by Sara Shepard
She climbed out of the tub, wrapped herself in an orange towel, and handed three towels to her old friends. Everyone was silent as they padded back toward the kitchen. Hanna and Aria slipped inside, but as Emily passed by, Spencer caught her arm. “Are you okay?”
Emily nodded faintly, her eyes trained on the wood slats on the deck. “I’m so sorry again,” she sighed. “It was wrong of me to tell Kelsey what you did. I never should have trusted her over you.”
“I should have never said what I said to you, either. I don’t know what happened to me.”
“Maybe I deserved it,” Emily said sadly.
“You didn’t.” Poor Emily, always thinking she deserved the worst. Spencer leaned into her. “We’ve been terrible to each other ever since Jamaica. We should know by now that we should stick together, not fight.”
“I know.” A tiny smile wobbled across Emily’s lips. Then, awkwardly, she stepped forward and circled her arms around Spencer’s shoulders. Spencer hugged back, feeling tears come to her eyes. In moments, Aria and Hanna returned from inside and looked at them. Spencer wasn’t sure if they’d heard the conversation or not, but both girls stepped forward and wrapped their arms around Spencer and Emily, too, becoming a four-girl sandwich, just like they’d hugged in sixth and seventh grade. They were one girl short, but Spencer didn’t miss her at all.
An hour later, after Spencer’s friends had gone home, she made the call setting up the appointment to visit Kelsey the following day. Then she sat on the living room couch, absently stroking Beatrice’s matted fur. For once, the house was dead quiet. Amelia’s orchestra group wasn’t rehearsing today. Spencer wondered what the songs would sound like with one violinist missing.
When the home phone rang, Spencer started so hugely her whole body twitched. Princeton Admissions Board, the Caller ID said. She stared at it for a moment, afraid to pick it up. This was it. The big decision of the Spencers had been made.
“Miss Hastings?” said a brisk voice when Spencer answered. “We haven’t met, but my name is Georgia Price. I’m on the admissions board at Princeton University.”
“Uh huh.” Spencer’s hands were shaking so badly she could barely hold the phone. She could just imagine the next sentence. We regret to inform you, but Spencer F. was a much stronger candidate. . . .
“I was wondering if you were still planning on joining us for the early admission mixer next week,” Georgia’s chipper voice broke through.
Spencer frowned. “Pardon?”
Georgia repeated herself. Spencer laughed confusedly. “I-I thought you were still reviewing my application.”
There was the sound of papers flipping. “Uh . . . no. I don’t think so. It says here we accepted you six weeks ago. Congratulations again. This was a tough admissions year.”
“What about the other Spencer Hastings?” Spencer said. “The boy with my same name who also applied? I got a letter that some of the admissions committee reviewed our applications thinking we were the same person, and . . .”
“You got a letter from us?” Georgia sounded appalled. “Miss Hastings, we would never do something like that. Your application is reviewed by five different rounds of readers. Discussed in committees. Approved by the dean himself. I assure you that we don’t make mistakes with whom we admit. We are very, very careful.”
Spencer stared at her reflection in the large mirror in the hall. Her hair was wild around her face. There was a wrinkle in the middle of her forehead she always got when she was utterly confused.
Georgia told Spencer the details about the mixer, then hung up. Afterward, Spencer sat back on the couch, blinking hard. What the hell had just happened?
And then, it came to her. She rose and padded across the hall to her dad’s old office, which still contained a bunch of computer and office equipment. It took her five seconds to log onto the Internet, and another five to call up Facebook. With shaking hands, she typed in Spencer F.’s name into the search window. Several Spencer Hastings profiles appeared, but none were for the golden boy from Darien, Connecticut, Spencer had stalked days before.
She pictured the letter from Princeton in her hands. Come to think of it, the seal had looked crooked. And it was suspicious that Kelsey had known Spencer had gotten into Princeton . . .
Of course. Kelsey had written the letter. She’d created Spencer F.’s profile, too, to mess with her head. Spencer F. didn’t exist. It was all a mind game.
Spencer shut her eyes, embarrassed that she’d been so naïve. “Good one, Kelsey,” she said into the silent room. She had to hand it to her old friend: It was classic A, through and through.
