Unbelievable pll-4

by Sara Shepard

  Aria fumbled in the blue-black darkness. Someone grabbed her hand, feeling her wrist bones and the mounds in her palm.

  “What sort of face do you see when you touch this person?” Sabrina called.

  Aria shut her eyes, trying to think. The hand was small and a bit cold and dry. A face began to form in her mind. First the pronounced cheekbones, then the bright blue eyes. Long, blond hair, pink, bow-shaped lips.

  Aria tightened her stomach. She was thinking of Ali.

  “Turn away from your partner now,” Sabrina instructed. “Get your sketch pads out, and I’m going to turn on the lights. Do not look at your partners. I want you to sketch exactly what you saw in your brain, and we’ll see how close you are to the real thing.”

  The bright overhead lights hurt Aria’s eyes as she shakily opened her sketch pad. She tentatively brushed the charcoal across her paper, but as hard as she tried, she couldn’t stop from drawing Ali’s face. When she stepped back, she felt a huge lump in her throat. There was a whisper of a smile across Ali’s lips and a devious sparkle in her eye.

  “Very nice,” said Sabrina—who looked exactly like her voice, with long, knotty brown hair; big boobs; a fleshy stomach; and puny, birdlike legs. She moved on to Aria’s partner. “That’s beautiful,” she murmured. Aria felt a pinch of annoyance. Why wasn’t her drawing beautiful? Did someone draw better than she did? Impossible.

  “Time’s up,” Sabrina called. “Turn around and show your partners the results.”

  Aria slowly turned, her eyes greedily assessing her partner’s allegedly beautiful sketch. And actually…it was beautiful. The drawing looked nothing like Aria, but it still was a much better rendering of a person than Aria could have done. Aria’s eyes floated up her partner’s body. The girl wore a fitted pink Nanette Lepore top. Her hair was dark and wild, spilling down her shoulders. She had creamy, blemish-free skin. Then, Aria saw the familiar turned-up button nose. And the giant Gucci sunglasses. There was a sleeping dog in a blue canvas vest at the girl’s feet. Aria’s entire body turned to ice.

  “I can’t see what you drew of me,” her partner said in a soft, sweet voice. She pointed to her Seeing Eye dog in explanation. “But I’m sure it’s great.”

  Aria’s tongue felt leaden in her mouth. Her partner was Jenna Cavanaugh.

  11 WELCOME BACK…SORT OF

  After what seemed like days of spinning through the stars, Hanna suddenly found herself thrust into the light again. Once more, she was sitting on Ali’s back porch. Once more, she could feel herself busting out of her American Apparel T-shirt and Seven jeans.

  “We get to have our sleepover in Melissa’s barn!” Spencer was saying.

  “Nice.” Ali grinned. Hanna recoiled. Maybe she was stuck revisiting this day over and over again, sort of like that guy in that old movie Groundhog Day. Maybe Hanna would have to keep reliving this one day until she got it right and convinced Ali that she was in grave danger. But…the last time Hanna had been in this memory, Ali had loomed close by, telling Hanna that she was okay. But she wasn’t okay. Nothing was okay.

  “Ali,” Hanna urged. “What do you mean, you’re okay?”

  Ali wasn’t paying attention. She watched Melissa as she strode through the Hastingses’ bordering yard, her graduation gown slung over her arm. “Hey, Melissa!” Ali cooed. “Excited to go to Prague?”

  “Who cares about her?” Hanna shouted. “Answer my question!”

  “Is Hanna…talking?” a far-off voice gasped. Hanna cocked her head. That didn’t sound like any of her old friends.

  Across the yard, Melissa put her hand on her hip. “Of course I’m excited.”

  “Is Ian going?” Ali asked.

  Hanna grabbed the sides of Ali’s face. “Ian doesn’t matter,” she said forcefully. “Just listen to me, Ali!”

  “Who’s Ian?” The far-off voice sounded like it was coming from the other end of a very long tunnel. Mona Vanderwaal’s voice. Hanna looked around Ali’s backyard, but didn’t see Mona anywhere.

  Ali turned to Hanna, heaving an exasperated sigh. “Give it a rest, Hanna.”

  “But you’re in danger,” Hanna sputtered.

  “Things aren’t always what they seem,” Ali whispered.

