Sara Shepard - Pretty Little Liars

‘How do you explain the surveillance tapes?’ Wilden asked.

Her mom paused. Hanna saw a tiny muscle in her neck quiver. Then, before Hanna could stop her, she reached into her purse and took out the loot. ‘This was all my fault,’ she said. ‘Not Hanna’s.’

Ms. Marin turned back to Wilden. ‘Hanna and I had a fight about these items. I said she couldn’t have them – I drove her to this. She’ll never do it again. I’ll make sure of it.’

Hanna stared, stunned. She and her mom had never once discussed Tiffany’s, let alone something she could or couldn’t have.

Wilden shook his head. ‘Ma’am, I think your daughter may need to do some community service. That’s usually the penalty.’

Ms. Marin blinked, innocently. ‘Can’t we let this slide? Please?’

Wilden looked at her for a long time, one corner of his mouth turned up almost devilishly. ‘Sit down,’ he said finally. ‘Let me see what I can do.’

Hanna looked everywhere but in her mom’s direction. Wilden hunched over his desk. He had a Chief Wiggum figurine from The Simpsons and a metal Slinky. He licked his pointer finger to turn the pages of the papers he was filling out. Hanna flinched. What sort of papers were they? Didn’t the local newspapers report crimes? This was bad. Very bad.

Hanna jiggled her foot nervously, having a sudden urge for some Junior Mints. Or maybe cashews. Even the Slim Jims on Wilden’s desk would do.

She could just see it: Everyone would find out, and she’d be instantaneously friendless and boyfriendless. From there, she’d recede back to dorky, seventh-grade Hanna in reverse evolution. She’d wake up and her hair would be a yucky, washed-out brown again. Then her teeth would go crooked and she’d get her braces back on. She wouldn’t be able to fit into any of her jeans. The rest would happen spontaneously. She’d spend her life chubby, ugly, miserable, and overlooked, just the way she used to be.

‘I have some lotion if those are chafing your wrists,’ Ms. Marin said, gesturing to the cuffs and rooting around in her purse.

‘I’m okay,’ Hanna replied, brought back to the present.

Sighing, she pulled out her BlackBerry. It was tough because her hands were cuffed, but she wanted to convince Sean that he had to come over to her house this Saturday. She suddenly really wanted to know he would. As she stared blankly at the screen, an e-mail popped up in her inbox. She opened it.

Hey Hanna,

Since prison food makes you fat, you know what Sean’s

gonna say? Not it!

—A

She was so startled that she stood up, thinking someone might be across the room, watching her. But there was no one. She closed her eyes, trying to think who might have seen the police car at her house.

Wilden looked up from his writing. ‘You all right?’

‘Um,’ Hanna said. ‘Yeah.’ She slowly sat back down. Not it? What the hell? She checked the note’s return address again, but it was just a mess of letters and numbers.

‘Hanna,’ Ms. Marin murmured after a few moments. ‘No one needs to know about this.’

Hanna blinked. ‘Oh. Yeah. I agree.’

‘Good.’

Hanna swallowed hard. Except . . . someone did know.

Wednesday morning, Aria’s father, Byron, rubbed his bushy black hair and hand-signaled out the Subaru window that he was making a left-hand turn. The turn signals had stopped working last night, so he was driving Aria and Mike to their second day of school and taking the car to the shop.

‘You guys happy to be back in America?’ Byron asked.

Mike, who sat next to Aria in the backseat, grinned. ‘America rocks.’ He went back to maniacally punching the tiny buttons of his PSP. It made a farting noise and Mike pumped one fist in the air.

Aria’s father smiled and navigated across the single-lane stone bridge, waving to a neighbor as he passed. ‘Well, good. Now, why does it rock?’

‘America rocks because it has lacrosse,’ Mike said, not taking his eyes off his PSP. ‘And hotter chicks. And a Hooters in King of Prussia.’

Aria laughed. Like Mike had been inside Hooters. Unless . . . Oh God, had he?

She shivered in her kelly green alpaca shrug and stared out the window at the thick fog. A woman wearing a long, red hooded stadium jacket that said, UPPER MAIN LINE SOCCER MOM, tried to stop her German shepherd from chasing a squirrel across the street. At the corner, two blondes with high-tech baby carriages stood together gossiping.

There was one word to describe yesterday’s English class: brutal. After Ezra blurted out, ‘Holy shit,’ the whole class turned and stared at her. Hanna Marin, who sat in front of her, whispered in a not-so-quiet voice, ‘Did you sleep with the teacher?’ Aria considered, for a half second, that maybe Hanna had written her the text message about Ezra – Hanna was one of the few people who knew about Pigtunia. But why would Hanna care?

