Pretty Little Liars

For JSW

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Contents

Epigraph
How It All Started
chapter 1:   Oranges, Peaches, and Limes, Oh My!
chapter 2:   Icelandic (and Finnish) Girls Are Easy
chapter 3:   Hanna’s First Toggle
chapter 4:   Spencer Walks the Plank
chapter 5:   Starts and Fitz
chapter 6:   Emily’s French Too!
chapter 7:   Spencer’s Got a Tight Posterior (Deltoid)
chapter 8:   Where are the Damn Girl Scouts When You Need Them?
chapter 9:   Not Your Typical Student-Teacher Conference
chapter 10:   Single Girls have Way More Fun
chapter 11:   At Least Sweet Potatoes have Lots of Vitamin A
chapter 12:   Mmm, Love that New-Test-Score Smell
chapter 13:   Act One: Girl Makes Boy Want Her
chapter 14:   That’ll Teach You to Google-Stalk When You’re Supposed to be Studying
chapter 15:   Insulting his Masculinity is Such a Deal Breaker
chapter 16:   Never Trust an Invite Without a Return Address
chapter 17:   Duck, Duck, Goose!
chapter 18:   Where’s Our Old Emily and What Have You Done with Her?
chapter 19:   Spicy Hot
chapter 20:   All Emily Needs is a Light Saber and a Black Helmet
chapter 21:   Hot Girls—They’re Just Like Us!
chapter 22:   Beer Baths are Good for the Pores
chapter 23:   Icelandic Aria Gets What She Wants
chapter 24:   There’s More Than Just Shoes and Jeans in Spencer’s Closet
chapter 25:   Student Drivers These Days!
chapter 26:   Do U Love Me? Y or N?
chapter 27:   Don’t Mind Me, I’m Just Dead!
chapter 28:   Brad and Angelina Actually Met at the Rosewood Police Station
chapter 29:   Good Morning, We Hate You
chapter 30:   The Circus is Back in Town
chapter 31:   Hell is Other People
chapter 32:   A Fallen Star
chapter 33:   Rosewood’s Finest
chapter 34:   Fancy Meeting You Here
chapter 35:   Just You Wait
Acknowledgments
What Happens Next…
Credits
 
Excerpt from The Lying Game
    
Prologue
    
chapter 1:   The Dead Ringer
 
Back Ads
    
Back ad for The Lying Game
    
Back ad for Everything We Ever Wanted
 
About the Author
Other Books by Sara Shepard
Copyright
About the Publisher

HOW IT ALL STARTED

Imagine it’s a couple of years ago, the summer between seventh and eighth grade. You’re tan from lying out next to your rock-lined pool, you’ve got on your new Juicy sweats (remember when everybody wore those?), and your mind’s on your crush, the boy who goes to that other prep school whose name we won’t mention and who folds jeans at Abercrombie in the mall. You’re eating your Cocoa Krispies just how you like ’em—doused in skim milk—and you see this girl’s face on the side of the milk carton.
MISSING
. She’s cute—probably cuter than you—and has a feisty look in her eyes. You think,
Hmm, maybe
she
likes soggy Cocoa Krispies too
. And you bet she’d think Abercrombie boy was a hottie as well. You wonder how someone so…well, so much like you went missing. You thought only girls who entered beauty pageants ended up on the sides of milk cartons.

Well, think again.

Aria Montgomery burrowed her face in her best friend Alison DiLaurentis’s lawn. “Delicious,” she murmured.

“Are you smelling the grass?” Emily Fields called from behind her, pushing the door of her mom’s Volvo wagon closed with her long, freckly arm.

“It smells good.” Aria brushed away her pink-striped hair and breathed in the warm early-evening air. “Like summer.”

Emily waved ’bye to her mom and pulled up the blah jeans that were hanging on her skinny hips. Emily had been a competitive swimmer since Tadpole League, and even though she looked great in a Speedo, she never wore anything tight or remotely cute like the rest of the girls in her seventh-grade class. That was because Emily’s parents insisted that one built character from the inside out. (Although Emily was pretty certain that being forced to hide her
IRISH GIRLS DO IT BETTER
baby tee at the back of her underwear drawer wasn’t exactly character enhancing.)

“You guys!” Alison pirouetted through the front yard. Her hair was bunched up in a messy ponytail, and she was still wearing her rolled-up field hockey kilt from the team’s end-of-the-year party that afternoon. Alison was the only seventh grader to make the JV team and got rides home with the older Rosewood Day School girls, who blasted Jay-Z from their Cherokees and sprayed Alison with perfume before dropping her off so that she wouldn’t smell like the cigarettes they’d all been smoking.

“What am I missing?” called Spencer Hastings, sliding through a gap in Ali’s hedges to join the others. Spencer lived next door. She flipped her long, sleek dark-blond ponytail over her shoulder and took a swig from her purple Nalgene bottle. Spencer hadn’t made the JV cut with Ali in the fall, and had to play on the seventh-grade team. She’d been on a year-long field hockey binge to perfect her game, and the girls
knew
she’d been practicing dribbling in the backyard before they arrived. Spencer hated when anyone was better at anything than she was. Especially Alison.

“Wait for me!”

They turned to see Hanna Marin climbing out of her mom’s Mercedes. She stumbled over her tote bag and waved her chubby arms wildly. Ever since Hanna’s parents had gotten a divorce last year, she’d been steadily putting on weight and outgrowing her old clothes. Even though Ali rolled her eyes, the rest of the girls pretended not to notice. That’s just what best friends do.

