Perfect (8 page)

“There’s nothing wrong with seventh-grade girls in their panties,” Mike said in a small voice.

“What are you guys doing?” Ali’s voice called. Then her face appeared on-screen, and Aria’s eyes brimmed with tears. That heart-shaped face, those luminous dark blue eyes, that wide mouth—it was
haunting.

“Were you looking at my phone?” Ali demanded, her hands on her hips.

“Of course not!” Hanna cried. Spencer staggered backward, clutching her head to keep her crown on.

Mike shoved a handful of Doritos into his mouth. “Can I be your love slave, princess Spencer?” he said in falsetto.

“I don’t think she goes out with prepubescent boys who still sleep with their blankies,” Aria snapped.

“Hey!” Mike squeaked. “It’s not a blankie! It’s my lucky lacrosse jersey!”

“That’s even worse,” Aria said.

Ali floated on-screen again, looking alive and vibrant and carefree. How could Ali be dead?
Murdered?

Then Spencer’s older sister, Melissa, and her boyfriend, Ian, walked past the camera. “Hey, girls,” Ian said.

“Hi,” Spencer greeted him loudly.

Aria smirked at the TV. She’d forgotten how they all lusted over Ian. He was one of the people they would prank-call sometimes—along with Jenna Cavanaugh before they hurt her, Noel Kahn because he was cute, and Andrew Campbell because Spencer found him annoying. For Ian, they took turns pretending they were girls from 1-800-Sexy-Coeds.

The camera caught Ali rolling her eyes at Spencer. Then Spencer scowled at Ali behind her back.
Typical,
Aria thought. The night Ali disappeared, Aria hadn’t been hypnotized, and she’d listened to Ali and Spencer fight. When they ran out of the barn, Aria waited a minute or two, then followed. Aria called their names. But she couldn’t catch up with them. She went back inside, wondering if Ali and Spencer had just ditched the rest of them, staging the whole thing so they could run off to a cooler party. But eventually Spencer burst back inside. She looked so
lost
, as if she was in a trance.

On-screen, Ian plopped down on the couch next to Ali. “So, what are you girls doing?”

“Oh, not much,” Aria said from behind the camera.

“Making a film.”

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

“Of course,” Spencer said, taking a seat next to him.

“It’s a talk show. I’m the host. You and Ali are my guests. I’ll do you first.”

The camera panned off the couch and focused on Ali’s closed phone, which was next to Ali’s hand on the couch. It got closer and closer until the phone’s tiny LED screen took up the whole picture. To this day, Aria didn’t know who had texted Ali that night.

“Ask him who his favorite teacher at Rosewood is,” Aria’s younger, slightly higher voice called out from behind the camera.

Ali chuckled and looked straight into the lens. “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 gasped, and heard her younger self gasp on-screen, too. Ali had really
said
that? In front of
all
of them?

And then the clip was over.

Mike turned to her. There were neon-orange Dorito crumbs around his mouth. “What did she mean about hooking up with teachers? It seemed like she was only talking to you.”

A dry rasp escaped Aria’s mouth. A had told Ella that Aria had known about Byron’s affair all these years, but Mike still didn’t know. He’d be so disappointed in her.

Mike stood up. “Whatever.” Aria could tell he was trying to be all unaffected and casual, but he bumbled out of the room, knocking over a framed, signed photo of Lou Reed—Byron’s rock star hero, and one of the few Byron artifacts Ella hadn’t removed. She heard him stomp up to his bedroom and slam the door hard.

Aria put her head in her hands. This was the three-thousandth instance she wished she were back in Reykjavík, hiking to a glacier, riding her Icelandic pony, Gilda, along a dried-up volcano bed, or even eating whale blubber, which everyone in Iceland seemed to adore.

She shut off the TV, and the house became eerily silent. When she heard a rustling at the door, she jumped. In the hall, she saw her mother, lugging in several large canvas shopping bags from Rosewood’s organic market.

Ella noticed Aria and smiled wearily. “Hey, sweetie.” Since she’d kicked Byron out, Ella seemed more disheveled than usual. Her black gauzy tunic was baggier than ever, her wide-leg silk pants had a tahini stain on the thigh, and her long, brownish-black hair sat in a rat’s nest at the crown of her head.

“Let me help.” Aria took a bunch of bags from Ella’s arms. They walked into the kitchen together, hefted the bags onto the island, and started unpacking.

