Flawless

“What’s that?” Naomi called. “Origami?”



Hanna unfolded the airplane and turned it over.



Hi again, Hanna! I want you to read Naomi and Riley the sentences below just as they’re written. No cheating! And if you don’t, everyone will know the truth about you-know-what. That includes Daddy. —A



Hanna stared at the paragraph below, written in rounded, unfamiliar handwriting. “No,” she whispered, her heart starting to pound. What A had written would ruin her flawless rep forever:



I tried to get in Sean’s pants at Noel’s party, but he dumped me instead. And, oh yeah, I make myself throw up at least three times a day.



“Hanna, did you get a luuuuve letter?” Riley cooed. “Is it from a secret admirer?”



Hanna glanced at Naomi and Riley, in their shortened pleated skirts and wedge heels. They both stared at her like wolves, as if they could smell her weakness. “Did you see who put this here?” she asked, but they looked at her blankly and shrugged.



Next she looked around the soccer bleachers, at every clump of kids, every parent, even at Lansing’s bus driver in the parking lot, leaning against the back of the bus smoking a cigarette. Whoever was doing this to her had to be here, right? They would have to know Riley and Naomi were sitting near her.



She looked at the note again. She couldn’t say this to them. There was no way.



But then she thought about the final time her dad asked her about Jenna’s accident. He’d sat down on her bed and spent a long time staring at the knitted socktopus Aria had made for her. “Hanna,” he finally said. “I’m worried about you. Promise me you guys weren’t playing with fireworks the night that girl was blinded.”



“I…I didn’t touch the fireworks,” Hanna whispered. It wasn’t a lie.



Down on the soccer field, two Lansing boys were giving each other high fives. Somewhere under the bleachers, someone lit up a joint; its skunky, mossy smell wafted into Hanna’s nostrils. She crumpled up the piece of paper, stood up, and, stomach churning, walked over to Naomi and Riley. They looked up at her, bemused. Riley’s mouth hung open. Her breath, Hanna noticed, stunk like someone who was on Atkins.



“I tried to get in seans pants at noels party but he dumped me instead,” Hanna blurted out. She took a deep breath. The part wasn’t even exactly true, but whatever. “And-I make myself barf three times a day.”



The words came out in a fast, unintelligible jumble, and Hanna turned swiftly around. “What did she say?” she heard Riley whisper, but she certainly wasn’t going to turn around and make herself clearer.



She stomped down the bleachers, ducking around someone’s mother who was carrying a precarious tray of Cokes and popcorn. She looked for someone—anyone—who might be looking back. But nothing. Not a single person was giggling or whispering. Everyone was just watching the Rosewood Day soccer boys advance toward Lansing’s goal.



But A had to be here. A had to be watching.



22



YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH



Friday evening, Aria shut off the radio in her bedroom. For the past hour, the local DJ had gone on and on about Foxy. He made it sound as if Foxy were a shuttle launch or a presidential inauguration, not just some silly benefit.



She listened to the sounds of her parents walking around the kitchen. There wasn’t the usual cacophony of noise—NPR on the radio, CNN or PBS on the kitchen TV, or a classical or experimental jazz CD playing on the kitchen stereo. All Aria heard were pots and pans clanging. Then a crash. “Sorry,” Ella said curtly. “It’s fine,” Byron answered.



Aria turned back to her laptop, feeling more and more crazed by the second. Since her Meredith-stalk had been cut short, she was now researching her online. Once you started Web-stalking someone, it was hard to stop. Aria had Meredith’s last name—Stevens—from a Strawberry Ridge Yoga schedule she found online, so she searched Google for Meredith’s phone number. She thought maybe she’d try to call to tell her, kindly, to stay away from Byron. But then she found her address and wanted to see how far away Meredith lived, so she mapped it on MapQuest. From there, it got nuts. She looked at a hypertext paper Meredith had done in her freshman year of college on William Carlos Williams. She hacked into Hollis’s student portal to see Meredith’s grades. Meredith was on Friendster, Facebook, and MySpace. Her favorite movies were Donnie Darko; Paris, Texas; and The Princess Bride, and her interests were quirky things like snow globes, tai chi, and magnets.



In a parallel universe, Aria and Meredith could have been friends. It made it even harder to do what A asked in Aria’s last text message: make it go away.



It felt like A’s threat was burning a hole in her Treo, and whenever she thought about seeing not only Meredith but Spencer in the yoga studio that morning, she felt uneasy. What was Spencer doing there? Did Spencer know something?



Back in seventh grade, Aria had told Ali about seeing Toby at her drama workshop while she, Ali, and Spencer were hanging out at Spencer’s pool. “He doesn’t know anything, Aria,” Ali had answered, calmly applying more sunscreen. “Chill out.”



“But how can you be sure?” Aria had protested. “What about that person I saw outside the tree house that night? Maybe they told Toby! Maybe it was Toby!”



