Heartless (19 page)

Hanna made a face.
This
was what her dad was paying a thousand dollars a day for?

Dr. Felicia clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention. “Okay, let’s talk about how we’re doing. Who wants to start?”

No one spoke. Hanna scratched her leg, her mind on whether she would get a French manicure today or a hot oil hair treatment. A slender, dark-haired girl across the room named Paige chewed her fingernails.

Dr. Felicia cupped her hands around her knees, sighing wearily. Then her gaze locked on Hanna. “Hanna!” she chirped. “Welcome to the group. Everyone, this is Hanna’s first time here. Let’s all make her feel safe and accepted.”

Hanna curled her toes inside her black Proenza Schouler ankle boots. “Thanks,” she mumbled into her chest. The burbling fountain roared in her ears. It kind of made her have to pee.

“Do you like it here?” Dr. Felicia’s voice swooped up and down. She was one of those people who never blinked but always smiled. It made her seem like a deranged cheerleader on Ritalin.

“It’s great,” Hanna said. “Really, um, fun so far.”

The doctor frowned. “Well, fun is good, but is there anything you’d like to discuss with the group?”

“Not really,” Hanna snapped.

Dr. Felicia pursed her lips, looking disappointed.

“Hanna’s my roommate, and she seems fine,” Iris jumped in. “She and I talk tons—I think this place is doing wonders for her. I mean, at least she doesn’t pull out her hair like Ruby.”

At that, everyone turned to Ruby, who indeed was grasping her hair in mid-yank. Hanna shot Iris a grateful smile, appreciative that she’d diverted Felicia’s attention elsewhere.

But after Dr. Felicia asked Ruby a few questions, she turned back to Hanna. “So, Hanna, would you like to tell us why you’re here? You’d be amazed at how much talking helps.”

Hanna jiggled her foot. Maybe if she sat here silent for long enough, Felicia would move on to someone else. Then she heard someone across the room take a breath.

“Hanna has normal, run-of-the-mill problems,” Tara said in a high-pitched, scathing voice. “She has eating issues, like every perfect girl does. Her daddy doesn’t love her anymore, but she’s trying not to think about it. And oh, she had a bitchy ex-best friend. Blah, blah, blah, nothing worth talking about.”

Satisfied, Tara leaned back, crossed her arms over her chest, and shot Hanna a look that said,
You asked for it.

Iris sniffed. “Wow, Tara, good for you. You spied on us. You have
ears.
And what ugly little rat ears they are.”

“Now,” Dr. Felicia warned.

Hanna didn’t want to give Tara the satisfaction either, but as she reviewed Tara’s words, the blood drained from her face. Something Tara had just said was very, very wrong.

“H-how did you know about my best friend?” she stammered. Mona’s face swam into her mind, her eyes fiery with rage as she gunned the engine of her SUV.

Tara blinked, caught off guard.

“It’s obvious,” Iris jumped in acidly. “She had her ear pressed to our door all night.”

Hanna’s heart beat faster and faster. A salt truck roared by outside. The sound of its plow blade scraping against the pavement made her wince. She looked at Iris. “But I never said anything about my bitch ex-best friend. Do
you
remember me saying anything about her?”

Iris scratched her chin. “Well, no. But I was tired, so maybe I’d fallen asleep by then.”

Hanna ran her hand over her forehead. What the hell was happening? She’d taken an extra dose of Valium last night to help her sleep; had it made her blurt out stuff about Mona? Her mind felt like a dark, endless tunnel.

“Maybe you didn’t want to talk about this friend, Hanna,” Dr. Felicia rushed in. She rose to her feet and walked to the windows. “But sometimes our minds and bodies have a way of pushing our problems out nevertheless.”

Hanna glared at her. “I don’t just blurt shit out. I don’t have Tourette’s. I’m not a
moron.
”

“You don’t need to get worked up,” Dr. Felicia said gently.

“I’m not getting worked up!” Hanna roared, her voice echoing off the walls.

Felicia backed off, her eyes round. A tense ripple swept through the other girls. Megan coughed, “
Psycho,
” into her hand. Pinpricks danced across Hanna’s skin.

Dr. Felicia returned to her chair and riffled her notebook pages. “Well. Let’s move on.” She turned a page in her notebook. “Uh . . . Gina. Have you spoken to your mom this week? How did that go?”