Alison, Aria, Spencer, Emily, and Hanna bonded last year when their parents volunteered them to work Saturday afternoons at Rosewood Day School’s charity drive—well, all except for Spencer, who volunteered herself. Whether or not Alison knew about the other four, the four knew about Alison. She was perfect. Beautiful, witty, smart. Popular. Boys wanted to kiss Alison, and girls—even older ones—wanted to
be
her. So the first time Ali laughed at one of Aria’s jokes, asked Emily a question about swimming, told Hanna her shirt was adorable, or commented that Spencer’s penmanship was
way
neater than her own, they couldn’t help but be, well…dazzled. Before Ali, the girls had felt like pleated, high-waisted mom jeans—awkward and noticeable for all the wrong reasons—but then Ali made them feel like the most perfect-fitting Stella McCartneys that no one could afford.

Now, more than a year later, on the last day of seventh grade, they weren’t just best friends, they were
the
girls of Rosewood Day. A lot had happened to make it that way. Every sleepover they had, every field trip, had been a new adventure. Even homeroom had been memorable when they were together. (Reading a steamy note from the varsity crew captain to his math tutor over the PA system was now a Rosewood Day legend.) But there were other things they all wanted to forget. And there was
one
secret they couldn’t even bear to talk about. Ali said that secrets were what bonded their five-way best-friendship together for eternity. If that was true, they were going to be friends for life.

“I’m so glad this day is over.” Alison moaned before gently pushing Spencer back through the gap in the hedges. “Your barn.”

“I’m so glad seventh
grade
is over,” Aria said as she, Emily, and Hanna followed Alison and Spencer toward the renovated barn-turned-guesthouse where Spencer’s older sister, Melissa, had lived for her junior and senior years of high school. Fortunately, she’d just graduated and was headed to Prague this summer, so it was all theirs for the night.

Suddenly they heard a very squeaky voice. “Alison! Hey, Alison! Hey, Spencer!”

Alison turned to the street. “Not it,” she whispered.

“Not it,” Spencer, Emily, and Aria quickly followed.

Hanna frowned. “Shit.”

It was this game Ali had stolen from her brother, Jason, who was a senior at Rosewood Day. Jason and his friends played it at inter-prep school field parties when scoping out girls. Being the last to call out “not it” meant you had to entertain the ugly girl for the night while your friends got to hook up with her hot friends—meaning, essentially, that you were as lame and unattractive as she was. In Ali’s version, the girls called “not it” whenever there was anyone ugly, uncool, or unfortunate near them.

This time, “not it” was for Mona Vanderwaal—a dork from down the street whose favorite pastime was trying to befriend Spencer and Alison—and her two freaky friends, Chassey Bledsoe and Phi Templeton. Chassey was the girl who’d hacked into the school’s computer system and then
told
the principal how to better secure it, and Phi Templeton went everywhere with a yo-yo—enough said. The three stared at the girls from the middle of the quiet, suburban road. Mona was perched on her Razor scooter, Chassey was on a black mountain bike, and Phi was on foot—with her yo-yo, of course.

“You guys want to come over and watch
Fear Factor
?” Mona called.

“Sorry,” Alison simpered. “We’re kind of busy.”

Chassey frowned. “Don’t you want to see when they eat the bugs?”

“Gross!” Spencer whispered to Aria, who then started pretending to eat invisible lice off Hanna’s scalp like a monkey.

“Yeah, I wish we could.” Alison tilted her head. “We’ve planned this sleepover for a while now. But maybe next time?”

Mona looked at the sidewalk. “Yeah, okay.”

“See ya.” Alison turned around, rolling her eyes, and the other girls did the same.

They crossed through Spencer’s back gate. To their left was Ali’s neighboring backyard, where her parents were building a twenty-seat gazebo for their lavish outdoor picnics. “Thank
God
the workers aren’t here,” Ali said, glancing at a yellow bulldozer.

Emily stiffened. “Have they been saying stuff to you again?”

“Easy there, Killer,” Alison said. The others giggled. Sometimes they called Emily “Killer,” as in Ali’s personal pit bull. Emily used to find it funny, too, but lately she wasn’t laughing along.

The barn was just ahead. It was small and cozy and had a big window that looked out on Spencer’s large, rambling farm, which had its very own windmill. Here in Rosewood, Pennsylvania, a little suburb about twenty miles from Philadelphia, you were more likely to live in a twenty-five-room farmhouse with a mosaic-tiled pool and hot tub, like Spencer’s house, than in a prefab McMansion. Rosewood smelled like lilacs and mown grass in the summer and clean snow and wood stoves in the winter. It was full of lush, tall pines, acres of rustic family-run farms, and the cutest foxes and bunnies. It had fabulous shopping and Colonial-era estates and parks for birthday, graduation, and just-’cause-we-feel-like-it fêtes. And Rosewood boys were gorgeous in that glowing, healthy, just-stepped-out-of-an-Abercrombie-catalog way. This was Philadelphia’s Main Line. It was full of old, noble bloodlines, older money, and practically ancient scandals.

As they reached the barn, the girls heard giggles coming from inside. Someone squealed, “I said,
stop
it!”

“Oh God,” Spencer moaned. “What is she doing here?”

As Spencer peeked through the keyhole, she could see Melissa, her prim and proper, excellent-at-everything older sister, and Ian Thomas, her tasty boyfriend, wrestling on the couch. Spencer kicked at the door with the heel of her shoe, forcing it open. The barn smelled like moss and slightly burned popcorn. Melissa turned around.

“What the fu—?” she asked. Then she noticed the others and smiled. “Oh, hey guys.”

The girls eyed Spencer. She constantly complained that Melissa was a venomous super-bitch, so they were always taken aback when Melissa seemed friendly and sweet.

Ian stood up, stretched, and grinned at Spencer. “Hey.”