This was what it had come to. Aria sitting in a booth at the diner near Ezra’s house in Old Hollis with all of her worldly goods—her laptop, her bike, her clothes, her books—around her. She had nowhere to go. Not Sean’s, not Ezra’s, not even her own family’s. The diner was the only place open right now, unless you counted the twenty-four-hour Taco Bell, which was a total stoner hangout.
She stared at her Treo, weighing her options. Finally, she dialed her home number. The phone rang six times before the answering machine picked up. “Thanks for calling the Montgomerys,” Ella’s cheery voice rang out. “We’re not home right now….”
Please. Where on earth would Ella be after midnight on a Saturday? “Mom, pick up,” Aria said into the machine after it beeped. “I know you’re there.” Still nothing. She sighed. “Listen. I need to come home tonight. I broke up with my boyfriend. I have nowhere else to stay. I’m sitting at a diner, homeless.”
She paused, waiting for Ella to answer. She didn’t. Aria could imagine her standing over the phone, listening. Or maybe she wasn’t at all. Maybe she’d heard Aria’s voice and walked back up the stairs to bed. “Mom, I’m in danger,” she pleaded. “I can’t explain how, exactly, but I’m…I’m afraid something’s going to happen to me.”
Beep. The answering machine tape cut her off. Aria let her phone clatter to the Formica tabletop. She could call back, but what would be the point? She could almost hear her mother’s voice: I can’t even look at you right now.
She lifted her head, considering something. Slowly, Aria picked up her Treo again and scrolled through her texts. Byron’s text with his number was still there. Taking a deep breath, she dialed. Byron’s sleepy voice answered.
“It’s Aria,” she said quietly.
“Aria?” Byron echoed. He sounded stunned. “It’s, like, two in the morning.”
“I know.” The diner’s jukebox switched records. The waitress married two ketchup bottles. The last remaining people besides Aria got up from their booth, waved good-bye to the waitress, and pushed through the front door. The diner’s bells jingled.
Byron broke the silence. “Well, it’s nice to hear from you.”
Aria curled her knees into her chest. She wanted to tell him that he’d messed up everything, making her keep his secret, but she felt too drained to fight. And also…part of her really missed Byron. Byron was her dad, the only dad she knew. He had warded off a snake that had slithered into Aria’s path during a hiking trip to the Grand Canyon. He’d gone down to talk to Aria’s fifth-grade art teacher, Mr. Cunningham, when he gave Aria an F on her self-portrait because she had drawn herself with green scales and a forked tongue. “Your teacher simply doesn’t understand postmodern expressionism,” Byron had said, grabbing his coat to go do battle. Byron used to pick her up, throw her over his shoulder, carry her to bed, and tuck her in. Aria missed that. She needed that. She wanted to tell him she was in danger. And she wanted him to say, “I’ll protect you.” He would, wouldn’t he?
But then she heard someone’s voice in the background. “Everything okay, Byron?”
Aria bristled. Meredith.
“Be there in a sec,” Byron called.
Aria fumed. A sec? That was all he planned to devote to this conversation? Byron’s voice returned to the phone. “Aria? So…what’s up?”
“Never mind,” Aria said icily. “Go back to bed, or whatever you were doing.”
“Aria—” Byron started.
“Seriously, go,” Aria said stiffly. “Forget I called.”
She hit END and put her head on the table. She tried to breathe in and out, thinking calm thoughts, like about the ocean, or riding a bicycle, or the mindlessness of knitting a scarf.
A few minutes later, she looked around the diner and realized she was the only person there. The ripped, faded counter stools were all vacant, the booths all cleaned off and empty. Two carafes of coffee sat on warmers behind the counter, and the cash register’s screen still glowed WELCOME, but the waitresses and cooks had all vanished. It was like one of those horror movies where somehow, all at once, the main character looks up to find everyone dead.
Ali’s killer is closer than you think.
Why didn’t A just tell her who the killer was? She was sick of playing Scooby-Doo. Aria thought of her dream again, of how that pale, ghostly Ali had stepped in front of the camera. “Look closer!” she’d screamed. “It’s right in front of you! It’s right there!” But what was right there? What had Aria missed?
The waitress with the mole trundled out from behind the counter and eyed Aria. “Want a piece of pie? The apple’s edible. On the house.”
“Th-that’s okay,” Aria stuttered.
The waitress leaned an ample hip against one of the counter’s pink stools. She had the kind of curly black hair that always looked wet. “You heard about the stalker?”
“Uh-huh,” Aria answered.
“You know what I heard?” the waitress said. “It’s a rich kid.” When Aria didn’t respond, she went back to washing an already clean table.
Aria blinked a few times. Look closer, Ali had said. She reached into her messenger bag and opened her laptop. It took a while to boot up, and then it took even longer for Aria to find the file folder that held her old videos. It had been so long since she’d searched for them. When she finally unearthed it, she realized that none of the video files were labeled very accurately. They were titled things like “Us Five, #1,” or “Ali and Me, #6,” and the dates were from when they’d last been viewed, not when they were made. She had no idea how to find the video that had been leaked to the press…besides going through all of them.
