Pretty Little Liars #13: Crushed

by Shepard, Sara

  “Hanna?”

  She looked up and saw Sean Ackard’s rounded cheeks, burning blue eyes, and do-gooder smile. He stood in the doorway of one of the offices, wearing a crisp blue button-down that looked like it had come straight from his father’s closet.

  “Hey, good to see you!” Sean said. “Why don’t you step in here so we can talk?”

  Hanna fiddled with a tissue box on the front desk. “I’m waiting to see your dad.”

  Sean rapped on the doorjamb. “Nope. Your interview is with me.”

  Hanna bit down hard on the inside of her mouth. She hadn’t really spoken to Sean since things crashed and burned last year. These days, he was going out with Kate. Total weirdness.

  Shrugging, she followed Sean into the room and sat down on a couch. Sean sat at a desk that was populated with stacks of papers, a flat-screen computer, and empty coffee mugs. An Elmo stuffed animal sat on a shelf behind him. There was a picture of Sean shaking the hand of the governor of Pennsylvania. “Do you work here now?” Hanna asked in confusion.

  “On the weekends, just to help my dad.” Sean straightened some papers. “We’re so overcrowded right now—a couple of local hospitals closed their burn clinics because of budget cuts.” He exhaled heavily, then looked at Hanna. “So how’s Mike?”

  Hanna blinked, startled. “Uh, fine.”

  The mention of Mike made her feel squirmy. It wasn’t like he knew she was here; he’d never, ever understand why she was back to beg for her old job. Every story she’d told him about the place was more disgusting than the last. She’d told him she had a hair appointment today to practice for her prom updo, but all he had to do was call up Fermata, the salon, and catch her in the lie.

  “Good.” Sean smiled. “So you actually want to come back?”

  Hanna shifted. “I feel bad about cutting my volunteer time short,” she lied. “After everything that has happened to me, I thought I should give back a little, you know?”

  Sean arched an eyebrow. “Didn’t you hate it here?”

  Hanna clasped her hands together, trying to look earnest. “I’ve changed. Volunteering means a lot to me. I have a friend in here right now, actually, someone I met on the cruise. Graham Pratt?”

  Sean sat back in his chair. “Yeah, Graham came in a few days ago.” He shook his head solemnly. “That cruise sounded like a nightmare. I heard about what happened to you guys, too—about that life raft. Some people were saying it was a suicide pact.”

  Hanna didn’t dignify that with a response. “It was scary to have to evacuate . . . and then get stranded at sea. I sort of had an epiphany when I almost drowned—life’s too short, I’d better make it count. So . . . please, can I help out?”

  Sean bounced a pencil, eraser down, on the desk. “Well, my dad said you could volunteer again as long as you work hard.”

  “I can do that!”

  “Okay,” Sean said. He extended his hand to Hanna, and she shook it. Then, his expression suddenly became almost mournful. “You know, I never got to tell you how awful I felt about all that Ali stuff.”

  “Oh, uh, thanks.”

  “I can’t even imagine what that must have been like,” Sean went on.

  Hanna’s eyes filled with tears. It was one thing for a friend, a parent, a complete stranger to offer sympathy, but there was something both touching and weird about Sean saying it. “Thanks,” she mumbled.

  Sean stepped forward, wrapped his arms around her, and gave her a quick hug. He smelled familiar, like cinnamon and deodorant and the potpourri his mom used generously around the house. It was a nice smell, a comfortable smell. Suddenly, Hanna didn’t hate him as much.

  She left his office for the women’s staff room, where she changed out of her Rachel Zoe print dress and snakeskin flats into hideous, oversized scrubs that smelled like puke. Then she went back to Sean’s office.

  “Ms. Marin?” A woman in pink scrubs appeared from around the corner. “I’m Kelly, one of the head nurses. I’m here to show you the ropes.”

  “Kelly’s one of our best,” Sean said proudly.

  “What would you like me to do?” Hanna asked pertly.

  “How do you feel about bedpans?” Kelly asked.

  Hanna winced, but it wasn’t like she could complain with Sean still standing right there. “I love bedpans.”

  “Well, great!” Kelly pumped her fist in the air. “Let me show you what to do!”