Chapter 37
FACE-TO-FACE WITH THE ENEMY
Dread filled Hanna as she walked into the sleek lobby of the Preserve at Addison-Stevens Mental Wellness and Rehab facility on Monday after school. All of a sudden, she was reliving the events of last year: how her dad had shoved her through the revolving doors, certain she needed help for her panic attacks. How Mike had walked with her through the lobby, saying, “Well, this doesn’t look so bad!” Yeah, the lobby wasn’t bad at all. It was the rest of the place that was a nightmare.
Next to her, Aria squinted at a tall potted cactus in the corner. Someone had affixed two eyes, a nose, and a mouth to its long green body. “Where have I seen that before?”
Spencer glanced at it and shook her head. Hanna shrugged. So did Emily, who had dressed up for the occasion in a rumpled gray skirt and a slightly too-small white sweater. She turned and nervously watched a worried-looking couple with a thin, hollow-eyed boy lean their elbows on the check-in desk. “It’s so weird to think Ali was here,” she whispered.
“Seriously,” Hanna said. Ali’s family had left her in here for years, too, barely even checking on her. They’d assumed she was the crazy twin, ignoring her pleas that she really was the Real Ali. That was probably enough to make anyone lose her mind.
Spencer approached the check-in desk and told an attendant that they were here to visit Kelsey Pierce. “Right this way,” the attendant said briskly, giving the girls a circumspect look. “Why do I know you?”
Everyone exchanged a glance. Because a patient here tried to kill us, Hanna wanted to say. Really, it was a wonder the Preserve hadn’t been shut down by a medical review board—they’d let the Real Ali out, thinking she was well, and she’d gone on to murder a bunch of innocent people.
They entered an airy room with round tables. There was a water dispenser in the corner, a coffee machine on the shelf. There were upbeat, self-esteem-affirming sayings written on yellow oaktag on the walls: YOU ARE UNIQUE! REACH FOR THE STARS! Gag.
Hanna recognized the black-and-white photo of the spiral staircase; apparently, some Preserve alum had taken it once he’d recovered. The room had a view to the facility hallway, and she couldn’t help but glance at some of the patients walking past, half expecting to recognize some of them. Like Alexis, who never ate anything. Or Tara, who had those huge boobs. Or Iris, who Hanna had thought was A—and who’d also roomed with Real Ali. But even the nurses looked unfamiliar. Betsy, the nurse who administered the meds, was gone. And there was no sign of Dr. Felicia, who’d led the torturous group therapy sessions.
After a moment, the door from the hallway creaked open, and a stout nurse with a hairy mole on her chin led a frail-looking girl in pink hospital pajamas into the room. The girl had bright red hair and small, even features, but it still took Hanna a beat to realize that this was the same person she had briefly met at Noel’s party last year . . . or the crazed figure she’d seen on the cliff two nights ago. There were circles under Kelsey’s eyes. Her hair was matted. Her shoulders slumped, and her arms hung heavy.
Everyone stiffened as Kelsey pulled out a chair and quietly sat down. She looked at them blankly, her face betraying nothing. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Hello,” Spencer answered. She gestured at Hanna and the others. “You remember everyone, right? This is Hanna and Aria . . . and you know Emily.”
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br /> “Uh huh,” Kelsey said morosely.
There was a long, punishing silence. Hanna stared at her hands in her lap, suddenly desperate to busy them with a nail file or a cigarette. She and her friends hadn’t exactly discussed what they were going to say to Kelsey once they got here. They’d never been in this situation before: face-to-face with A, able to ask her why she was torturing them.
Finally, Kelsey sighed. “So my therapist says I’m supposed to apologize.”
Hanna snuck a peek at Aria. Apologize?
“I shouldn’t have dragged you out to that quarry.” Kelsey looked at Emily. “My therapist said I put you in danger.”
Emily’s throat bobbed as she swallowed. Wasn’t that the point? Hanna wanted to say.
“And I should thank you, too.” Kelsey stared at her fingernails, sounding upset. “For saving my life on Saturday. So . . . gracias.”
Emily blinked. “Uh, you’re welcome?”