She clicked randomly on a video titled “Meow!” Aria, Ali, and the others were in Ali’s bedroom. They were struggling to dress up Ali’s Himalayan cat, Charlotte, in a hand-knit sweater, giggling as they stuffed her legs through the armholes.
She watched another movie called “Fight #5,” but it wasn’t what she thought it would be—she, Ali, and the others were making chocolate-chip cookies and got in a food fight, flinging cookie dough around Hanna’s kitchen. In another, they were playing foosball on the table in Spencer’s basement.
When Aria clicked on a new MPEG that was simply called “DQ,” she noticed something.
By the looks of Ali’s haircut and all their new warm-weather clothes, the video was from a month or so before Ali had gone missing. Aria had zoomed in on a shot of Hanna downing a monster-size Dairy Queen Blizzard in record time. In the background, she heard Ali start making retching noises. Hanna paused, and her face quickly drained of color. Ali giggled in the background. No one else seemed to notice.
A strange sensation slithered over Aria. She’d heard the rumors that Hanna had a bulimia problem. It seemed like something that A—and Ali—would know.
She clicked on another. They were flipping through the channels at Emily’s house. Ali stopped on a newscast of a Gay Pride parade that had taken place in Philly earlier that day. She turned pointedly to Emily and grinned. “That looks fun, doesn’t it, Em?” Emily turned red and pulled her sweatshirt hood around her head. None of the others batted an eye.
And another. This one was only sixteen seconds long. The five of them were lounging around Spencer’s pool. They all wore massive Gucci sunglasses—or, in Emily and Aria’s case, knockoffs. Ali sat up and pushed her glasses down her nose. “Hey, Aria,” she said abruptly. “What does your dad do if, like, he gets sexy students in his class?”
The clip ended. Aria remembered that day—it had been shortly after the time she and Ali had discovered Byron and Meredith kissing in Byron’s car, and Ali had begun dropping hints that she was going to tell the others.
Ali really did know all their secrets, and she’d been dangling them over their heads. It had all been right in front of them, and they hadn’t realized it. Ali had known everything. About all of them. And now, A did, too.
Except…what was Spencer’s secret?
Aria clicked on another video. Finally, she saw the familiar scene. There was Spencer, sitting on her couch with that crown on her head. “Want to read her texts?” She pointed at Ali’s LG phone, which was lying between the couch cushions.
Spencer opened Ali’s phone. “It’s locked.”
“Do you know her password?” Aria heard her own voice ask.
“Try her birthday,” Hanna whispered.
“Were you looking at my phone?” Ali screamed.
The phone clattered to the ground. Just then, Spencer’s older sister, Melissa, and her boyfriend, Ian, walked past the camera. Both of them smiled into the lens. “Hey, guys,” Melissa said. “What’s up?”
Spencer batted her eyes. Ali looked bored. The camera zoomed in on her face and panned down to the closed phone.
“Oh, this is the clip I’ve seen on the news,” said a voice behind Aria. The waitress was leaning against the counter, filing her nails with a Tweety Bird nail file.
Aria paused the clip and whirled around. “I’m sorry?”
The waitress blushed. “Oops. When it’s dead like this, I turn into my evil eavesdropping twin. I didn’t mean to look at your computer. That poor boy, though.”
Aria squinted at her. She noticed for the first time that the waitress’s name tag said ALISON. Spelled the same way and everything. “What poor boy?” she asked.
Alison pointed at the screen. “No one ever talks about the boyfriend. He must have been so heartbroken.”
Aria stared at the screen, baffled. She pointed at Ian’s frozen image. “That’s not her boyfriend. He’s with the girl who’s in the kitchen. She’s not on-screen.”
“No?” Alison shrugged and started wiping the counter again. “The way they’re sitting…I just assumed.”
Aria didn’t know what to say. She set the video back to the beginning, confused. She and her friends tried to hack Ali’s phone, Ali came back, Melissa and Ian smiled, cinematic shot of closed phone, finis.
She restarted the movie one more time, this time at half-speed. Spencer slowly readjusted her crown. Ali’s cell phone dragged across the screen. Ali came back, every expression languid and contorted. Instead of scurrying past, Melissa plodded. Suddenly, she noticed something in the corner of the screen: the edge of a small, slender hand. Ali’s hand. Then came another hand. It was larger and masculine. She slowed down the frame speed. Every so often, the big hand and the little hand bumped each other. Their pinkies intertwined.
Aria gasped.
The camera swung up. It showed Ian, who was looking at something beyond the camera. Off to the right was Spencer, looking longingly at Ian, not realizing he and Ali were touching. The whole thing happened in a blink. But now that she saw it, it was all so obvious.
Someone wanted something of Ali’s. Her killer is closer than you think.