The jurors reassembled, the lawyers took their places, and the judge appeared at his bench. Her gaze wandered to the rest of the crowd—her parents, Aria’s parents, a bunch of people from the press. Then she looked back at the jurors in their box. Suddenly, one of them met her gaze. A tiny smile appeared on the woman’s face. Hanna felt her jaw drop. That had to be a good sign, right? Had the jury decided they weren’t guilty?
The judge’s booming voice rang out through the room, and all eyes turned to him. “Has the jury reached a verdict?” he asked.
A pasty-colored middle-aged guy who served as the jury’s representative clutched a folded piece of paper tightly. “We have, your honor.”
It seemed to take ages for the bailiff to walk the length from the jury box to the judge’s bench. Hanna thought she might faint as the judge took the sheet of paper from him and studied it. Spencer’s nails dug into Hanna’s palm. Aria trembled next to her. For a few seconds, it didn’t seem like a single person in the courtroom breathed.
The judge coughed, then lowered his glasses farther down his nose. He looked at the jury foreman and asked, “How do you find?”
The man replied, “We the jury find Hanna Marin, Spencer Hastings, and Aria Montgomery guilty of the murder of Alison DiLaurentis.”
Hanna’s mouth fell open. Someone near her screamed. Spencer’s hand slipped from hers. Hanna glanced blindly around the courtroom, her gaze first landing on Mr. DiLaurentis, who was in his regular seat in the back. There was a small, tense smile on his face. Then Hanna found Mike in the crowd. His skin was ashen. He was blinking hard, maybe to hold back tears. Hanna held his gaze as long as she could, but she couldn’t offer a brave smile, and neither could he. That was when she realized. Mike hadn’t really thought this was ever going to happen.
Maybe she hadn’t, either. But the reality sank in, and made her dizzy: She was never going to see him again, except in a prison visitor’s room. She was never going to see anyone again.
The judge said more after that—something about the girls serving their life sentences immediately, as they were all flight risks, and for that sentence to be served at the Keystone State Correctional Facility, but Hanna barely registered it. Her vision began to dim. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. It rang in her head like a gong. Life in prison. Forever.
And then everything went dark.
26
PRISON BLUES
Aria usually had a cast-iron stomach when it came to motion sickness, but something about the way the bald, burly, khaki-jacketed prison worker drove the van to the Keystone State Correctional Facility sent her stomach tumbling all the way until they rolled through the prison gates. Maybe it was his jerky driving, or maybe it was the way he smelled like jerky—beef jerky, the scent of it literally leaking from his pores.
The car came to a halt, throwing Aria, Spencer, and Hanna forward roughly against their seat belts. The worker glared at them, got out, and yanked open the sliding back door to the van. “End of the line,” he ordered, then chuckled. “Welcome to your new home, bitches.”
Aria shuffled out of the van as best she could with the shackles around her ankles. Hanna and Spencer followed, neither of them saying a word. They hadn’t spoken since the verdict had been passed down, actually. Cried into one another’s shoulders, yes. Stared at one another in horror, definitely. But what was there really to say?
Guilty. It was still too horrible to believe. Anything Rubens had said, any logic about what might have happened, any assurance that they’d appeal as soon as they could, went in one of Aria’s ears and out the other. A panel of people had found them guilty. It made her feel lower than low. People actually thought she was a murderer. They’d listened to that ridiculous case and took Ali’s side. She couldn’t believe it.
The worker shoved them toward an open metal door. Another guard, a portly woman with short brown hair and a jowly face, waited for them, a metal basket in her outstretched hands. Aria glanced at the name on her badge. BURROUGHS. She’d read somewhere that people went only by last names in prison—first names were too personal. Or maybe they gave you too much of an identity. So in here, Aria would no longer be Aria, but simply Montgomery. No longer an individual, but a number. No longer an artist, but a killer.
“Turn over all your belongings,” Burroughs ordered Spencer, who was first in line. “Any jewelry, anything you got in your pockets, give it here.”
Spencer took off a pair of earrings and dropped them into the basket. Aria had nothing to fork over—she’d removed the Cartier bracelet Noel had given her earlier and handed it to Ella for safekeeping. She’d told her to give it back to the Kahn family, though even saying that had choked her up. She wished now that she hadn’t chickened out of talking to him at Hanna and Mike’s wedding. He’d just looked so . . . pissed. And he hadn’t come to her trial. Then again, his own trial was probably soon. She wondered what he thought when he heard she’d been found guilty. Maybe he didn’t care at all.
Suddenly Burroughs had pushed her up against the wall, Aria’s chin banging against the cinder blocks. She felt Burroughs’s hands move roughly up and down her body, prodding her armpits, cupping the space beneath her boobs, and doing a full sweep between her legs. Burroughs stood back and looked at the three of them with narrowed eyes. “Before we go inside, I don’t want any funny business,” she growled. “No talking. No looking at the other inmates. No complaining. You’ll do what you’re told, and you won’t make waves.”