, which she'd unfortunately dreamed about way too many times in Iceland. Above her were the same eggshell-white, vaulted ceilings. Below her were the same farmhouse-cozy wood floors. To her right and left were the
usual framed photos of stuffy alums, and to her left, incongruous rows of dented metal lockers. Even the very same song, the
1812 Overture,
hummed through the PA speakers—Rosewood played between-classes music because it was “mentally stimulating.” Sweeping by her were the exact same people Aria had known for a gazillion years…and all of them were staring.

Aria ducked her head. Since she'd moved to Iceland at the beginning of eighth grade, the last time everyone had seen her she was part of the grief-stricken group of girls whose best friend freakishly vanished. Back then, wherever she went, people were whispering about her.

Now, it felt like she'd never left. And it almost felt like Ali was still here. Aria's breath caught in her chest when she saw a flash of blond ponytail swishing around the corner to the gym. And when Aria rounded the corner past the pottery studio, where she and Ali used to meet between classes to trade gossip, she could almost hear Ali yelling, “Hey, wait up!” She pressed her hand to her forehead to see if she had a fever.

“So what class do you have first?” Noel asked, still keeping pace with her.

She looked at him, surprised, and then down at her schedule. “English.”

“Me too. Mr. Fitz?”

“Yeah,” she mumbled. “He any good?”

“Dunno. He's new. Heard he was a Fulbright Scholar, though.”

Aria eyed him suspiciously. Since when did Noel Kahn care about a teacher's credentials? She turned around a corner and saw a girl standing in the English room doorway. She looked familiar and foreign all at the same time. This girl was model-thin, had long, red-brown hair, and wore a rolled-up blue plaid Rosewood uniform skirt, purple platform wedge-heels, and a Tiffany charm bracelet.

Aria's heart started to pound. She'd worried about how she might react when she saw her old friends again, and here was Hanna. What had
happened
to Hanna?

“Hey,” Aria said softly.

Hanna turned and looked Aria up and down, from her long, shaggy haircut to her Rosewood Day white shirt and chunky Bakelite bracelets to her brown scuffed lace-up boots. A blank expression crossed her face, but then she smiled.

“Omigod!” Hanna said. At least it was still Hanna's same high-pitched voice. “How was…where were you? Czechoslovakia?”

“Um, yeah,” Aria answered. Close enough.

“Cool!” Hanna gave Aria a tight smile.

“Kirsten looks like she's gone off South Beach,” interrupted a girl next to Hanna. Aria turned her head sideways, trying to place her. Mona Vanderwaal? The last time Aria saw her, Mona had put a billion teensy braids in her hair and was riding her Razor scooter. Now, she looked even more glamorous than Hanna.

“Doesn't she?” Hanna agreed. She then gave Aria and Noel—who was
still
standing there—an apologetic shrug. “Sorry, guys, can you excuse us?”

Aria headed into the classroom and fell into the first desk she saw. She put her head down and took heaving, emotional breaths.

“
Hell is other people
,” she chanted. It was her favorite quote by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and a perfect mantra for Rosewood.

She rocked back and forth for a few seconds, in full freak-out mode. The only thing that made her feel better was the memory of Ezra, that guy she'd met at Snookers. At the bar, Ezra had followed her into the bathroom, grabbed her face, and kissed her. Their mouths fit perfectly together—they didn't bang teeth once. His hands floated all over the small of her back, her stomach, her legs. They'd had such a
connection.
And okay, fine, some might say it was just a…a tongue connection…but Aria knew it was more.

She'd felt so overcome thinking about it last night, she'd written a haiku about Ezra to express her feelings—haikus were her favorite kind of poem. Then, pleased with how it turned out, she'd keyed it into her phone and texted it to the number Ezra had given her.

Aria let out a tortured sigh and looked around the classroom. It smelled like books and Mop & Glo. The oversize, four-paned windows faced the south lawn and beyond that, green rolling hills. A few trees had started to
turn yellow and orange. There was a great Shakespearean sayings poster next to the blackboard, and a
MEAN PEOPLE SUCK
sticker someone had stuck to the wall. It looked like the janitor had tried to scrape off the sticker but gave up halfway through.

Was it desperate to text Ezra at 2:30
A
.
M
.? She still hadn't heard back from him. Aria felt for her phone in her bag and pulled it out. The screen read,
NEW TEXT MESSAGE
. Her stomach swooped, relieved and excited and nervous all at once. But as she clicked
READ
, a voice interrupted her.

“Excuse me. Um, you can't use your cell in school.”

Aria covered her phone with her hands and looked up. Whoever had said it—the new teacher, she guessed—stood with his back to the rest of the room and was writing on the chalkboard.
Mr. Fitz
was all he'd written so far. He was holding a memo with Rosewood's insignia on the top. From the back, he looked young. A few of the other girls in the class gave him an appreciative once-over as they found seats. The now-fabulous Hanna even whistled.