Kelsey pushed a letter into Emily’s palm. “This is for you. I wrote it this morning, and it explains . . . everything. We don’t have access to phones or computers here, so our shrinks are all about us writing letters to get our feelings out.” She rolled her eyes.
“Thanks,” Emily said, staring at the folded piece of paper.
Kelsey shrugged. “I’m glad you pulled me back from the cliff, but you shouldn’t have called an ambulance.”
Emily’s mouth dropped open. “You were convulsing! What were we supposed to do?”
“Leave me. I would’ve come out of it okay. It’s happened before.” Kelsey started to tear a random napkin that was sitting on the table into pieces. Redness crept into her neck. “The cops had zero tolerance because of my record. This was strike three, so I’m automatically back in rehab. And after rehab, more juvie.”
Emily shook her head slightly. “I had no idea.”
“None of us did,” Spencer added.
Kelsey didn’t say anything, but she looked like she didn’t believe them.
Everyone shifted uncomfortably. Then, Spencer leaned forward. “Listen. I’m sorry, you know. About . . . what happened this summer. What I did at the police station.”
Kelsey stared down at the table, still not saying a word.
“And I’m sorry, too,” Hanna added. There was no way she could bottle it up any longer. “For putting those pills in your room. And for calling the cops and telling on you.”
Kelsey let out a choppy laugh. “I already had a bunch of pills in my room, but that was pretty shitty of you to call the cops. I don’t even know you.”
Hanna blinked hard. So . . . Kelsey deserved to go to jail after all?
Spencer looked equally blindsided. “Why didn’t you tell me you had pills that night? We wouldn’t have gone on that crazy drug deal. We wouldn’t have gotten in trouble!”
A sneaky smile appeared on Kelsey’s lips. “That was my secret stash, Spencer. My ticket to an Ivy League school—not yours. I never thought you’d have the balls to go to North Philly and buy drugs from someone. I mean, look at you.” She narrowed her eyes at Spencer’s blousy Elizabeth and James tunic and J Brand denim leggings, which Hanna had seen on a table at Otter for almost three hundred dollars.
Aria leaned forward. “Why did you do this to us?”
“Do what?” Kelsey asked dumbly, raising her heavy-lidded eyes to the group.
Torture us as A! Hanna wanted to scream.
“This is because of Tabitha, right?” Aria pressed.
“Who’s Tabitha?” Kelsey sounded bored.
“You know,” Spencer urged. “You know everything!”
Kelsey stared at them for a beat, then squeezed her eyes shut. “My head really hurts. They have me on so many meds here.” She pushed back her chair and stood. “Frankly, this is kind of weird. I mean, thanks for apologizing and whatever. And . . . here.” She reached into the pocket of her pajama pants and pulled out a folded piece of lined paper. “I wrote this for you, too, Spencer.”
Kelsey pushed the letter into Spencer’s hands. “Have a nice life, guys.” And then she shuffled out of the room, her pajama bottoms dragging on the ground. A nurse stopped her outside the guest area and led her into a small office with transparent windows. The girls watched as she slumped onto a blue plastic chair. The nurse said something to her, and Kelsey nodded limply, her face expressionless.
Hanna leaned across the table. “What the hell was that?”
“She seemed so . . . different.” Emily stared at Kelsey across the hall. “So hopeless.”
Spencer twisted her silver ring around her finger. “Why did she say she didn’t know Tabitha? She has to know her. She had those pictures on her phone. She sent me that text!”
“She was lying,” Aria said matter-of-factly. “She had to be.”
Then Spencer unfolded the letter Kelsey had given her and laid it flat on the table. Everyone hitched forward in their seats to read it. A single paragraph was written in leaky black pen.
Dear Spencer,
Apparently one of the steps to getting better in rehab is letting go of bad blood between people, so I guess I’ll start with you. I’m not mad at you anymore. I mean, I was pissed at you for months after I went to juvie, wondering if you had something to do with getting me in trouble, but I never knew for sure until Emily told me on Friday. So you saved yourself; good for you. I don’t really blame you, I guess. When I texted you on Friday about how we needed to talk, I thought I could keep my cool, but then I saw you and I got so angry. Then again, you were angry, too. But I even forgive you for hurting me. I don’t know what your problem is, but you seriously need help.