“How was your day?” Ella murmured.

Then Aria remembered. “Oh my God, you’ll never believe what I did,” she exclaimed, feeling a surge of giddiness. Ella glanced at her before putting the organic peanut butter away. “I went down to Hollis. Because I was looking for…you know.
Her
.” Aria didn’t want to say Meredith’s name. “She was teaching an art class, so I ran inside, grabbed a paintbrush, and painted a scarlet
A
across her chest. You know, like that woman in
The Scarlet Letter
? It was awesome.”

Ella paused, holding a bag of whole-wheat pasta midair. She looked nauseated.

“She didn’t know what hit her,” Aria went on. “And then I said, ‘Now everyone will know what you’ve done.’” She grinned and spread her arms out.
Taa-daa!

Ella’s eyes darted back and forth, processing this. “Do you realize that Hester Prynne is supposed to be a
sympathetic
character?”

Aria frowned. She was only on page eight. “I did it for you,” Aria explained quietly. “For revenge.”

“Revenge?” Ella’s voice shook. “Thanks. That makes me look really sane. Like I’m really handling this well. This is hard enough for me as it is. Don’t you realize you’ve made her look like…like a martyr?”

Aria took a step toward Ella. She hadn’t considered that. “I’m sorry….”

Then Ella crumpled against the counter and started to sob. Aria stood motionless. Her limbs felt like Sculpey clay straight out of the oven, all hardened and useless. She couldn’t fathom what her mom was going through, and she’d gone and made it worse.

Outside their kitchen window, a hummingbird landed on the replica of a whale penis Mike had bought at Reykjavík’s phallological museum. In any other circumstance, Aria would’ve pointed it out—hummingbirds were rare here, especially ones that landed on fake whale penises—but not today.

“I can’t even look at you right now,” Ella finally stammered.

Aria put her hand to her chest, as if her mother had speared her with one of her Wüsthof knives. “I’m
sorry
. I wanted Meredith to pay for what she’s done.” When Ella didn’t answer, the searing, acidic feeling in Aria’s stomach grew stronger. “Maybe I should get out of here for a while then, if you can’t stand the sight of me.”

She paused, waiting for Ella to jump in and say,
No, that’s not what I want
. But Ella stayed quiet. “Yes, maybe that’s a good idea,” she agreed quietly.

“Oh.” Aria’s shoulders sank and her chin trembled.

“Then I…I won’t come home from school tomorrow.” She didn’t have any idea where she’d go, but that didn’t matter right now. All that mattered was doing the one thing that would make her mom happy.

9

EVERYONE, A BIG ROUND OF APPLAUSE FOR SPENCER HASTINGS!

On Tuesday afternoon, while most of the Rosewood Day junior class ate lunch, Spencer sat on top of the conference table in the yearbook room. Eight blinking Mac G5 computers, a whole bunch of long-lensed Nikon cameras, six eager sophomore and freshman girls, and a nerdy, slightly effeminate freshman boy surrounded her.

She tapped the covers of the past few Rosewood Day yearbooks. Each year, the books were named
The Mule
due to some apocryphal, inside joke from the 1920s that even the school’s oldest teachers had long forgotten. “In this year’s
Mule,
I think we should try to capture a slice of what Rosewood Day students are like.”

Her yearbook staff diligently wrote down
slice of life
in their spiral-bound notebooks.

“Like…maybe we could do some quickie interviews with random students,” Spencer went on. “Or ask people what’s on their favorite iPod playlist, and then publish it in boxes next to their photos. And how are the still lifes going?” Last meeting, they had planned to ask a couple kids to empty the contents of their bags to document what Rosewood Day girls and guys were carrying around.

“I got great photos of the stuff in Brett Weaver’s soccer bag and Mona Vanderwaal’s purse,” said Brenna Richardson.

“Fantastic,” Spencer said. “Keep up the good work.”

Spencer closed her leaf green leather-bound journal and dismissed her staff. Once they were gone, she grabbed her black fabric Kate Spade bag and pulled out her Sidekick.

There it was. The note from A. She kept hoping it wouldn’t be there.

As she slid the phone back into her bag, her fingers grazed against something in the inside pocket: Officer Wilden’s business card. Wilden wasn’t the first cop to ask Spencer about the night Ali went missing, but he was the only one who’d ever sounded so…suspicious.

