Ella fiddled with her chunky turquoise necklace. “Tuesday.”

“With who?”

Ella ducked her head, revealing a thin strip of gray roots at her scalp. “Just someone I’ve been talking to on Match.com. He sounds nice…but who knows? It’s not like I know that much about him. We’ve talked mostly about music. We both like the Rolling Stones.”

Aria shrugged. As seventies rock went, she was more of a Velvet Underground girl—Mick Jagger was thinner than she was, and Keith Richards was downright terrifying. “So what does he do?”

Ella smiled sheepishly. “I actually have no idea. All I know is that his name is Wolfgang.”

“Wolfgang?” Aria almost spit out a bite of bread. “As in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?”

Ella’s face was getting more and more flushed. “Maybe I won’t go.”

“No, no, you should!” Aria cried. “I think it’s great!” And she was happy for Ella. Why should her father have all the fun? “I think it’s gross,” Mike piped up. “It should be illegal for people over forty to date.”

Aria ignored him. “What are you going to wear?”

Ella stared down at her favorite eggplant-colored tunic. It had floral embroidery around the neck and what looked like a scrambled egg stain near the hem. “What’s wrong with this?”

Aria widened her eyes and shook her head.

“I got it in that sweet little fishing village in Denmark last year,” Ella protested. “You were with me! That old woman with no teeth sold it to us.”

“We have to get you something else,” Aria demanded. “And re-dye your hair. And let me do your makeup.” She squinted, envisioning her mother’s bathroom counter. Usually it was cluttered with watercolor paints, tins of turpentine, and half-finished jewelry projects. “Do you even own makeup?”

Ella took another long sip of her beer. “Shouldn’t he like me for who I am without all that…embellishment?”

“It’ll still be you. Just better,” Aria encouraged.

Mike swiveled back and forth between them, then brightened. “You know what I think makes women look better? Implants!”

Ella gathered their plates and carried them to the sink. “Fine,” she said to Aria. “I’ll let you give me a makeover for my date, okay? But now I have to drive Mike to his date.”

“It’s not a date!” Mike whined, stomping out of the room and up the stairs.

Aria and Ella snickered. Once he was gone, they regarded each other shyly, something warm and unspoken passing between them. The last few months hadn’t been particularly easy. Mona-as-A had also told Ella that Aria had kept her father’s secret for three long years, and for a while, Ella had been too disgusted to even let her daughter in the house. Eventually, she’d forgiven Aria, and they were working hard on getting their relationship back to normal. They weren’t quite there yet. There were a lot of things Aria still couldn’t mention; they still hardly spent any time alone; and Ella hadn’t confided in Aria once, which she used to do all the time. But it was getting better every day.

Ella raised an eyebrow and reached into her tunic’s kangaroo pocket. “I just remembered.” She pulled out a rectangular card with three intersecting blue lines on the front. “I was supposed to go to this art opening tonight, but I don’t have time. You want to go instead?”

“I don’t know.” Aria shrugged. “I’m tired.”

“Go,” Ella urged. “You’ve been too cooped up lately. No more being miserable.”

Aria opened her mouth to protest, but Ella had a point. She’d spent the whole winter break in her bedroom, knitting scarves and absently flicking the Shakespeare bobblehead Ezra had given her before he left Rosewood in November. Every day she thought she’d hear something from him—an e-mail, a text, anything—especially since so much about Rosewood, Ali, and even Aria herself had been on the news. The months slid by…and nothing.

She pressed the corner of the invitation into the pit of her palm. If Ella was brave enough to get back into the world, then so was she. And there was no better time to start than right now.

On her way to the art opening, Aria had to pass Ali’s old street. There was her house, same as it had been earlier that day. Spencer’s house was next door, and the Cavanaughs’ was across the street. Aria wondered if Jenna was inside, getting ready for her first day back at Rosewood Day. She’d heard that Jenna would be having private, all-day tutoring sessions.

A day didn’t go by when Aria didn’t think about the last—and only—time she and Jenna had spoken. It had been at the Hollis art studio, when Aria had had a panic attack during a thunderstorm. Aria had tried to apologize once and for all for what they’d done to her that horrible night when Jenna was blinded, but Jenna explained that she and Ali had conspired together to launch the firework to get rid of Jenna’s stepbrother, Toby, for good. Ali had agreed to the plan because, apparently, she had sibling problems too.

For a while, Aria obsessed over what sibling problems meant. Toby used to touch Jenna inappropriately—could Ali’s brother, Jason, have been doing the same thing to Ali? But Aria hated to think that way. She’d never sensed anything weird between Ali and Jason. He’d always seemed so protective.

And then it hit Aria. Of course. Ali didn’t have problems with Jason; she’d simply made that up as a way to earn Jenna’s trust and get her to spill what was going on. She’d done the same thing with Aria, acting all empathetic and devastated when she and Aria had caught Bryon and Meredith making out in the Hollis parking lot. Once she knew Aria’s secret, Ali had held it over Aria’s head for months. And she’d done the same thing to her other friends. Only, why had Ali cared about something dorky Jenna Cavanaugh was hiding?