  Kelly helped her with the first bedpan, giving Hanna the opportunity to carry the pee-filled thing down the hall. A male nurse passed her going the opposite direction. Hanna couldn’t help but stare—he was tall, built, and extremely handsome, with a shaved head and gleaming blue eyes.

  “Hey,” the nurse said to Hanna, widening his eyes at Hanna’s boobs.

  “H-hey,” Hanna stammered back, then followed the nurse’s gaze. He wasn’t staring at her boobs. He was looking at the bedpan. Pee sloshed over the sides, splashing dangerously close to Hanna’s scrubs. She squealed and almost dropped the thing on the floor.

  Kelly giggled. “Jeff always has that effect on people.”

  They continued into the next room. Sean was right about the place being overcrowded: There were burn victims everywhere she looked. In the halls. Crammed three to a room. There was even a bed in one of the waiting areas.

  “Is this legal?” Hanna asked, nearly tripping over someone’s monitor stand.

  Kelly shrugged. “Until the new wing is finished, we don’t have anywhere to put everyone.”

  Then Kelly pantomimed inhaling and exhaling an invisible cigarette and said she’d be back. Hanna turned back for the supply room to grab a clean bedpan. Something behind her caught her eye. The nurse’s station was empty. Every single chair was unoccupied.

  She tiptoed around the desk and peered at the computer console. A program showed a list of patients in the clinic and their corresponding room numbers. Score. She dragged the pointer down the page. GRAHAM PRATT. According to the files, he was in room 142, which was just down the hall.

  She stepped away from the desk just as Kelly swept around the corner, smelling like a Newport. “Okay, honey, time for mopping!”

  Hanna added soap to the bucket and started down a hall. She gazed at the room numbers as she passed: 132 . . . 134 . . . 138 . . . and there it was, room 142. It wasn’t a room, per se—more like a small partition in a corner separated by a curtain.

  She held her breath and peeked in. There, on a bed, lay a boy with a big bandage on his head and neck. His eyes were shut tight, and tubes snaked into his hands and mouth. Several machines beeped. A frisson went through Hanna’s body. This was what A was capable of. Hanna must have made a strange noise, because Kelly placed her hand on her shoulder. “That’s your friend? I heard you talking about him to Sean.”

  Hanna stared at the blinking lights on Graham’s monitors. “Y-yeah,” she said, feeling a little bad for lying. “How is he?”

  Kelly’s mouth made an upside-down U. “He’s in and out.”

  “Has he said anything?”

  Kelly shrugged. “No. Why?”

  For a split second, she was looking at Hanna kind of suspiciously. “Can you do me a favor?” she asked in an innocent voice. “If he starts to wake up and I’m not here, can you call my house? I want to tell him something important. Something I should have told him before all this.”

  Kelly’s eyes softened. “He really meant something to you, huh?” She gave Hanna’s hand a squeeze. “You got it.”

  Then Kelly disappeared back into the hall. Hanna remained where she was, staring at the figure on the bed. Graham’s monitors beeped steadily. His chest rose up and down. Then, his eyelids fluttered and his lips parted.

  Hanna leaned over his bed. “Graham?” she whispered. “Are you there?” Did you see A? she asked silently.

  A puff of air escaped between Graham’s lips. His eyelashes fluttered once more, and then he went motionless on the pillow. Hanna pulled away from the bed, her heart still pounding hard.
Graham was going to wake up soon. She could feel it.

  A high-pitched giggle came from the vents. Hanna stiffened and looked down the hall. Patients lay motionless. Mop water gleamed on the floor. Everything was so still and quiet that for a second Hanna felt like she was dead.

  She shuddered. If she and the others didn’t find Ali and her helper soon, she might be.

  11

  Family Bonding Time

  As soon as Emily stepped into Saks Fifth Avenue at the King James Mall, a pin-thin girl appeared with a flower-shaped glass atomizer. “Want to try the new Flowerbomb?”

  “Absolutely,” Iris insisted, pushing Emily out of the way and holding out her impossibly skinny, blue-veined wrist. “Now you, Emily.”

  Emily shrugged and complied. After the perfume girl sprayed the fruity liquid on her wrist, Iris glanced at someone behind them. “You should try it, too, Mrs. Fields!”

  Emily whirled around. Her mom stood in the entrance, peeling her plastic, see-through rain hat from her head. “M-mom?” Emily stammered. “What are you doing here?”