  “What do you mean?” Hanna urged desperately. When she reached out for Ali, her hand went right through Ali’s arm, like Ali was just an image projected onto a screen.

  “What does who mean?” Mona’s voice called.

  Hanna’s eyes popped open. A bright, painful light practically blinded her. She was lying on her back on an uncomfortable mattress. Several figures stood around her—Mona, Lucas Beattie, her mother, and her father.

  Her father? Hanna tried to frown, but her face muscles were in excruciating pain.

  “Hanna.” Mona’s chin wobbled. “Oh my God. You’re…awake.”

  “Are you okay, honey?” her mother asked. “Can you talk?”

  Hanna glanced down at her arms. At least they were thin and not ham hocks. Then, she saw the IV tube sticking out of the crook in her elbow and the clunky cast on her arm. “What’s going on?” she croaked, looking around. The scene in front of her eyes seemed staged. Where she’d just been—on Ali’s back porch, with her old best friends—seemed far more real. “Where’s Ali?” she asked.

  Hanna’s parents exchanged uneasy looks. “Ali’s dead,” Hanna’s mother said quietly.

  “Go easy on her.” A white-haired, hawk-nosed man in a white coat swept around a curtain to the foot of Hanna’s bed. “Hanna? My name’s Dr. Geist. How do you feel?”

  “Where the hell am I?” Hanna demanded, her voice rising with panic.

  Hanna’s father took her hand. “You had an accident. We were really worried.”

  Hanna looked fitfully at the faces around her, then at the various contraptions that fed into different parts of her body. In addition to the IV drip, there was a machine that measured her heartbeat and a tube that sent oxygen into her nose. Her body felt hot, then cold, and her skin prickled with fear and confusion. “Accident?” she whispered.

  “A car hit you,” Hanna’s mother said. “At Rosewood Day. Can you remember?”

  Her hospital sheets felt sticky, like someone had drizzled nacho cheese all over them. Hanna searched her memory, but nothing about an accident was there. The last thing she remembered, before sitting in Ali’s backyard, was receiving the champagne-colored Zac Posen dress for Mona’s birthday party. That had been Friday night, the day before Mona’s celebration. Hanna turned to Mona, who looked both distraught and relieved. Her eyes had huge, kind of ugly purple circles under them, too, as if she hadn’t slept in days. “I didn’t miss your party, did I?”

  Lucas made a sniffing noise. Mona’s shoulders tensed. “No…”

  “The accident happened afterward,” Lucas said. “You don’t remember?”

  Hanna tried to pull the oxygen tube out of her nose—no one looked attractive with something dangling from a nostril—and found that it had been taped down. She closed her eyes and grappled for something, anything, to explain all this. But the only thing she saw was Ali’s face looming over her and whispering something before dissipating into black nothingness.

  “No,” Hanna whispered. “I don’t remember any of that at all.”

  12 ON THE LAM

  Late Monday evening, Emily sat on a faded blue bar stool at the counter of the M&J diner across from the Greyhound station in Akron, Ohio. She hadn’t eaten anything all day and contemplated ordering a piece of nasty-looking cherry pie to go with her metallic-tasting coffee. Next to her, an old man slowly slurped a spoonful of tapioca pudding, and a bowling pin–shaped man and his knitting needle–shaped friend were shoveling down greasy burgers and fries. The jukebox was playing some twangy country song, and the hostess leaned heavily against the register, polishing dust off the Ohio-shaped magnets that were on sale for ninety-nine cents.

  “Where you headed?” a voice asked.

  Emily looked into the eyes of the diner’s fry
cook, a sturdy man who looked like he did a lot of bow hunting when he wasn’t making grilled cheese. Emily searched for a name tag, but he wasn’t wearing one. His red ball cap had a big, singular letter A stitched in the center. She licked her lips, shivering a little. “How do you know I’m headed somewhere?”

  He gave her a knowing look. “You’re not from here. And Greyhound’s across the street. And you have a big duffel bag. Clever, aren’t I?”