Ezra – er, Mr. Fitz – had dispelled the laughing quickly, and come up with the lamest excuse for swearing in class. He said, and Aria quoted in her head, ‘I was afraid that a bee had flown into my pants, and I thought the bee was going to sting me, and so I yelled out in terror.’

As Ezra then started talking about five-paragraph themes and the class’s syllabus, Aria couldn’t concentrate. She was the bee that had flown into his pants. She couldn’t stop looking at his wolfish eyes and his sumptuous pink mouth. When he peeked in her direction out of the corner of his eye, her heart did two and a half somersaults off the high dive and landed in her stomach.

Ezra was the guy for her, and she was the girl for him – she just knew it. So what if he was her teacher? There had to be a way to make it work.

Her father pulled up to Rosewood’s stone-gated entrance. In the distance, Aria noticed a vintage powder-blue Volkswagen beetle parked in the teacher’s lot. She knew that car from Snookers – it was Ezra’s. She checked her watch. Fifteen minutes until homeroom.

Mike shot out of the car. Aria opened her door as well, but her father touched her forearm. ‘Hang on a sec,’ he said.

‘But I have to . . .’ She glanced longingly at Ezra’s bug.

‘Just for a minute.’ Her father turned down the radio volume. Aria slumped back in her seat. ‘You’ve seemed a little . . .’ He flicked his wrist back and forth uncertainly. ‘You okay?’

Aria shrugged. ‘About what?’

Her father sighed. ‘Well . . . I don’t know. Being back. And we haven’t talked about . . . you know . . . in a while.’

Aria fidgeted with her jacket’s zipper. ‘What’s there to talk about?’

Byron stuck a cigarette he’d rolled before they left into his mouth. ‘I can’t imagine how hard it’s been. Keeping quiet. But I love you. You know that, right?’

Aria looked out at the parking lot again. ‘Yeah, I know,’ she said. ‘I have to go. I’ll see you at three.’

Before he could answer, Aria shot out of the car, blood rushing in her ears. How was she supposed to be Icelandic Aria, who left her past behind, if one of her worst memories of Rosewood kept bubbling to the surface?

It had happened in May of seventh grade. Rosewood Day had dismissed the students early for teacher conferences, so Aria and Ali headed to Sparrow, Hollis campus’s music store, to search for new CDs. As they cut through a back alley, Aria noticed her father’s familiar beat-up brown Honda Civic in a far-off space in an empty parking lot. As Aria and Ali walked toward the car to leave a note, they realized there was someone inside. Actually, two someones: Aria’s father, Byron, and a girl, about twenty years old, kissing his neck.

That’s when Byron looked up and saw Aria. She sprinted away before she had to see any more and before he could stop her. Ali followed Aria all the way back to her house but didn’t try to stop her when Aria said she wanted to be alone.

Later that night, Byron came up to Aria’s room to explain. It wasn’t what it looked like, he said. But Aria wasn’t stupid. Every year her father invited his students over to their house for get-to-know-you cocktails, and Aria had seen that girl walk through her very door. Her name was Meredith, Aria remembered, because Meredith had gotten tipsy and spelled out her name on the refrigerator in plastic letter magnets. When Meredith left, instead of shaking her dad’s hand as the other kids had, she gave him a lingering kiss on his cheek.

Byron begged Aria not to tell her mom. He promised her it would never happen again. She decided to believe him, and so she kept his secret. He’d never said so, but Aria believed Meredith was the reason her dad took his sabbatical when he did.

You promised yourself you wouldn’t think about it, Aria thought, glancing back over her shoulder. Her father hand-signaled out of the Rosewood parking lot.

Aria walked into the narrow hallway of the faculty wing. Ezra’s office was at the end of the hall, next to a small, cozy window seat. She stopped in the doorway and watched him as he typed something into his computer.

Finally, she knocked. Ezra’s blue eyes widened when he saw her. He looked adorable in his button-down white shirt, blue Rosewood blazer, green cords, and beat-up black loafers. The corners of his mouth curled up into the tiniest, shyest smile.

‘Hey,’ he said.

Aria hovered in the doorway. ‘Can I talk to you?’ Aria asked. Her voice squeaked a little.

Ezra hesitated, pushing a lock of hair out of his eyes. Aria noticed a Snoopy Band-Aid wrapped around his left pinkie finger. ‘Sure,’ he said softly. ‘Come in.’