  Mrs. Fields stuffed the hat into her quilted purse. “Iris invited me. And since it was on my way home from CVS, I figured, why not?” Then she stuck out her wrist for some Flowerbomb and gave Iris a warm smile.

  This whole Iris thing was freaking Emily out more every second. For one thing, Emily kept waiting for The Preserve to call up and say, Um, have you stolen our patient? For another, she hated, hated, hated that Iris had to stay at her house—sometimes without Emily supervising. After Emily had returned from the panic room yesterday, she hadn’t known what to expect. What if Iris had decided to tell her parents everything? What if Iris had flipped out and gone after them with a kitchen knife?

  But instead, she’d found Iris and her parents sitting on the living room couch watching Jeopardy! and drinking tea. Somehow, that was even more terrifying. Iris was acting like she was just a member of the family. “I’m sure Iris is tired, Mom,” Emily had blurted out in horror. “She’s had a long day, and she probably wants to go to bed.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m wide awake!” Iris had said eagerly, moving a little closer to Mrs. Fields on the couch. She had been eating, Emily had noticed, one of her mom’s Rice Krispies treats. No one ate those things—they always came out hard as rocks and way over-buttered. Mrs. Fields, of course, had looked thrilled.

  Now, Emily poked Iris’s side. “Why did you invite my mom?” she murmured.

  Iris shrugged innocently. “She’s cool.”

  Yeah, right, Emily thought, waiting for Iris to roll her eyes and say something nasty. But she didn’t. Instead, Iris turned, checked to see that the perfume girl’s back was turned and Mrs. Fields’s attention was occupied by a free makeup sample offer, and scooped up a Flowerbomb perfume box from a display table and slid it up the sleeve of the baggy sweatshirt Emily had lent her. Emily reached forward to stop her, but Iris just gave her an I-know-what-I’m-doing look. This was the reason they were at the mall, after all. Steal lots of shit from Saks was number sixteen on her list of Things I Want to Do During My Time Off from The Preserve. Maybe there were bonus points for doing it in front of Emily’s mom.

  She trailed after Iris down the sweet-smelling corridor toward the Contemporary section. As Emily passed the handbags, someone yanked her arm. Spencer was crouched behind a table full of Marc by Marc Jacobs satchels. “Psst,” she whispered.

  Emily ducked down beside her. “What are you doing here?”

  Spencer’s eyes darted back and forth. “I special-ordered shoes for prom at Saks.” She peered down the corridor at Iris, who was now posing in front of a three-way mirror. “Has she told you anything yet?”

  “Not since you last asked,” Emily grumbled. “We’ve been too busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  Emily gazed at a perfume ad across the aisle. The girl in the picture looked a little like Jordan, which made her heart ache. “Well, after I signed her out of The Preserve and before I met you at the panic room, Iris made me go to the city so she could make out with a Ben Franklin impersonator. And then, this morning, I had to drive her to her old school. Iris wanted to climb a rope in the playground and ring a brass bell at the top.” She’d looked like a spider on that rope, all spindly arms and legs, the jeans Emily lent her held up by a child-sized belt.

  “It turns out high school kids hide pot up that pole,” Emily went on. “Iris came down with a huge bag. So now I’ve got an escaped mental patient and pot at my house. My parents will freak if they find out.”

  As soon as she said it, she realized how ridiculous it sounded. Her parents would freak even more if they found out Emily was keeping the secret that Aria had stolen a priceless painting. And helped shove a girl off a roof. And everything else.

  Spencer shifted her weight. “So she’s told you nothing about Ali?”

  Emily looked around for Iris, finally spotting her blond head by a rack of miniskirts. “I’m working on it.” She’d asked Iris for an Ali tidbit last night, but Iris had said that Emily hadn’t done anything to really deserve information yet—she would have to prove herself. When Emily asked Iris what, specifically, she had to do to receive a blessed piece of information, Iris had tossed her hair, shrugged, and said, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  “And A doesn’t know Iris is with you, right?” Spencer whispered.

  Emily squeezed a Michael Kors clutch, angry all over again that Iris had changed the rules on her. The tissue paper inside crinkled. “No.”

  “What should we do about that painting?”