But as Dr. Felicia asked the other girls about how their weeks had been, Hanna’s mind wouldn’t quiet down. It was like there was a tiny splinter in her brain that desperately needed to be dislodged. When she shut her eyes, she was in the Rosewood Day parking lot again, Mona’s car barreling toward her.
No,
she shouted to herself. She couldn’t go down this path, not here, not ever again. She forced her eyes open. The fun noodles in the corner blurred and wobbled. The girls’ faces warped and stretched, like she was looking at them through a fun house mirror.

Unable to stand it any longer, Hanna pointed a shaking finger at Tara. “You have to tell me how you know about Mona.”

Silence fell. Tara’s pimply brow crinkled. “Excuse me?”

“Did A tell you about her?” Hanna asked.

Tara shook her head slowly. “A who?”

Dr. Felicia stood up, crossed the room, and touched Hanna’s arm. “You seem confused, honey. Maybe you should go back to your room and rest.”

But Hanna didn’t move. Tara matched her stare for a while, then rolled her eyes and shrugged. “I have no idea who Mona is. I thought your bitchy best friend was Alison.”

Hanna’s throat shunted closed. She sank back into her seat.

Iris perked up. “Alison? Isn’t that the girl whose flag you have? Why is she an
ex
-best friend?”

Hanna barely heard her. She stared at Tara. “How do you know about Alison?” she whispered.

Begrudgingly, Tara reached into her grubby canvas bag. “From this.” She tossed a copy of
People
Hanna had never seen before across the room. It skidded to a stop next to Hanna’s chair. “I was
going
to tell you about this before GT. But you were too
cool
to talk to me.”

Hanna snatched the magazine and opened to a marked page. Splashed out across the spread was the headline
A Week of Secrets and Lies.
Beneath it was a picture of Hanna, Spencer, Aria, and Emily, running from the fire in the woods. The caption said
The Pretty Little Liars,
followed by each of their names.

“Oh my God,” Hanna whispered.

Then she noticed a box and a graph in the bottom right-hand corner.
DID THE PRETTY LITTLE LIARS KILL ALISON DILAURENTIS
? They’d surveyed a hundred people in Times Square. Almost the whole pie—92 percent—was purple for
yes.

“I love your nickname, by the way,” Tara simpered, crossing her legs. “Pretty Little Liars.
So
cute.”

Everyone crowded around Hanna’s chair to read. She felt powerless to stop them. Ruby gasped. A patient named Julie clucked her tongue. And Iris—well, Iris looked horrified and disgusted. Everyone’s opinions about Hanna were changing instantaneously. From now on, she would be
that girl.
The psycho everyone thought killed her best friend four years ago.

Dr. Felicia snatched the magazine from Hanna’s lap. “Where did you get this?” she scolded Tara. “You know magazines aren’t allowed.”

Tara cowered, shy and sheepish now that she was in trouble. “Iris always brags that she gets early editions of the magazine snuck in,” she mumbled, peeling away the wrapping on her water bottle. “I just wanted to see a copy for myself.”

Iris rose to her feet, almost knocking over a chrome floor lamp next to her. She strode over to Tara. “I had that issue in my bedroom, you bitch! I hadn’t even read it yet! You went through my stuff!”

“Iris.” Dr. Felicia clapped her hands, trying to regain control. A nurse peered through the little side pane in the GT door, probably trying to decide whether or not she should come to Dr. Felicia’s aid. “Iris, you know your room is locked. No patient can get in.”

“It wasn’t in her bedroom,” Tara cried. She pointed toward the hall. “It was on the window seat near the lobby.”

“That’s impossible!” Iris screamed, whirling around and facing Dr. Felicia again. Her eyes yo-yoed from the magazine in Dr. Felicia’s fist to Hanna’s stricken face. “And
you.
You tried to come off as so cool, Hanna. But you’re just as messed up as everyone else in here.”

“Pretty Little Liar,” a girl across the room teased.

A huge lump formed in Hanna’s throat. Now all eyes were on her again. She wanted to get up and run out of the room, but it felt like her butt was stitched into the seat. “I’m not a liar,” she said in a small voice.

Iris snorted, looking Hanna up and down disdainfully, as if Hanna had suddenly sprouted a rash of zits all over her face and arms. “Whatever.”

“Girls, stop!” Dr. Felicia pulled Iris by her sleeve. “And, Iris and Tara, you both broke the rules and you’re both in trouble.” She shoved
People
into her back pocket, then pulled Tara to her feet, grabbed Iris’s arm, and marched both girls out the door. Before they left, Tara turned around and shot Hanna a smirk.

