Flawless

The girls exchanged a pleading look. Then Aria took the others’ hands and they strode across Emily’s lawn, treading straight through a flower bed. They were a few feet from Emily’s front door when a police officer stepped in their path.



“Hanna, I told you to stay out of this,” the cop said.



Spencer gulped. It was Wilden, the guy who’d come by her house yesterday. Her heart started to pound.



Hanna tried to push him aside. “Don’t tell me what to do!” The officer grabbed Hanna by the shoulders, and she started to squirm. “Get off me!”



Spencer quickly gripped Hanna around her tiny waist. “Try to calm her down,” Wilden said to Spencer. Then he noticed who she was. “Oh,” he breathed. He looked confused, then curious. “Miss Hastings.”



“We just want to know what happened to Emily,” Spencer tried to explain, her insides roiling. “She’s…she’s our friend.”



“You guys should all go home.” Wilden crossed his arms over his chest.



Suddenly, the front door opened…and Emily stepped out.



She was barefoot and pale, and holding a glass of water in an old McDonald’s Muppet mug. Spencer was so relieved to see her, she actually cried out. A vulnerable, pained noise escaped from her throat.



The girls rushed over to her. “Are you all right?” Hanna asked.



“What happened?” Aria said at the same time.



“What’s going on?” Spencer gestured to the crowd of people.



“Emily…” Wilden put his hands on his hips. “Maybe you should see your friends later. Your parents said you were supposed to stay inside.”



But Emily shook her head, almost irritated. “No, it’s okay.”



Emily led them right past the cop to her side yard. They stood practically in a rosebush up against the side of the house, so they’d have a little privacy. Spencer took a good look at Emily. She had dark circles under her eyes, and there were scratches all over her legs, but otherwise, she looked fine. “What happened?” Spencer asked.



Emily took a huge breath. “A mountain biker found Toby’s body in the woods behind my house this morning. I guess…I guess he OD’d on pills or something.”



Spencer’s heart stopped. Hanna gasped. Aria went pale. “What? When?” she asked.



“It was sometime during the night,” Emily said. “I was going to call you, except that cop’s watching me like a hawk.” Her jaw was trembling. “My parents are visiting my grandmother this weekend.” She tried to smile, but it warped into a grimace, and then her face collapsed into a sob.



“It’s all right,” Hanna comforted her.



“He was acting crazy last night,” Emily said, wiping her face with her shirt. “He took me home from Foxy, and one minute, it was totally normal, and the next, he was telling me how much he hated Ali. He said he couldn’t forgive Ali for what she did, and that he was glad she’s dead.”



“Oh my God.” Spencer covered her eyes. It was all true.



“That’s when I realized—Toby knew,” Emily went on, her pale, freckly hands fluttering. “He must have found out what Ali did, and…and I think he killed her.”



“Wait a second,” Hanna interrupted, holding up her hand. “I don’t think he—”



“Shhh.” Spencer put her hand lightly on Hanna’s tiny wrist. Hanna looked like she wanted to say something, but Spencer was afraid that if Emily stopped, she wouldn’t be able to finish.



“I ran away from him—the whole way to my house,” Emily said. “When I got inside, Spencer called, but we got cut off. Then…then Toby was at my back door. I told him that I knew what he’d done, and I was going to tell the police. He acted all amazed that I’d figured it out.”



Emily seemed winded by all that talking. “You guys—how did Toby know?”



Spencer’s stomach dropped. The phone lines had gone down before she could explain the truth of The Jenna Thing to Emily last night. She wished she didn’t have to tell Emily now—she seemed so fragile. It had been bad enough telling Aria and Hanna—but the truth was going to shatter Emily’s world.



Aria and Hanna were looking at Spencer expectantly, so Spencer steeled herself. “He always knew,” she said. “He saw Ali do it. Only, Ali blackmailed him into taking the blame. She made me keep the secret.” She paused for a breath and noticed that Emily wasn’t reacting the way she thought she would. She was standing there, completely calm, as if she were listening to a geography lecture. It kind of put Spencer off balance. “So, um, when Ali went missing, I always thought that maybe, I don’t know…” She looked up toward the sky, realizing that what she was about to say was true. “I thought maybe Toby had something to do with it, but I was too scared to say anything. But then he came back for her funeral…and my A notes referenced the Toby secret. The last one said, You hurt me, so I’m going to hurt you. He wanted revenge on all of us. He must have known we were all involved.”



Emily was still standing there so calmly. Then, slowly, her shoulders started to shake. She shut her eyes. At first, Spencer thought she was crying, but then she realized she was laughing.



Emily threw her head back, laughing louder. Spencer glanced at Aria and Hanna uneasily. Emily had obviously lost it. “Em…” she prodded gently.



When Emily brought her head back down, her bottom lip was trembling. “Ali promised us that no one knew what we’d done.”



“Guess she lied,” Hanna said flatly.



