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As Hanna waited, she scrolled through her BlackBerry. She had it programmed to keep messages until manually erased, so all her old Alison text conversations were still stored right in her inbox. Most of the time, Hanna didn’t like going through them—it was too sad—but today, for some reason she wanted to. She found one from the first day of June, a few days before Ali went missing.
Trying to study for the health final, Ali had written. I have all this nervous energy.
Y? had been Hanna’s answer.
Ali: I don’t know. Maybe I’m in love. Ha ha.
Hanna: Yr in love? w/ who?
Ali: Kidding. Oh shit, Spencer’s at my door. She wants to practice field hockey drills…AGAIN.
Tell her no, Hanna had written back. Who do U love?
You don’t tell Spencer no, Ali argued. She’ll, like, hurt you.
Hanna stared at her BlackBerry’s bright screen. At the time, she’d probably laughed. But now Hanna looked at the old texts with a fresh eye. A’s note—saying one of Hanna’s friends was hiding something—scared her. Could Spencer be hiding something?
All of a sudden, Hanna recalled a memory she hadn’t thought of in a long time: A few days before Ali went missing, the five of them had gone on a field trip to the People’s Light Playhouse to see Romeo and Juliet. There weren’t many seventh-graders who’d opted to go—the rest of the field-trippers had been high-schoolers. Practically all of the Rosewood Day senior class had been there—Ali’s older brother, Jason, Spencer’s sister, Melissa, Ian Thomas, Katy Houghton, Ali’s field hockey friend, and Preston Kahn, one of the Kahn brothers. After the play was over, Aria and Emily disappeared to the bathroom, Hanna and Ali sat on the stone wall and started eating their lunches, and Spencer sprinted over to talk to Mrs. Delancey, the English teacher, who was sitting near her students.
“She’s only over there because she wants to be near the older boys,” Ali muttered, glaring at Spencer.
“We could go over too, if you want,” Hanna suggested.
Ali said no. “I’m mad at Spencer,” she declared.
“Why?” Hanna asked.
Ali sighed. “Long, boring story.”
Hanna let it drop—Ali and Spencer often got mad at each other for no reason. She started daydreaming about how the hot actor who played Tybalt had stared right at her all through his death scene. Did Tybalt think Hanna was cute…or fat? Or perhaps he wasn’t staring at her at all—maybe he was just acting dead with his eyes open. When she looked up again, Ali was crying.
“Ali,” Hanna had whispered. She’d never seen Ali cry before. “What’s wrong?”
Tears ran silently down Ali’s cheeks. She didn’t even bother wiping them away. She stared off in the direction of Spencer and Mrs. Delancey. “Forget it.”
“Shit! Look at that!” Mason Byers cried out, breaking Hanna out of her old seventh-grade thoughts. Up in the sky, a biplane cut a line through the clouds. It passed over Rosewood Day, swooped around, and then zoomed by again. Hanna jiggled up and down in her seat and swiveled around. Where the hell was Mona?
“Is that an old Curtiss?” James Freed asked.
“I don’t think so,” Ridley Mayfield answered. “I think it’s a Travel Air D4D.”
“Oh, right,” James said, as if he’d known it all along.
Hanna’s heart fluttered excitedly. The plane made a few long, sweeping strokes through the air, puffing out a trail of clouds that formed a perfect letter G. “It’s writing something!” a girl near the door called out.
The plane moved on to the E, then the T, and then, after a space, the R. Hanna was practically bursting. This was the coolest party court gift ever.
Mason squinted at the plane, which was dipping and weaving in the sky. “Get…ready…to…” he read.
Just then, Mona slid into the seat next to her, throwing her charcoal gray quilted Louis Vuitton bag over her chair. “Hey, Han,” she said, opening her Fresh Fields bento box and sliding the paper off her wooden chopsticks. “So you’ll never believe who Naomi and Riley got to play at my birthday party. It’s the best gift ever.”
“Forget that,” Hanna squealed. “I got you something cooler.”
Hanna tried to point out the plane in the sky, but Mona was riled up. “They got Lexi,” she rushed on. “Lexi! For me! At my party! Can you believe it?”
Hanna let her spoon drop back in the yogurt container. Lexi was a female hip-hop artist from Philadelphia. A major label had signed her and she was going to be a megastar. How had Naomi and Riley managed that? “Whatever,” she said quickly, and steered Mona’s chin toward the clouds. “Look what I did for you.”
Mona squinted into the sky. The plane had finished writing the message and was now doing loops over the letters. When Hanna took in the whole message, her eyes widened.
“Get ready to…” Mona’s mouth fell open. “…fart with Mona?”
“Get ready to fart with Mona!” Mason cried. Others who saw it were repeating it, too. A freshman boy by the abstract wall mural blew into his hands to make a farting sound.
Mona stared at Hanna. She looked a little green. “What the hell, Hanna?”
“No, that’s wrong!” Hanna squeaked. “It was supposed to say, ‘Get ready to party with Mona!’ P-A-R-T-Y! They messed up the letters!”
More people made fart noises. “Gross!” a girl near them screamed. “Why would she write that?”
