“Mine too.” Hanna nodded.
“I guess we can look on the bright side,” Emily said, her voice high-pitched and jittery. “It can’t get any worse than this.”
As they followed the procession out to the gravel parking lot, Spencer stopped. Her old friends stopped too. Spencer wanted to say something to them—not about Ali or A or Jenna or Toby or the police, but instead, more than anything, she wanted to tell them that she’d missed them all these years.
But before she could say it, Aria’s phone rang.
“Hang on…,” Aria muttered, rooting around in her bag for her phone. “It’s probably my mom again.”
Then, Spencer’s Sidekick vibrated. And rang. And chirped. It wasn’t just her phone, but her friends’ phones too. The sudden, high-pitched noises sounded even louder against the sober, silent funeral procession. The other mourners shot them dirty looks. Aria held hers up to silence it; Emily struggled to operate her Nokia. Spencer wrenched her phone out of her clutch’s pocket.
Hanna read her screen. “I have one new message.”
“I do too,” Aria whispered.
“Same,” Emily echoed.
Spencer saw she did, too. Everyone hit READ. A moment of stunned silence passed.
“Oh my God,” Aria whispered.
“It’s from…,” Hanna squeaked.
Aria murmured, “Do you think she means…”
Spencer swallowed hard. In tandem, the girls read their texts out loud. Each said the exact same thing:
I’m still here, bitches. And I know everything. —A