The memory of that night was both crystal clear and incredibly muddled. She remembered a glut of emotions: excitement over getting the barn for their sleepover, annoyance that Melissa was there, giddiness that Ian was. Their kiss had been a couple weeks before that. But then Ali started talking about how Melissa and Ian made the cutest couple and Spencer’s emotions swung again. Ali had already threatened to tell Melissa about the kiss. Once Ian and Melissa left, Ali tried to hypnotize them, and she and Spencer got in a fight. Ali left, Spencer ran after her, and then…
nothing
. But what she never told the cops—or her family, or her friends—was that sometimes when she thought about that night, it felt like there was a black hole in the middle of it. That something had happened which she couldn’t remember.

Suddenly, a vision flashed in front of Spencer’s eyes.
Ali laughing nastily and turning away.

Spencer stopped in the middle of the packed hallway and someone ran into her back.

“Will you move?” the girl behind her whined. “Some of us have to get to class.”

Spencer took a tentative step forward. Whatever she had just remembered had quickly disappeared, but it felt like there had been an earthquake. She looked around for shattered glass and scattering students, certain the rest of the world had felt it, too, but everything looked completely normal. A few steps away, Naomi Zeigler inspected her reflection in her mini locker mirror. Two freshmen by the Teacher of the Year plaque laughed at the pointy Satan beard and horns drawn over Mr. Craft’s smiling photo. The windows that faced the commons weren’t the tiniest bit cracked, and none of the vases in the Pottery III display case had fallen over. What was the vision Spencer had just seen? Why did she feel so…slithery?

She slipped into her AP econ classroom and slumped down at her desk, which was right next to a very large portrait of a scowling J. P. Morgan. Once the rest of the class filed in and everyone sat down, Squidward strode to the front of the room. “Before today’s video, I have an announcement.” He looked at Spencer. Her stomach swirled. She didn’t want everyone looking at her right now.

“For her first essay assignment, Spencer Hastings made a very eloquent, convincing argument on the invisible-hand theory,” Squidward proclaimed, stroking his tie, which had Benjamin Franklin’s C-note portrait stamped all over it. “And, as you may have heard, I have nominated her for a Golden Orchid award.”

Squidward began to applaud, and the rest of the class followed. It lasted an intolerable fifteen seconds.

“But I have another surprise,” Squidward continued.

“I just got off the phone with a member of the judges’ panel, and Spencer, you’ve made the finals.”

The class burst into applause again. Someone at the back even wolf-whistled. Spencer sat very still. For a moment, she lost all vision completely. She tried to paste a smile on her face.

Andrew Campbell, who sat next to her, tapped her on the shoulder. “Nice job.”

Spencer looked over. She and Andrew had hardly spoken since she’d been the world’s worst Foxy date and ditched him at the dance. Mostly, he’d been giving her dirty looks. “Thanks,” she croaked, once she found her voice.

“You must have really worked hard on it, huh? Did you use extra sources?”

“Uh-huh.” Spencer frantically pulled out all the loose handouts from her econ folder and started straightening them. She smoothed out any bent-down corners and folds and tried to organize them by date. Melissa’s paper was actually the only outside source Spencer had used. When she’d tried to do the necessary research for the essay, even Wikipedia’s simple definition of
invisible hand
had completely perplexed her. The first few sentences of her sister’s essay were clear enough—
The great Scottish economist Adam Smith’s invisible-hand concept can be summed up very easily, whether it’s describing the markets of the nineteenth century or those of the twenty-first: you might think people are doing things to help you, but in reality, everyone is only out for themselves
. But when she read the rest of the essay, her brain got as foggy as her family’s eucalyptus steam room.

“What kind of sources?” Andrew continued. “Books? Magazine articles?” When she looked over again, he seemed to have a smirk on his face, and Spencer felt dizzy. Did he
know
?

“Like the…like the books McAdam suggested on his list,” she fumbled.

“Ah. Well, congratulations. I hope you win.”

“Thanks,” she answered, deciding Andrew couldn’t know. He was just jealous. Spencer and Andrew were ranked number one and number two, respectively, in the class and were constantly shifting positions. Andrew probably monitored Spencer’s every achievement like a stockbroker watches the Dow Jones Industrial Average ticker. Spencer went back to straightening her folder, although it wasn’t making her feel any better.