Perfect

Page 9

She hit END, feeling anxious. She couldn’t imagine what dark secret of Emily’s A might out if she talked to the police, but Aria knew from experience that A would do it.
Sighing, she unlocked her front door and clomped up the stairs, passing her parents’ bedroom. The door was ajar. Inside, her parents’ bed was neatly made—or was it only Ella’s bed now? Ella had draped it with the bright salmon batik-print quilt that she loved and Byron despised. She’d piled all the pillows up on her side. The bed felt like a metaphor for divorce.
Aria dropped her books and aimlessly wandered back downstairs into the den, A’s threat spinning around in her head like the centrifuge they’d used in today’s biology lab. A was still here. And, according to Wilden, so was Ali’s killer. A could be Ali’s killer, worming her way into all of their lives. What if Wilden was right—what if Ali’s killer wanted to hurt someone else? What if Ali’s killer wasn’t only Ali’s enemy, but Aria’s, Hanna’s, Emily’s, and Spencer’s, too? Did that mean one of them was…next?
The den was dark except for the flickering TV. When Aria saw a hand curled over the edge of the tweedy love seat, she jumped. Then Mike’s familiar face appeared.
“You’re just in time.” Mike pointed to the TV screen.
“Coming up, a never-before-seen home video of Alison DiLaurentis shot the week before she was murdered,” he said in his best Moviefone-announcer impersonation.
Aria’s stomach tightened. This was the leaked video Wilden had been talking about. Years ago, Aria had thrown herself into filmmaking, documenting everything she could, from snails in the backyard to her best friends. The movies were generally short, and Aria often tried to make them arty and poignant, focusing on Hanna’s nostril, or the zipper on Ali’s hoodie, or Spencer’s fidgety fingers. When Ali went missing, Aria turned her video collection over to the police. The cops combed through them but had found no clues about where Ali could have gone. Aria still had the originals on her laptop, although she hadn’t looked through them in a long, long time.
Aria flopped down on the love seat. When a Mercedes commercial ended and the news came back on, Aria and Mike sat up straighter. “Yesterday, an anonymous source sent us this clip of Alison DiLaurentis,” the anchorman announced. “It offers a look at how chillingly innocent her life was just days before she was murdered. Let’s watch.”
The clip opened with a fumbling shot of Spencer’s leather living room couch. “And because she wears a size zero,” Hanna said offscreen. The camera panned to a younger-looking Spencer, who had on a pink polo and capri-length pajama pants. Her blond hair cascaded around her shoulders, and she wore a sparkly rhinestone crown on her head.
“She looks hot in that crown,” Mike said enthusiastically, tearing open a large bag of Doritos.
“Shhh,” Aria hissed.
Spencer pointed at Ali’s LG phone on the couch.
“Want to read her texts?”
“I do!” Hanna whispered, ducking out of the shot. Then the camera swung to Emily, who looked nearly the same as she did today—same reddish-blond hair, same oversize swimming T-shirt, same pleasant-but-worried expression. Aria suddenly remembered this night—before they’d turned on the camera, Ali had gotten a text message and hadn’t told them whom it was from. Everyone had been annoyed.
The camera showed Spencer holding Ali’s phone. “It’s locked.” There was a blurry shot of the phone’s screen.
“Do you know her password?” Aria heard her own voice ask.
“Damn! That’s you!” Mike whooped.
“Try her birthday,” Hanna suggested.
The camera showed Hanna’s chubby hands reaching in and taking the phone from Spencer.
Mike wrinkled his nose and turned to Aria. “Is this what girls do when they’re alone? I thought I was going to see pillow fights. Girls in panties. Kissing.”
“We were in seventh grade,” Aria snapped. “That’s just gross.”
“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.”