Finally, Spencer pointed at the door. “Leave.”
“Fine.” Alison strode outside.
“Good!” But after a few seconds passed, Spencer followed her. The bluish evening air was still, and there weren’t any lights on in her family’s main house. It was quiet, too—even the crickets were quiet—and Spencer could hear herself breathing. “Wait a second!” she cried after a moment, slamming the door behind her. “Alison!”
But Alison was gone.
When she heard the door slam, Aria opened her eyes. “Ali?” she called. “Guys?” No answer.
She looked around. Hanna and Emily sat like lumps on the carpet, and the door was open. Aria moved out to the porch. No one was there. She tiptoed to the edge of Ali’s property. The woods spread out in front of her and everything was silent.
“Ali?” she whispered. Nothing. “Spencer?”
Inside, Hanna and Emily rubbed their eyes. “I just had the weirdest dream,” Emily said. “I mean, I guess it was a dream. It was really quick. Alison fell down this really deep well, and there were all these giant plants.”
“That was my dream too!” Hanna said.
“It was?” Emily asked.
Hanna nodded. “Well, kind of. There was a big plant in it. And I think I saw Alison too. It might’ve been her shadow—but it was definitely her.”
“Whoa,” Emily whispered. They stared at each other, their eyes wide.
“Guys?” Aria stepped back through the door. She looked very pale.
“Are you okay?” Emily asked.
“Where’s Alison?” Aria creased her forehead. “And Spencer?”
“We don’t know,” Hanna said.
Just then, Spencer burst back into the house. All the girls jumped. “What?” she asked.
“Where’s Ali?” Hanna asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” Spencer whispered. “I thought…I don’t know.”
The girls fell silent. All they could hear were the tree branches sliding across the windows. It sounded like someone scraping her long fingernails against a plate.
“I think I want to go home,” Emily said.
The next morning, they still hadn’t heard from Alison. The girls called one another to talk, a four-way call this time instead of five.
“Do you think she’s mad at us?” Hanna asked. “She seemed weird all night.”
“She’s probably at Katy’s,” Spencer said. Katy was one of Ali’s field hockey friends.
“Or maybe she’s with Tiffany—that girl from camp?” Aria offered.
“I’m sure she’s somewhere having fun,” Emily said quietly.
One by one, they got calls from Mrs. DiLaurentis, asking if they’d heard from Ali. At first, the girls all covered for her. It was the unwritten rule: They’d covered for Emily when she snuck in after her 11 P.M. weekend curfew; they’d fudged the truth for Spencer when she borrowed Melissa’s Ralph Lauren duffel coat and then accidentally left it on the seat of a SEPTA train; and so on. But as each one hung up with Mrs. DiLaurentis, a sour feeling swelled in her stomach. Something felt horribly wrong.
That afternoon, Mrs. DiLaurentis called again, this time in a panic. By that evening, the DiLaurentises had called the police, and the next morning there were cop cars and news vans camped out on the DiLaurentises’ normally pristine front lawn. It was a local news channel’s wet dream: a pretty rich girl, lost in one of the safest upper-class towns in the country.
Hanna called Emily after watching the first nightly Ali news report. “Did the police interview you today?”
“Yeah,” Emily whispered.
“Me too. You didn’t tell them about…” She paused. “About The Jenna Thing, did you?”
“No!” Emily gasped. “Why? Do you think they know something?”
“No…they couldn’t,” Hanna whispered after a second. “We’re the only ones who know. The four of us…and Alison.”
The police questioned the girls—along with practically everybody from Rosewood, from Ali’s second-grade gymnastics instructor to the guy who’d once sold her Marlboros at Wawa. It was the summer before eighth grade and the girls were supposed to be flirting with older boys at pool parties, eating corn on the cob in one another’s backyards, and shopping all day at the King James Mall. Instead they were crying alone in their canopied beds or staring blankly at their photo-covered walls. Spencer went on a room-cleaning binge, reviewing what her fight with Ali had really been about, and thinking of things she knew about Ali that none of the others did. Hanna spent hours on her bedroom floor, hiding emptied Cheetos bags under her mattress. Emily couldn’t stop obsessing over a letter she’d sent to Ali before she disappeared. Had Ali ever gotten it? Aria sat at her desk with Pigtunia. Slowly, the girls began calling one another less frequently. The same thoughts haunted all four of them, but there wasn’t anything left to say to one another.
The summer turned into the school year, which turned into the next summer. Still no Ali. The police continued to search—but quietly. The media lost interest, heading off to obsess over a Center City triple homicide. Even the DiLaurentises moved out of Rosewood almost two and a half years after Alison disappeared. As for Spencer, Aria, Emily, and Hanna, something shifted in them, too. Now if they passed Ali’s old street and glanced at her house, they didn’t go into insta-cry mode. Instead, they started to feel something else.
Relief.