Perfect (2 page)

Emily stood up from her perch on the couch’s arm. “I don’t know….” She started inching away from Ali’s phone, as if just being close to it incriminated her.

Spencer scooped up Ali’s cell. She looked curiously at the blank screen. “C’mon. Don’t you want to know who texted her?”

“It was probably just Katy,” Emily whispered, referring to one of Ali’s hockey friends. “You should put it down, Spence.”

Aria took the camera off the tripod and walked toward Spencer. “Let’s do it.”

They gathered around. Spencer opened the phone and pushed a button. “It’s locked.”

“Do you know her password?” Aria asked, still filming.

“Try her birthday,” Hanna whispered. She took the phone from Spencer and punched in the digits. The screen didn’t change. “What do I do now?”

They heard Ali’s voice before they saw her. “What are you guys doing?”

Spencer dropped Ali’s phone back onto the couch. Hanna stepped back so abruptly, she banged her shin against the coffee table.

Ali stomped through the door to the family room, her eyebrows knitted together. “Were you looking at my phone?”

“Of course not!” Hanna cried.

“We were,” Emily admitted, sitting on the couch, then standing up again. Aria shot her a look and then hid behind the camera lens.

But Ali was no longer paying attention. Spencer’s older sister, Melissa, a senior in high school, burst into the Hastings’ kitchen from the garage. A takeout bag from Otto, a restaurant near the Hastings’ neighborhood, hung from her wrists. Her adorable boyfriend, Ian, was with her. Ali stood up straighter. Spencer smoothed her dirty-blond hair and straightened her tiara.

Ian stepped into the family room. “Hey, girls.”

“Hi,” Spencer said in a loud voice. “How are you, Ian?”

“I’m cool.” Ian smiled at Spencer. “Cute crown.”

“Thanks!” Spencer fluttered her coal-black eyelashes.

Ali rolled her eyes. “Be a little more obvious,” she singsonged under her breath.

But it was hard not to crush on Ian. He had curly blond hair, perfect white teeth, and stunning blue eyes, and none of them could forget the recent soccer game where he’d changed his shirt midquarter and, for five glorious seconds, they’d gotten a full-on view of his naked chest. It was almost universally believed that his gorgeousness was wasted on Melissa, who was totally prudish and acted way too much like Mrs. Hastings, Spencer’s mother.

Ian plopped down on the edge of the couch near Ali. “So, what are you girls doing?”

“Oh, not much,” Aria said, adjusting the camera’s focus. “Making a film.”

“A film?” Ian looked amused. “Can I be in it?”

“Of course,” Spencer said quickly. She plopped down on the other side of him.

Ian grinned into the camera. “So what are my lines?”

“It’s a talk show,” Spencer explained. She glanced at Ali, gauging her reaction, but Ali didn’t respond. “I’m the host. You and Ali are my guests. I’ll do you first.”

Ali let out a sarcastic snort and Spencer’s cheeks flamed as pink as her Ralph Lauren T-shirt. Ian let the reference pass by. “Okay. Interview away.”

Spencer sat up straighter on the couch, crossing her muscular legs just like a talk show host. She picked up the pink microphone from Hanna’s karaoke machine and held it under her chin. “Welcome to the Spencer Hastings show. For my first question—”

“Ask him who his favorite teacher at Rosewood is,” Aria called out.

Ali perked up. Her blue eyes glittered. “That’s a good question for you, Aria. You should ask him if he wants to
hook up
with any of his teachers. In vacant parking lots.”

Aria’s mouth fell open. Hanna and Emily, who were standing off to the side near the credenza, exchanged a confused glance.

“All my teachers are dogs,” Ian said slowly, not getting whatever was happening.

“Ian, can you
please
help me?” Melissa made a clattering noise in the kitchen.

“One sec,” Ian called out.

“Ian.”
Melissa sounded annoyed.

“I got one.” Spencer tossed her long blond hair behind her ears. She was loving that Ian was paying more attention to them than to Melissa. “What would your ultimate graduation gift be?”

“Ian,”
Melissa called through her teeth, and Spencer glanced at her sister through the wide French doors to the kitchen. The light from the fridge cast a shadow across her face. “I. Need. Help.”

“Easy,” Ian answered, ignoring her. “I’d want a base-jumping lesson.”

“Base-jumping?” Aria called. “What’s that?”

“Parachuting from the top of a building,” Ian explained.