  The cloying mix of perfumes was giving Emily a headache. “I don’t know. What do you think we should do?”

  Spencer slowly shook her head. “I don’t have a clue.”

  Emily stared into Spencer’s clear blue eyes. She still couldn’t believe that Aria had kept her secret for so long, especially given that she knew about things Spencer, Emily, and Hanna had done over the summer. But now that she thought about it, there might have been one time around Christmas when Aria had tried: They were at Spencer’s annual party, and after a couple of drinks, Aria had pulled Emily aside. “I’ve done something awful,” she’d whispered into Emily’s ear. “I can’t live with myself.”

  Emily had assumed she meant Tabitha. “Any of us would have done the same thing.”

  Aria shook her head, her eyes glittering with tears. “You don’t understand. You just don’t understand. What I did will ruin everything, and—”

  “There you are!” a voice said from behind them, and suddenly Noel clapped a hand on Aria’s shoulder. Aria’s features crumpled into something resembling a smile. “Hey, will you come meet my buddy from lacrosse camp? I haven’t seen him in ages!” Noel said.

  “Sure!” Aria said brightly, her mouth still wobbling.

  And just like that, he was steering her away from Emily. In retrospect, perhaps a bit territorially. Like Aria was his possession.

  But the next time Emily had caught up with her, she’d been buoyant and lively. What if Aria had been trying to tell her about hooking up with Olaf? Stealing the painting?

  “Ooh! These are pretty!”

  Emily snapped out of her reverie in time to see Iris showing Mrs. Fields a pair of teal-blue jeans. They were a size 00—and Emily guessed they would still be too big on Iris.

  She was about to stand up to go join them, but Spencer grabbed her arm. “Do you really think Noel was on a ski trip the weekend Olaf was killed?”

  There was a determined look in Spencer’s eye, the same sort of face she got when she, Ali, Emily, and the others used to put together puzzles on the floor of Ali’s Poconos living room. Sometimes, they made solving the puzzles a race, and Spencer, desperate to beat Ali, shoved pieces together even when they didn’t fit.

  “I don’t think we should go on a witch hunt quite yet,” Emily said slowly.

  “But Noel makes so much sense, don’t you think?” Spencer whispered.

  Emily shut her eyes. S
he didn’t want Noel to make sense. It would kill Aria. “I don’t know,” she said wearily.

  “Emily!” Iris crowed. When Emily looked up, Iris was coming straight for them.

  Emily shoved Spencer out of the way and stood. “Hey!” she called, trying to smile.

  “What were you doing on the floor?” Iris stared suspiciously at the spot where Emily had just been sitting. Blessedly, Spencer had scampered out of sight. Then Iris pressed an armful of silk blouses at Emily’s chest. “Stuff these in your bag. I already pulled the electronic tags off.”

  She glared at Iris. “My mom’s right over there!” Mrs. Fields was holding up a leopard-patterned jacket to her torso and twisting this way and that in the mirror.

  Iris scoffed. “So? She won’t see.” She inched closer. “I’ll give you a really good Ali tidbit if you do.”

  “Fine,” Emily growled, yanking the shirts out of Iris’s arms. Glancing back and forth, she took a deep breath and shoved the shirts deep into her swim bag that sometimes doubled as a purse. She marched over to her mom and grabbed her elbow. “We’re going now.”

  “So soon?” Mrs. Fields looked disappointed. “We just got here! And isn’t this cute?” She showed Emily the leopard jacket. “I wanted to get you something special.”

  “That’s sweet, but, um, Iris has an interview at four thirty,” Emily said, steering them toward the exit. “It’s a really big deal—they’re thinking of offering her a scholarship.”

  “Really?” Mrs. Fields smiled at Iris. “Where?”

  “Villanova,” Emily said quickly before Iris could spout out a made-up college name—or ask what the hell Emily was talking about. “I have to drive her there, in fact. So we’d better get a move on.”

  Her heart thudded as she walked past the displays by the doors. As her fingers curled on the handle, she braced herself for the alarms—and her mom’s wrath.

  But no sirens sounded as Emily pushed through the second door fast and spilled onto the sidewalk. Her whole body was sweating. Her head throbbed. She couldn’t believe Jordan used to do this on a regular basis—except with boats and cars.