Fifteen minutes later, Aria reached the gallery. The art opening was being held in an old, lofty farmhouse in the woods. As she parked Ella’s Subaru on the gravel embankment and got out, she heard rustling. The sky was so black out here.

Something made a strange squawking noise off in the woods. And then…more rustling. Aria took a step back. “Hello?” she called quietly.

A pair of curious eyes stared back at her from behind a dilapidated wooden fence. For a moment, Aria’s heart stopped. But then she realized the eyes were surrounded by white fur. It was only an alpaca. As several more trotted to the edge of the fence, batting their enviably long eyelashes, Aria smiled and exhaled, figuring the farm must have a whole herd of them. After months of being stalked, it was hard to shake the paranoid feeling that someone was watching.

The inside of the farmhouse smelled like freshly baked bread, and a Billie Holliday song was playing softly over the stereo. A waitress carrying a large tray of Bellinis swept past. Aria eagerly grabbed a glass. After she downed the whole thing, she looked around the room. There were at least fifty paintings on the walls, with small plaques bearing the title, artist’s name, and price. Thin women with angularly cut dark hair loitered in clusters near the appetizers. A guy in dark-framed glasses talked anxiously to a buxom woman with a beet-red beehive. A wild-eyed man with frizzy gray hair sipped what looked like a glass of bourbon, whispering something to his Sienna-Miller-look-alike wife.

Aria’s heart thumped. These weren’t the normal, local collectors who came to Rosewood art openings—people like Spencer’s parents, who dressed in business suits and carried thousand-dollar Chanel purses. Aria was pretty sure this was the authentic art world, maybe even from New York City.

The exhibit featured three different artists, but the majority of the onlookers were gathered around abstract paintings by someone named Xavier Reeves. Aria walked up to one of his only pieces that didn’t have an enormous crowd of people around it and assumed her best art critic pose—hand on chin and frowning like she was deep in thought. The painting was of a large purple circle with a small, darker purple circle in the middle.

Interesting, Aria thought to herself. But honestly…it looked like a giant nipple.

“What do you think of the brushstrokes?” someone murmured behind her.

Aria turned around and found herself looking into the soft brown eyes of a tall guy in a ribbed black sweater and dark blue jeans. An excited jolt shot through her body, leaving her toes tingling in her scuffed satin flats. With his prominent cheekbones and super-short hair that stood up in a tuft at the front, he reminded Aria of Sondre, the hot musician she’d met in Norway last year. She and Sondre had spent hours in a fisherman’s pub in Bergen, drinking homemade whiskey and making up stories about the mounted trophy fish that hung on the pub’s wood-paneled walls.

Aria assessed the painting again. “The brushstrokes are very…powerful.”

“True,” the guy agreed. “And emotional.”

“Definitely.” Aria was thrilled to be having an authentic art critic conversation, especially with someone so cute. It was also nice to not be around Rosewood people and have to listen to the constant gossip about Ian’s upcoming trial. She scrambled for something else to say. “It makes me think of…”

The guy leaned closer, smirking. “Suckling, maybe?”

Aria’s eyes widened in surprise. So she wasn’t the only one who saw the resemblance. “It does look a little bit like that, doesn’t it?” she giggled. “But I think we’re supposed to take this seriously. The painting’s called The Impossibility of the Space Between. Xavier Reeves probably painted it to represent solitude. Or the proletarian struggle.”

“Shit.” The guy was so close to Aria, she could smell his cinnamon-gum-and-Bellini-scented breath. “I guess that means the one over there called Time Moves Handily isn’t a penis, huh?”

An older woman in multicolored cat-eye glasses looked over, startled. Aria covered her mouth to keep from laughing, noticing how there was a crescent moon–shaped freckle right by her new friend’s left ear. If only she hadn’t worn the same pilled green cowl-necked sweater she’d lived in the entire winter break. She should’ve wiped the fondue stain off the collar, too.

He polished off the rest of his drink. “So what’s your name?”

“Aria.” She chewed coyly on the swizzle stick that had come with her Bellini.

“It’s nice to meet you, Aria.” A group of people swept by, pushing Aria and her new friend closer together. As his hand bumped against her waist, heat rose to Aria’s cheeks. Had he touched her by accident…or on purpose?

He grabbed two more drinks and handed one to her. “So do you work around here, or are you still in school?”

Aria opened her mouth, contemplating. She wondered how old this guy was. He looked young enough to be a college student, and she could picture him living in one of the shabby-chic Victorian houses near Hollis College. But she’d made that same assumption about Ezra, too.

Before Aria could say a word, a woman in a fitted houndstooth suit inserted herself between them. With her spiky black hair, she bore more than a passing resemblance to Cruella De Vil from 101 Dalmatians. “Mind if I borrow him?” Cruella looped her arm around his elbow. He gave Cruella’s arm a little squeeze.

*** Copyright: Novel12.Com