As Ian told a story about Hunter Queenan, one of his friends who had base-jumped, the girls leaned forward eagerly. Aria focused the camera on Ian’s jaw, which looked hewn out of stone. Her eyes flickered for a moment to Ali. She was sitting next to Ian, staring off into space. Was Ali
bored
? She probably had better things to do—that text was probably about plans with her glamorous older friends.

Aria glanced again at Ali’s cell phone, which was resting on the cushion of the couch next to her arm. What was she hiding from them? What was she up to?

Don’t you sometimes want to kill her?
Spencer’s question floated through Aria’s brain as Ian rambled on. Deep down, she knew they all felt that way. It might be better if Ali were just…gone, instead of leaving them behind.

“So Hunter said he got the most amazing rush when he base-jumped,” Ian concluded. “Better than anything. Including sex.”

“Ian,”
Melissa warned.

“That sounds incredible.” Spencer looked to Ali on the other side of Ian. “Doesn’t it?”

“Yes.” Ali looked sleepy, almost like she was in a trance. “Incredible.”

The rest of the week had been a blur: final exams, planning parties, more get-togethers, and more tension. And then, on the evening of the last day of seventh grade, Ali went missing. Just like that. One minute she was there, the next…gone.

The police scoured Rosewood for clues. They questioned the four girls separately, asking if Ali had been acting strangely or if anything unusual had happened recently. They all thought long and hard. The night she disappeared had been strange—she’d been hypnotizing them and had run out of the barn after she and Spencer had a stupid fight about the blinds and just…
never came back.
But had there been other strange nights? They considered the night they tried to read Ali’s texts, but not for very long—after Ian and Melissa left, Ali had snapped out of her funk. They’d had a dance contest and played with Hanna’s karaoke machine. The mystery texts on Ali’s phone had been forgotten.

Next, the cops asked if they thought anyone close to Ali might have wanted to hurt her. Hanna, Aria, and Emily all thought of the same thing:
Don’t you sometimes want to kill her?
Spencer had snarled. But no. She’d been kidding. Hadn’t she?

“Nobody wanted to hurt Ali,” Emily said, pushing the worry out of her mind.

“Absolutely not,” Aria answered too, in her own separate interview, darting her eyes away from the burly cop sitting next to her on the porch swing.

“I don’t think so,” Hanna said in her interview, fiddling with the pale blue string bracelet Ali had made for them after Jenna’s accident. “Ali wasn’t that close with many people. Only us. And we all loved her to death.”

Sure, Spencer seemed angry with Ali. But really, deep down, weren’t they all? Ali was perfect—beautiful, smart, sexy, irresistible—and she was ditching them. Maybe they did hate her for it. But that didn’t mean any of them wanted her gone.

It’s amazing what you don’t see, though. Even when it’s right in front of your eyes.

1

SPENCER’S HARD WORK PAYS OFF

Spencer Hastings should have been sleeping at six-thirty on Monday morning. Instead, she was sitting in a therapist’s blue-and-green waiting room, feeling a little like she was trapped inside an aquarium. Her older sister, Melissa, was sitting on an emerald-colored chair opposite her. Melissa looked up from her
Principles of Emerging Markets
textbook—she was in an MBA program at the University of Pennsylvania—and gave Spencer a motherly smile.

“I’ve felt so much
clearer
since I started seeing Dr. Evans,” purred Melissa, whose appointment was right after Spencer’s. “You’re going to love her. She’s incredible.”

Of course she’s incredible,
Spencer thought nastily. Melissa would find anyone willing to listen to her for a whole uninterrupted hour amazing.

“But she might come on a little strong for you, Spence,” Melissa warned, slapping her book closed. “She’s going to tell you things about yourself you don’t want to hear.”

Spencer shifted her weight. “I’m not six. I can take criticism.”

Melissa gave Spencer a tiny eyebrow-raise, clearly indicating that she wasn’t so sure. Spencer hid behind her
Philadelphia
magazine, wondering again why she was here. Spencer’s mother, Veronica, had booked her an appointment with a therapist—
Melissa’s
therapist—after Spencer’s old friend Alison DiLaurentis had been found dead and Toby Cavanaugh committed suicide. Spencer suspected the appointment was also meant to sort through why Spencer had hooked up with Melissa’s boyfriend, Wren. Spencer was doing fine though. Really. And wasn’t going to her worst enemy’s therapist like going to an ugly girl’s plastic surgeon? Spencer feared she’d probably come out of her very first shrink session with the mental-health equivalent of hideously lopsided fake boobs.