Spencer frowned, then glanced at Alison. “Ali, maybe you should just—”



Ali cleared her throat loudly. “Spence,” she said, sort of as a warning.



Aria looked back and forth at them, confused. Then she blurted out the question she’d wanted to ask for a while: “What were you guys whispering about the night of her accident? When I woke up and you were in the bathroom?”



Ali cocked her head. “We weren’t whispering.”



“Ali, we were,” Spencer hissed.



Ali gave her another sharp look, then turned back to Aria. “Look, we weren’t talking about Toby. Besides”—she gave Aria a little smile—“don’t you have bigger things to worry about right now?”



Aria bristled. Just days before, Aria and Ali had caught her father with Meredith.



Spencer tugged Ali’s arm. “Ali, I really think you should tell—”



Ali held up her hand. “Spence, I swear to God.”



“You swear to God what?” Spencer shrieked. “You think this is easy?”



After Aria saw Spencer at the yoga studio this morning, she’d considered tracking her down in school and talking to her. Spencer and Ali had covered something up, and maybe it was tangled in A. But…she felt afraid. She thought she’d known her old friends inside and out. But now that she knew they all had dark secrets they didn’t want to share…maybe she’d never really known them at all.



Aria’s cell phone rang, breaking her out of the memory. Startled, she dropped it into a pile of dirty T-shirts she’d been meaning to wash. She grabbed it.



“Hey,” said a boy’s voice on the other end. “It’s Sean.”



“Oh!” Aria exclaimed. “What’s up?”



“Not much. Just got back from a soccer game. What are you doing tonight?”



Aria wiggled with glee. “Um…nothing, really.”



“Wanna hang out?”



She heard another clatter downstairs. Then her father’s voice. “I’m going.” The front door slammed. He wasn’t even going to have dinner with them. Again.



She put her mouth back to the phone. “How about right now?”



Sean parked his Audi in a desolate lot and led Aria up an embankment. To their left was a chain-link fence, to their right a sloping path. Above them were the elevated train tracks, and below them was all of Rosewood. “My brother and I found this place years ago,” Sean explained.



He spread his cashmere sweater on the grass and gestured for her to sit. Then he pulled a chrome thermos out of his backpack and handed it to her. “Want some?” Aria could smell the Captain Morgan through the little space in the lid.



She took a greedy swig, then looked at him crookedly. His face was so chiseled and his clothes fit so perfectly, but he didn’t have the same I’m hot and I know it air about him that other typical Rosewood boys did. “You come here a lot?” she asked.



Sean shrugged and sat down next to her. “Not a lot. But sometimes.”



Aria had assumed Sean and his typical Rosewood boy crowd drove around partying all night, or sneaked their parents’ beer at someone’s empty house while playing Grand Theft Auto on PlayStation. And there would be a soak in a hot tub to cap off the night, of course. Pretty much everyone in Rosewood had a hot tub in their backyard.



The town lights twinkled below. Aria could see Hollis’s spire, which was lit up in ivory at night. “This is amazing,” she sighed. “I can’t believe I’ve never found this place.”



“Well, we used to live not far from here.” Sean smiled. “My brother and I rode all over these woods on our dirt bikes. We also used to come here and play Blair Witch.”



“Blair Witch?” Aria repeated.



He nodded. “After the movie came out, we were obsessed with making our own ghost movies.”



“I did that too!” Aria cried, so excited she laid her hand on Sean’s arm. She quickly pulled it away. “Except I did mine in my backyard.”



“You still have the videos?” Sean asked.



“Yep. You?”



“Uh-huh.” Sean paused. “Maybe you could come see them some time.”



“I’d like that.” She smiled. Sean was starting to remind her of the croque-monsieur she once ordered in Nice. At first glance, it looked like a plain, cookie-cutter grilled cheese, nothing special. But when she bit into it, the cheese was Brie and there were chopped-up portabello mushrooms hidden underneath. There was a lot more to it than it had appeared.



Sean leaned back on his elbows. “One time, my brother and I came here and caught this couple having sex.”



“Really?” Aria giggled.



Sean took the mug from her. “Yeah. And they were so into it, they didn’t see us at first. I backed up really slowly but then tripped over some rocks. They totally freaked.”



“I’m sure.” She shivered. “God, that would be awful.”



Sean poked her in the arm. “What, you’ve never done it in public?”



Aria looked away. “Nah.”



They were quiet for a moment. Aria wasn’t sure how she felt. Uneasy, sort of. But also…a little buzzy. It felt like something was going to happen. “So, um, remember that secret you told me, in your car?” she asked. “The one about not wanting to be a virgin?”



“Yeah.”



“Why do you…why do you think you feel that way?”



Sean leaned back on his elbows. “I started going to V Club because everybody was rushing to have sex, and I wanted to see why the people at V Club decided not to.”



“And?”



“Well, I think they’re mostly scared. But also, I think they want to find the right person. Like, someone they can be completely honest and themselves with.”