Good luck with everything. Think of me when you’re at Princeton—yeah, right.
Kelsey
“Whoa,” Hanna said when she finished.
“I don’t understand.” Spencer looked at Emily. “She didn’t know what I did until you told her? If she’s A, how is that possible?”
“She did seem surprised when I told her at the cast party,” Emily murmured. “But then, at the quarry, I figured she was lying—that she knew all along.”
Hanna pointed to Emily’s letter. “What does yours say?”
Emily looked nervously at each of them, almost as if she’d rather read the missive in private, but then she shrugged and unfolded the letter.
Dear Emily,
I suppose I have some explaining to do. I totally screwed up, and I dragged you into it, and I’m so sorry. But I’m mad at you, too. You kept a huge secret from me.
When I met you, I was clean and sober. Happy. Excited to make a new friend. But then I made the connection of who you were and who you knew. That made me think of Spencer, and all the bad memories flooded back. So I started on pills again. I popped them before we hung out at the bowling alley and before we walked on the trail. I popped them at the play. You asked me what was wrong, but I didn’t tell you. I knew you’d try everything in your power to stop me, and I didn’t want to stop.
As soon as you told me what Spencer did, I drowned my sorrows, taking more pills than I could handle. I was out of my mind when we were at the quarry, and I’m sorry if I put you in danger. I can’t thank you enough for pulling me back from the edge, and although I’m pissed to be in rehab, my therapist says that if I give it time, maybe I’ll really get better. You never know.
The thing is, I’m a liar, too. I’ve done things I’m not proud of, things no one would ever put on her bad-girl bucket list. I cheated on my SATs. I bribed a teacher sophomore year to give me an A by making out with him in the supply closet. And when I was on spring break in Jamaica, I met this guy the first afternoon and left with him hours after getting there, going to the other side of the island and leaving my friends without a car or money.
So see, you’re not alone in being a shitty person. I forgive you, and I hope you can forgive me, too. Maybe someday we can be friends again.
Or maybe life sucks, and then you die.
Kelsey
When everyone finished re
ading, Emily folded the letter back up, tears in her eyes. “Poor Kelsey.”
“Poor Kelsey?” Spencer exploded. “Poor you!”
“And, you guys, Jamaica.” Aria pointed to the bottom of the page. “This part where she says she took off with a guy her first day there. Could that be true?”
Hanna glanced out into the hall again. Kelsey was still sitting in the nurse’s office, fiddling with the string on her pajama pants. “If it is, she wouldn’t have seen us interacting with Tabitha. She certainly wouldn’t have seen . . . what happened.”
“Maybe she was telling the truth when she said she didn’t know who Tabitha was,” Emily whispered.
Spencer shook her head, her dangling earrings trembling. “It’s not possible. What about that photo she sent me of Tabitha on the beach . . . dead?”
A light went on in Hanna’s mind. “Let me see your phone.”
Spencer gave her a strange look, but then turned it over. Hanna opened up Spencer’s saved texts and scrolled through her history. A’s message was still there: You hurt both of us. Now I’m going to hurt you. But Spencer also had at least twenty unopened messages from Friday after the play. Many of them were from her family or friends or that guy who played Macbeth, but one was from an unknown number with a 484 area code.
Hanna opened it up. Emily told me what you did, bitch, it said. We need to talk. Kelsey.
“Jesus,” Hanna whispered, showing it to Spencer. “What if this was the text she was talking about in the letter? The text she was referring to on Friday night?”
The blood drained from Spencer’s face. “B-but I didn’t see this on Friday. All I saw was that one from A, and then Kelsey came up, and I put two and two together, and . . .”
She let the phone fall to the table. Her gaze searched the room, seemingly trying to hold on to something stable and solid. “Kelsey must have sent both texts.”
“But what if she didn’t?” Hanna whispered. “What if this second one was from someone else?”
Everyone stared at one another, wide-eyed. Then Hanna turned around and peeked into the nurse’s office across the hall. They needed to solve this. They needed to ask Kelsey what the hell was going on.