“I know I'm the new guy,” he went on, writing,
AP English,
under his name, “but I have this handout from the front office. Some stuff about no cell phones in school.” Then he turned. The handout fluttered out of his hand and onto the linoleum floor.

Aria's mouth instantly went dry. Standing in front of the classroom was Ezra from the bar. Ezra, the recipient of her haiku.
Her
Ezra, looking lanky and adorable in a
Rosewood jacket and tie, his hair combed, his buttons buttoned correctly, and a leather-bound lesson planner under his left arm. Standing at the blackboard and writing…
Mr. Fitz, AP English.

He stared at her, his face draining of color. “Holy shit.”

The entire class turned around to see who he was looking at. Aria didn't want to stare back at them, so she looked down at her text message.

Holy shit, indeed.

Tuesday afternoon, Emily stood in front of her green metal locker after the final bell of the day had rung. The locker still had her old stickers from last year—USA Swimming, Liv Tyler as Arwen the elf, and a magnet that said,
COED NAKED BUTTERFLY
. Her boyfriend, Ben, hovered next to her.

“You want to hit Wawa?” he asked. His Rosewood swimming jacket hung loosely off his lanky, muscular body, and his blond hair was a little messy.

“Nah, I'm good,” Emily answered. Because they had practice at three-thirty after school, the swimmers usually just stayed at Rosewood and sent someone off to Wawa so they could get their hoagie/iced tea/Cheats/Reese's Pieces fix before swimming a billion laps.

A bunch of boys stopped to slap Ben's hand as they headed toward the parking lot. Spencer Hastings, who was in Ben's history class last year, waved. Emily waved
back before realizing Spencer was looking at Ben, not her. It was hard to believe that after everything they'd been through together and all the secrets they shared, they now acted like strangers.

After everyone passed, Ben turned back to her and frowned. “You've got your jacket on. You're not practicing?”

“Um.” Emily shut her locker and gave the combination a spin. “You know that girl I've been showing around today? I'm walking her to her house 'cause this is her first day and all.”

He smirked. “Well, aren't
you
sweet? Parents of prospective students pay for tours, but you're doing it for free.”

“Come on.” Emily smiled uneasily. “It's like a ten-minute walk.”

Ben looked at her, vaguely nodding for a little while.

“What? I'm just trying to be nice!”

“That's cool,” he said, and smiled. He took his eyes off her to wave at Casey Kirschner, the captain of the boys' varsity wrestling team.

Maya appeared a minute after Ben loped down the side stairs out to the student parking lot. She wore a white denim jacket over her Rosewood oxford shirt and Oakley flip-flops on her feet. Her toenails weren't painted. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey.” Emily tried to sound bright, but she felt uneasy. Maybe she should've just gone to practice with Ben. Was it weird to walk Maya home and walk right back?

“Ready?” Maya asked.

The girls walked through campus, which was basically a bunch of very old brick buildings off a twisty back road in Rosewood. There was even a Gothic clock tower that chimed out the hours. Earlier, Emily had shown Maya all the standard stuff that every private school has. She'd also shown her the cool things about Rosewood Day that you usually had to discover on your own, like the dangerous toilet in the girls' first-floor bathroom that sometimes spewed up geyser-style, the secret spot on the hill kids went when they cut gym class (not that Emily ever would), and the school's only vending machine that sold Vanilla Coke, her favorite. They'd even developed an inside joke about the prim, stick-up-her-butt model on the anti-smoking posters that hung outside the nurse's office. It felt good to have an inside joke again.

Now, as they cut through an unused cornfield to Maya's neighborhood, Emily took in every detail of her face, from her turned-up nose to her coffee-colored skin to the way her collar couldn't settle right around her neck. Their hands kept bumping against each other when they swung their arms.

“It's so different here,” Maya said, sniffing the air. “It smells like Pine-Sol!” She took off her denim jacket and rolled up the sleeves of her button-down. Emily pulled at her hair, wishing it was dark and wavy, like Maya's, instead of chlorine-damaged and a slightly greenish shade of reddish blond. Emily also felt a little self-conscious
about her body, which was strong, muscular, and not as slender as it used to be. She didn't usually feel so aware of herself, even when she was in her swimsuit, which was practically naked.

“Everyone has stuff they're really
into
,” Maya continued. “Like this girl Sarah in my physics class. She's trying to form a band, and she asked me to be in it!”

“Really? What do you play?”

“Guitar,” Maya said. “My dad taught me. My brother's actually a lot better, but whatever.”

“Wow,” Emily said. “That's cool.”

“Omigod!” Maya grabbed Emily's arm. Emily flinched at first but then relaxed. “You should join the band too! How fun would that be? Sarah said we'd practice three days a week after school. She plays bass.”