Just then, the office door swung open, and a petite blond woman wearing tortoiseshell glasses, a black tunic, and black pants poked her head out.

“Spencer?” the woman said. “I’m Dr. Evans. Come in.”

Spencer strode into Dr. Evans’s office, which was spare and bright and thankfully nothing like the waiting room. It contained a black leather couch and a gray suede chair. A large desk held a phone, a stack of manila folders, a chrome gooseneck lamp, and one of those weighted drinking-bird toys that Mr. Craft, the earth science teacher, loved. Dr. Evans settled into the suede chair and gestured for Spencer to sit on the couch.

“So,” Dr. Evans said, once they were comfy, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Spencer wrinkled her nose and glanced toward the waiting room. “From Melissa, I guess?”

“From your mom.” Dr. Evans opened to the first page of a red notebook. “She says that you’ve had some turmoil in your life, especially lately.”

Spencer fixed her gaze on the end table next to the couch. It held a candy dish, a box of Kleenex—of
course
—and one of those pegboard IQ games, the kind where you jumped the pegs over one another until there was only one peg remaining. There used to be one of those in the DiLaurentis family den; she and Ali had solved it together, meaning they were both geniuses. “I think I’m coping,” she muttered. “I’m not, like, suicidal.”

“A close friend died. A neighbor, too. That must be hard.”

Spencer let her head rest on the back of the couch and looked up. It looked like the bumpily plastered ceiling had acne. She probably needed to talk to someone—it wasn’t like she could talk to her family about Ali, Toby, or the terrifying notes she’d been getting from the evil stalker who was known simply as A. And her old friends—they’d been avoiding her ever since she’d admitted that Toby had known all along that they’d blinded his stepsister, Jenna—a secret she’d kept from them for three long years.

But three weeks had gone by since Toby’s suicide, and almost a month had passed since the workers unearthed Ali’s body. Spencer was coping better with all of it, mostly, because A had vanished. She hadn’t received a note since before Foxy, Rosewood’s big charity benefit. At first, A’s silence made Spencer feel edgy—perhaps it was the calm before the hurricane—but as more time passed, she began to relax. Her manicured nails dislodged themselves from the heels of her hands. She started sleeping with her desk light off again. She’d received an A+ on her latest calc test and an A on her Plato’s
Republic
paper. Her breakup with Wren—who had dumped her for Melissa, who had in turn dumped him—didn’t sting so much anymore, and her family had reverted back into everyday obliviousness. Even Melissa’s presence—she was staying with the family while a small army renovated her town house in Philly—was mostly tolerable.

Maybe the nightmare was over.

Spencer wiggled her toes inside her knee-high buff-colored kidskin boots. Even if she felt comfortable enough with Dr. Evans to tell her about A, it was a moot point. Why bring A up if A was gone?

“It is hard, but Alison has been missing for years. I’ve moved on,” Spencer finally said. Maybe Dr. Evans would realize Spencer wasn’t going to talk and end their session early.

Dr. Evans wrote something in her notebook. Spencer wondered what. “I’ve also heard you and your sister were having some boyfriend issues.”

Spencer bristled. She could only imagine Melissa’s extremely slanted version of the Wren debacle—it probably involved Spencer eating whipped cream off Wren’s bare stomach in Melissa’s bed while her sister watched helplessly from the window. “It wasn’t really a big deal,” she muttered.

Dr. Evans lowered her shoulders and gave Spencer the same
you’re not fooling me
look her mother used. “He was your sister’s boyfriend first, wasn’t he? And you dated him behind her back?”

Spencer clenched her teeth. “Look, I know it was wrong, okay? I don’t need another lecture.”

Dr. Evans stared at her. “I’m not going to lecture you. Perhaps…” She put a finger to her cheek. “Perhaps you had your reasons.”

Spencer’s eyes widened. Were her ears working correctly—was Dr. Evans seriously suggesting that Spencer wasn’t 100 percent to blame? Perhaps $175 an hour wasn’t a blasphemous price to pay for therapy, after all.

“Do you and your sister ever spend time together?” Dr. Evans asked after a pause.

Spencer reached into the candy dish for a Hershey’s Kiss. She pulled off the silver wrapper in one long curl, flattened the foil in her palm, and popped the kiss in her mouth. “Never. Unless we’re with our parents—but it’s not like Melissa talks to
me
. All she does is brag to my parents about her accomplishments and her insanely boring town house renovations.” Spencer looked squarely at Dr. Evans. “I guess you know my parents bought her a town house in Old City simply because she graduated from college.”