Authors: Sara Shepard
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 slot 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.”
Hanna noticed that Aria was sneaking a peek at Hanna’s greenish bruises, a grossed-out look on her face.
“What?”
Hanna snapped, smoothing out her long, auburn hair, which she’d just spritzed with Bumble & Bumble Surf Spray. “You should try to be a little more Florence Nightingale, Aria. Sean’s really into that.”
It still rankled Hanna that her ex, Sean Ackard, had broken up with
her
to be with Aria. Today, Aria’s hair hung in chunks around her face, and she wore a red-and-white-checkered tent dress under her Rosewood Day blazer. She looked like a cross between that freaky drummer girl in the White Stripes and a tablecloth. Besides, didn’t she know that if she got caught without the plaid pleated skirt part of the school’s uniform, Appleton would just send her home and make her change?
“Sean and I broke up,” Aria mumbled.
Hanna raised a curious eyebrow. “Oh
really
? And why is that?”
Aria sat down in the little orange plastic chair next to Hanna’s bed. “That doesn’t matter right now. What matters is…this. You.” Her eyes welled with tears. “I wish we would’ve gotten to the playground sooner. I keep thinking about it. We could’ve stopped that car, somehow. We could’ve pulled you out of the way.”
Hanna stared at her, her throat constricting. “You were
there
?”
Aria nodded, then glanced at Spencer. “We were all there. Emily too. You wanted to meet us.”
Hanna’s heart quickened. “I did?”
Aria leaned closer. Her breath smelled like Orbit Mint Mojito gum, a flavor Hanna hated. “You said you knew who A was.”
“What?”
Hanna whispered.
“You don’t
remember
?” Spencer shrieked. “Hanna, that’s who hit you!” She whipped out her Sidekick and brought up a text. “Look!”
Hanna stared at the screen.
She knew too much.—A
“A sent us this right after you were hit by the car,” Spencer whispered.
Hanna blinked hard, stunned. Her mind was like a big, deep Gucci purse, and when Hanna rooted around in the bottom, she couldn’t come up with the memory she needed. “A tried to
kill
me?” Her stomach began to churn. All day, she’d had this awful feeling, deep down, that this hadn’t been an accident. But she’d tried to quell it, telling herself that was nonsense.
“Maybe A had spoken to you?” Spencer tried. “Or maybe you saw A doing something. Can you think? We’re afraid that if you don’t remember who A is, A might…” She trailed off, gulping.
“…strike again,” Aria whispered.
Hanna shivered spastically, breaking out in a cold, horrified sweat. “Th-the last thing I remember was the night before Mona’s party,” she stammered. “The next thing I know, we’re all sitting in Ali’s backyard. We’re in seventh grade again. It’s the day before Ali disappeared, and we’re talking about how we’re going to have the sleepover in the barn. Remember that?”
Spencer squinted. “Uh…sure. I guess.”
“I kept trying to warn Ali that she was going to die the next day,” Hanna explained, her voice rising. “But Ali wouldn’t pay attention to me. And then she looked at me and said I should stop making a big deal out of it. She said she was fine.”
Spencer and Aria exchanged a glance. “Hanna, it was a dream,” Aria said softly.
“Well,
yeah,
obviously.” Hanna rolled her eyes. “I’m just saying. It was like Ali was right
there
.” She pointed at a pink
GET WELL SOON
balloon at the end of the bed. It had a round face and accordion-style arms and legs, and it could walk on its own.
Before either of Hanna’s old friends could respond, a loud voice interrupted them. “Where’s the sexiest patient in this hospital?”
Mona stood in the doorway, her arms outstretched. She, too, wore her Rosewood Day blazer and skirt along with an amazing pair of Marc Jacobs boots Hanna had never seen. Mona glanced at Aria and Spencer suspiciously, then dumped a pile of
Vogue, Elle, Lucky,
and
Us Weekly
magazines on the nightstand. “
Pour vous,
Hanna. A lot has happened to Lindsay Lohan that you and I need to discuss.”
“I
so
love you,” Hanna cried, quickly trying to switch gears. She couldn’t dwell on this A thing. She just
couldn’t.
She was relieved that she hadn’t been hallucinating yesterday when she woke up and saw Mona standing over her bed. Things with Mona had been rocky last week, but Hanna’s last memory was receiving a court dress for Mona’s birthday party in the mail. It was obviously an olive branch, but it was weird that she couldn’t remember their makeup conversation—usually, when Hanna and Mona made up, they gave each other gifts, like a new iPod case or a pair of Coach kidskin gloves.
Spencer looked at Mona. “Well, now that Hanna’s awake, I guess we don’t have to do that thing on Friday.”
Hanna perked up. “What thing?”
Mona perched on Hanna’s bed. “We were going to have a little vigil for you at the Rosewood Country Club,” she admitted. “Everyone at school was invited.”
Hanna put her IV-rigged hand to her mouth, touched. “You guys were going to do that…for me?” She caught Mona’s eye. It seemed unusual that Mona would be planning a party with Spencer—Mona had a lot of issues with Hanna’s old friends—but Mona actually looked excited. Hanna’s heart lifted.