“But all I play is the flute,” Emily said, realizing she sounded like Eeyore from
Winnie-the-Pooh
.

“The flute would be awesome!” Maya clapped her hands. “And drums!”

Emily sighed. “I really couldn't. I have swimming, like, every day after school.”

“Hmm,” Maya said. “Can't you skip a day? I bet you'd be so good at the drums.”

“My parents would murder me.” Emily tilted her head and stared at the old iron railroad bridge above them. Trains didn't use the bridge anymore, so now it was mostly a place for kids to go and get drunk without their parents knowing.

“Why?” Maya asked. “What's the big deal?”

Emily paused. What was she supposed to say? That her parents expected her to keep swimming because scouts from Stanford were already watching Carolyn's progress? That her older brother, Jake, and oldest sister, Beth, were now both at the University of Arizona on full swimming rides? That anything less than a swimming scholarship to somewhere top-notch would be a family failure? Maya wasn't afraid to smoke pot when her parents were buying groceries. Emily's parents, by comparison, seemed like old, conservative, controlling East Coast suburbanites. Which they were. But still.

“This is a shorter way home.” Emily gestured across the street, to the large colonial house's lawn she and her friends used to cut through on winter days to get to Ali's house faster.

They started up through the grass, avoiding a sprinkler spraying the hydrangea bushes. As they pushed through the brambly tree branches to Maya's backyard, Emily stopped short. A small, guttural noise escaped her throat.

She hadn't been in this backyard—
Ali's
old backyard—in ages. There, across the lawn, was the teak deck where she and Ali had played countless games of Spit. There was the worn patch of grass where they'd hooked up Ali's thick white iPod to speakers and had dance parties. To her left was the familiar knotty oak tree. The tree house was gone, but carved in the bark on the trunk were the
initials:
EF + AD
—Emily Fields + Alison DiLaurentis. Her face flushed. At the time, Emily hadn't known why she carved their names into the bark; she'd just wanted to show Ali how happy she was that they were friends.

Maya, who had walked on ahead of her, looked over her shoulder. “You okay?”

Emily shoved her hands into her jacket pockets. For a second, she considered telling Maya about Ali. But a hummingbird swept past her and she lost her nerve. “I'm fine,” she said.

“Do you wanna come in?” Maya asked.

“No…I…I have to go back to school,” Emily answered. “Swimming.”

“Oh.” Maya crinkled up her eyes. “You didn't have to walk me home, silly.”

“Yeah, but I didn't want you to get lost.”

“You're so cute.” Maya looped her hands behind her back and swung her hips back and forth. Emily wondered what she meant by
cute
. Was that a California thing?

“So, well, have fun at swimming,” Maya said. “And thanks for showing me around today.”

“Sure.” Emily stepped forward, and their bodies smushed together in a hug.

“Mmm,”
Maya said, squeezing tighter. The girls stepped back and grinned at each other for a second. Then Maya leaned forward and kissed Emily on both cheeks. “Mwah, mwah!” she said. “Like the French.”

“Well, then, I'll be French too.” Emily giggled,
forgetting about Ali and the tree for a second. “Mwah!” She kissed Maya's smooth left cheek.

Then Maya kissed her again, on her right cheek, except now just a teensy bit closer to her mouth. There was no
mwah
this time.

Maya's mouth smelled like banana bubble gum. Emily jerked back and caught her swimming bag before it slid off her shoulder. When she looked up, Maya was grinning.

“I'll see ya,” Maya said. “Be good.”

 

Emily folded her towel into her swim bag after practice. The whole afternoon had been a blur. After Maya skipped into her house, Emily jogged back to school—as if running would untangle the jumble of feelings inside her. As she slipped into the water and swam lap after lap, she saw those haunting initials on the tree. When Coach blew her whistle and they practiced starts and turns, she smelled Maya's banana gum and heard her fun, easy laugh. Standing at her locker, she was pretty sure she'd shampooed her hair twice. Most of the other girls had stayed in the communal showers for longer, gossiping, but Emily was too spaced out to join them.

As she reached for her T-shirt and jeans, folded neatly on the shelf in her locker, a note came fluttering out. Emily's name was written on the front in plain, unfamiliar handwriting, and she didn't recognize the graph notebook paper. She picked it up off the cold, wet floor.

Emily curled her toes around the rubber locker room mat and stopped breathing for a second. She looked around. No one was looking at her.

Was this for real?

She stared at the note and tried to think rationally. She and Maya were out in the open, but no one was around.

And…
I've been replaced? Another friend to kiss?
Emily's hands trembled. She looked at the signature again. Laughter from the other swimmers echoed off the walls.

Emily had kissed just one other friend. It was two days after she carved their initials into that oak tree and just a week and a half before the end of seventh grade.

Alison.