  Emily sighed, staring into her cup of coffee. It had taken her less than twenty minutes to power-walk the mile from Helene’s to the mini mart down the road, even with her heavy duffel in tow. Once there, she’d found a ride to the bus station, and had bought a ticket for the first bus out of Iowa. Unfortunately it had been going to Akron, a place where Emily knew absolutely no one. Worse, the bus smelled like someone had bad gas, and the guy sitting next to her had his iPod cranked up to maximum volume while he sang along to Fall Out Boy, a band she detested. Then, weirdly, when the bus pulled into the Akron station, Emily had discovered a crab scuttling around under her seat. A crab, even though they were nowhere near an ocean. When she’d stumbled into the terminal and noticed that the big departures board said there was a 10 P.M. bus to Philadelphia, an ache had welled up inside her. She’d never missed Pennsylvania as much as she did now.

  Emily shut her eyes, finding it hard to believe that she was really, truly running away. There were many times she’d imagined running away before—Ali used to say she’d go with her. Hawaii was one of their top five choices. So was Paris. Ali said they could assume different identities. When Emily protested, saying that sounded difficult, Ali shrugged and said, “Nah. Becoming someone else is probably really easy.” Wherever they chose, they promised to spend tons of uninterrupted time together, and Emily had always secretly hoped that maybe, just maybe, Ali would have realized she loved Emily as much as Emily loved her. But in the end, Emily always felt bad and said, “Ali, you have no reason to run away. Your life is perfect here.” And Ali would shrug in response, saying Emily was right, her life was pretty perfect.

  Until someone killed her.

  The fry cook turned up the volume on the tiny TV sitting next to the eight-slice toaster and an open package of Wonder Bread. When Emily looked up, she saw a CNN reporter standing in front of the familiar Rosewood Memorial Hospital. Emily knew it well—she passed it every morning on her drive to Rosewood Day.

  “We have reports that Hanna Marin, seventeen-year-old resident of Rosewood and friend to Alison DiLaurentis, the girl whose body mysteriously turned up in her old backyard about a month ago, has just awakened from the coma she’d been in since Saturday night’s tragic accident,” the reporter said into her microphone.

  Emily’s coffee cup clattered against her saucer. Coma? Hanna’s parents swam onto the screen, saying that, yes, Hanna was awake and seemed okay. There were no leads as to who had hit Hanna, or why.

  Emily covered her mouth with her hand, which smelled like the fake-leather Greyhound bus seat. She whipped her Nokia out of her jean jacket pocket and turned it on. She’d been trying to conserve the battery because she’d accidentally left her charger behind in Iowa. Her fingers shook as she dialed Aria’s number. It went to voice mail. “Aria, it’s Emily,” she said after the beep. “I just found out about Hanna, and…”

  She trailed off, her eyes returning to the screen. There, in the upper right-hand corner, was her own face, staring back at her from the photo she’d had taken for last year’s yearbook. “In other Rosewood news, another one of Ms. DiLaurentis’s friends, Emily Fields, has gone missing,” the anchor said. “She was visiting relatives in Iowa this week, but vanished from the property this morning.”

  The fry cook turned from flipping a grilled cheese and glanced at the screen. A look of disbelief crossed his face. He looked at Emily, then back at the screen again. His metal spatula fell to the floor with a hollow clatter.

  Emily hit END without finishing her message to Aria. On the TV screen, her parents were standing in front of Emily’s blue-shingled house. Her father wore his best plaid polo shirt, and her mom had a cashmere sweater cardigan draped over her shoulders. Carolyn stood off to the side, holding Emily’s swim team portrait for the camera. Emily was too stunned to be embarrassed that a picture of her in a high-cut Speedo tank suit was on national television.

  “We’re very worried,” Emily’s mother said. “We want Emily to know that we love her and just want her to come home.”

  Tears bloomed at the corners of Emily’s eyes. Words couldn’t describe what it felt like to hear her mother say those three little words: we love her. She slid off the stool, pushing her arms into her jacket sleeves.

  The word PHILADELPHIA was plastered on top of a red, blue, and silver Greyhound bus across the street. The big 7-Up clock over the diner’s counter said 9:53. Please don’t let the 10 P.M. bus be sold out, Emily prayed.

  She glanced at the scribble-covered bill next to her coffee. “I’ll be back,” she said to the cook, grabbing her bags. “I just have to get a bus ticket.”

  The fry cook still looked like a tornado had picked him up and dropped him onto a different planet. “Don’t worry about it,” he said faintly. “Coffee’s on the house.”