“Iris,” Hanna pleaded to Iris’s receding back, “it’s not what you think!”

Iris turned in the doorway, staring at Hanna blankly, as if she were a stranger. “Sorry, but I don’t talk to freaks.” And then she whirled around and followed Felicia down the hall, leaving Hanna behind.

Chapter 21

The Truth Hurts

A big Greyhound huffed in the parking lot of the Lancaster bus station, its final destination, Philadelphia, emblazoned above the windshield. Emily tentatively climbed aboard, breathing in the smell of new upholstery and heavy-duty bathroom cleaner. Even though she’d only spent a few days with Lucy and her family, the bus seemed jarringly modern, almost monstrous.

Emily had barely said a word to Lucy after Lucy admitted that Wilden had been her dead sister’s old boyfriend. Lucy had repeatedly asked Emily what was wrong, but Emily said she was fine—just tired. What
could
she say?
I know your sister’s old boyfriend. I think he really
might
have killed Leah. There’s a hole in the back of someone’s yard where he might have dumped her.

Her brain had been on warp speed ever since, circling memory after memory of that horrible time. The day after Ali vanished, after their talk with Mrs. DiLaurentis, Emily and her friends went in opposite directions. Emily had passed right by the big hole where they’d eventually find the body.

The workers, she remembered, had been filling the hole with concrete that very day. All their cars were along the curb next to the DiLaurentises’ lawn. There was one at the end that she’d studied for a second or two, wondering where she’d seen it before. It was an old black sedan, like something out of a sixties or seventies movie. It was the same car that screeched up to the Rosewood Day Lower School curb the day Ali bragged to everyone that she was going to find a piece of the Time Capsule flag. After his fight with Ian, Jason DiLaurentis had yanked open the passenger door to that car and slumped inside. It was the same car that chugged outside the DiLaurentis house the day Emily and the others tried to steal Ali’s flag. And here it was in her memory again, looming at the DiLaurentises’ house the day the concrete covered up that body for three long years. That car belonged to Darren Wilden.

The bus pulled away a few minutes later, the green fields of Lancaster disappearing behind them. There were only four other passengers, so Emily had a row to herself. Spying an outlet near her feet, she leaned down, plugged in her cell phone, and switched it on. The screen glowed with life.

Emily had to do something about what she’d learned, but what? If she called Spencer, Hanna, or Aria, they’d tell her she was crazy for thinking Ali was alive
and
for following A’s instructions to go to Amish Country. She couldn’t call her parents, either—they thought she was in Boston. And she couldn’t call the police—Wilden
was
the police.

It was incredible that Wilden had really once been Amish. Emily knew very little about his life, only that he’d been a rebel at Rosewood Day but then had reinvented himself as a cop. It probably wouldn’t take too much effort to find out when Wilden had left the community and started school at Rosewood Day, though, and when he spoke to Emily and the others in the hospital, he’d mentioned that he’d lived with his uncle in high school. According to Lucy, Wilden had convinced Leah, Lucy’s sister, to leave the community as well. Maybe when she refused, he’d gotten angry . . . and made plans to do away with her for good.

Wilden could have talked to Ali about her secret dreams to run away since he and Jason were friends. Wilden might have even promised Ali to help her run away for good, sneaking her out of Rosewood the night she went missing. He dumped a body into the hole in the DiLaurentises’ backyard, making it look like Ali had been killed. But the body in that hole didn’t belong to Ali. It belonged to the girl who broke Wilden’s heart.

Horribly, it all fit. It explained why Leah had never been found. It explained why Ali showed up in the woods last Saturday and why Wilden was dissuading the police force from investigating the possibility that Ali was alive—if they realized it wasn’t her body in that hole, they’d have to figure out whose body it was. It was why Wilden didn’t believe in A and didn’t buy that Ian knew a secret about what happened that night. A had been right all along—there
had
been a secret. But it wasn’t about Ali’s death. It was about who had been killed in Ali’s
place.

Emily stared at the graffiti someone had drawn on the wall of the bus under the window.
MIMI LUVS CHRISTOPHER. TINA HAS A FAT ASS
. There was even a sketch of two fat butt cheeks next to it. Ali was out there, somewhere, just as she’d always known. But where had she been all this time? It seemed implausible that a seventh grader could survive on her own. or perhaps she’d known someone who’d taken her in. Why hadn’t she contacted Emily to let her know she was okay? Or maybe she hadn’t
wanted
to contact anyone. Maybe she’d decided to forget her entire life in Rosewood, even her four best friends.