Emily’s eyes flickered searchingly back and forth. “But how could she lie to us like that? What if Toby decided to tell?” She shook her head. “This…this happened when we were all inside Ali’s house, watching at her front door?” Emily asked. “That very same night?”



Spencer nodded solemnly.



“And Ali came back inside and said everything was fine, and when none of us could sleep except for her, she comforted us by scratching our backs?”



“Yes.” Tears came to Spencer’s eyes. Of course Emily remembered every detail.



Emily stared off into space. “And she gave us these.” She held up her arm. The bracelet Ali had made them—to symbolize the secret—was tightly knotted around her wrist. Everyone else had taken theirs off.



Emily’s legs buckled, and she fell to the grass. Then she started tearing at the bracelet around her wrist, trying get it off, but the strings were old and tough. “Damn it,” Emily said, collapsing her fingers together to make her wrist smaller so she could yank the bracelet off without untying it. Then she went at it with her teeth, but it wouldn’t budge.



Aria put her hand on Emily’s shoulder. “It’s all right.”



“I just can’t believe any of it.” She wiped her eyes, giving up on the bracelet. Emily pulled up a fistful of grass. “And I can’t believe I went to Foxy with Ali’s…killer.”



“We were so scared for you,” Spencer whispered.



Hanna waved her arms around. “You guys, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Toby’s not Ali’s killer.”



“Huh?” Spencer frowned. “What are you talking about?”



“I…I spoke to that cop this morning.” Hanna pointed toward Wilden, who was talking to the news team. “I told him about Toby…how I thought he killed Ali. He said they checked him out, like, years ago. Toby’s not even a suspect.”



“He definitely did it.” Emily stood back up. “Last night, when I told him I knew what he’d done, he got really panicked and begged me not to tell the cops.”



Everyone looked at one another, confused. “So you think the cops are just wrong?” Hanna fiddled with the heart-shaped charm on her bracelet.



“Wait a minute,” Emily said slowly. “Spencer, what was Ali blackmailing him about? How did she get Toby to take the blame for…for Jenna?”



“Spencer said Ali wouldn’t tell her,” Aria answered.



Spencer felt a tight, nervous feeling come over her. It’s better my way, Ali had said. We keep Toby’s secret, he keeps ours.



But Toby was dead. Ali was dead. It didn’t matter, now. “I do know,” she said quietly.



Then Spencer noticed someone coming around the side yard, and her heart sped up. It was Jenna Cavanaugh.



She was dressed in a black T-shirt and skinny black jeans, and her black hair was piled up on her head. Her skin was still a brilliant, snowy white, but her face was half-hidden by oversized sunglasses. She held a white cane in one hand and the harness to her golden retriever in the other. He led Jenna to the edge of the group.



Spencer was pretty sure she was about to faint. Either that or start crying again.



Jenna and her dog stopped right next to Hanna. “Is Emily Fields here?”



“Yes,” Emily whispered. Spencer could hear the fear in her voice. “Right here.”



Jenna turned in the direction of Emily’s voice. “This is yours.” She held out a pink satin purse. Emily took it very carefully, as if it were made of glass. “And there’s something you should read.” Jenna reached in her pocket for a wrinkled piece of paper. “It’s from Toby.”



37



STRING BRACELETS ARE SO OUT, ANYWAY



Emily pushed her hair behind her ears and looked at Jenna. The sunglasses she wore stretched from her cheekbones to above her eyebrows, but Emily could just make out a few pinkish, wrinkled scars—burn scars—on her forehead.



She thought of that night. The way Ali’s house had smelled like an Aveda peppermint candle. The way Emily’s mouth tasted like salt-and-vinegar chips. How her feet rubbed against the grooves in the DiLaurentises’ living room wood floor as she stood at the window, watching Ali run across the Cavanaughs’ lawn. The boom of the firework, the paramedics climbing up the tree house ladder, how Jenna’s mouth made a rectangle, she was crying so hard.



Jenna handed her the dirty, wrinkled piece of paper. “They found this with him,” she said, her voice cracking on the word him. “He wrote things to all of us. Your part is somewhere in the middle.”



The paper was actually the Foxy auction list; Toby had scrawled something on the back. Seeing the way Toby’s words didn’t stay between the lines, that he’d barely used any capital letters, and that he’d signed the note Toby in wobbly cursive made Emily clench up inside. Although she’d never seen Toby’s handwriting before, it seemed to bring him to life beside her. She could smell the soap he used, feel his big hand holding her smaller one. This morning, she’d awakened not on the porch swing but in her bed. The doorbell was ringing. She stumbled down the stairs, and there was a guy in bike shorts and a helmet at her door. “Can I use your phone?” he asked. “It’s an emergency.”



Emily had stared at him woozily, not awake. Carolyn appeared behind her, and the cyclist started to explain himself. “I was just riding through your woods, and I found this boy, and first I thought he was sleeping, but…”