  “Thanks!” The sleigh bells on the diner’s door jingled together as Emily left. She ran across the empty highway and skidded into the bus station, thanking the various forces of the universe that had prevented a line from forming at the ticket window. Finally, she had a destination: home.

  13

  ONLY LOSERS GET HIT BY CARS

  Tuesday morning, when she should have been strolling into her Pilates II class at Body Tonic gym, Hanna was instead lying flat on her back as two fat female nurses cleaned her off with a sponge. After they left, her physician, Dr. Geist, strode into the room and flipped on the light.

  “Turn it off!” Hanna demanded sharply, quickly covering her face.

  Dr. Geist left it on. Hanna had put in a request for a different doctor—if she was spending all this time here, couldn’t she at least have an M.D. who was a little bit hotter?—but it seemed like nobody in this hospital was listening.

  Hanna slid halfway under the covers and peeked into her Chanel compact. Yep, her monster face was still there, complete with the stitches on her chin, the two black eyes, the fat, purplish bottom lip, and the enormous bruises on her collarbone—it was going to be ages before she could wear low-cut tops again. She sighed and snapped the compact closed. She couldn’t wait to go to Bill Beach to fix all the damage.

  Dr. Geist inspected Hanna’s vital signs on a computer that looked like it had been built in the sixties. “You’re recovering very well. Now that the swelling’s gone down, we don’t see any residual brain injury. Your internal organs look fairly good. It’s a miracle.”

  “Ha,” Hanna grumbled.

  “It is a miracle,” Hanna’s father butted in, walking in to stand behind Dr. Geist. “We were sick with worry, Hanna. It makes me sick that someone did this to you. And that they’re still out there.”

  Hanna sneaked a peek at him. Her dad wore a charcoal gray suit and sleek black shiny loafers. In the twelve hours since she’d awakened, he’d been incredibly patient, succumbing to Hanna’s every whim…and Hanna had lots of whims. First, she demanded that they move her into her own private room—the last thing she needed was to hear the old lady on the other side of the curtain in intensive care talk about her bowel habits and imminent hip replacement. Next, Hanna had made her dad get her a portable DVD player and some DVDs from the nearby Target. The hospital rent-a-TVs only got six lame-ass network channels. She’d begged her dad to make the nurses give her more painkillers, and she’d deemed the mattress on the hospital bed completely uncomfortable, forcing him to go out to the Tempur-Pedic store an hour ago to get her a space-age foam topper. From the looks of the mammoth Tempur-Pedic plastic bag he was holding, it appeared that his trip had been successful.

  Dr. Geist dropped Hanna’s clipboard back into the slo
t at the foot of her bed. “We should be able to let you out in a few more days. Any questions?”

  “Yes,” Hanna said, her voice still croaky from the ventilator they’d had her on since her accident. She pointed to the IV in her arm. “How many calories is this thing giving me?” By the way her hip bones felt, it seemed as if she’d lost weight while being in the hospital—bonus!—but she just wanted to make sure.

  Dr. Geist looked at her crazily, probably wishing he could switch patients too. “It’s antibiotics and stuff to hydrate you,” Hanna’s father quickly interjected. He patted Hanna’s arm. “It’s all going to make you feel much better.” As he and her dad left the room, Dr. Geist snapped off the light again.

  Hanna glowered for a moment at the empty doorway, then fell back onto her bed. The only thing that could make her feel better right now was a six-hour massage by some hot, shirtless Italian male model. And, oh yeah, a brand-new face.

  She was completely weirded out that this had happened to her. She kept wondering if, after falling asleep again, she’d wake up in her own bed with its six-hundred thread-count pima cotton sheets, beautiful as before, ready for a day of shopping with Mona. Who gets hit by a car? She wasn’t even in the hospital for something cool, like a high-stakes kidnapping or Petra Nemcova’s tsunami tragedy.

  But something that scared her far more—and something that she didn’t want to think about—was that the whole night was a huge, gaping hole in Hanna’s memory. She couldn’t even remember Mona’s party.

  Just then, two figures in familiar blue blazers appeared at the door. When they saw Hanna was awake and decent, Aria and Spencer rushed in quickly, their faces pinched with worry. “We tried to see you last night,” Spencer said, “but the nurses wouldn’t let us in.”