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“Th-that’s okay,” Aria stuttered.
The waitress leaned an ample hip against one of the counter’s pink stools. She had the kind of curly black hair that always looked wet. “You heard about the stalker?”
“Uh-huh,” Aria answered.
“You know what I heard?” the waitress said. “It’s a rich kid.” When Aria didn’t respond, she went back to washing an already clean table.
Aria blinked a few times. Look closer, Ali had said. She reached into her messenger bag and opened her laptop. It took a while to boot up, and then it took even longer for Aria to find the file folder that held her old videos. It had been so long since she’d searched for them. When she finally unearthed it, she realized that none of the video files were labeled very accurately. They were titled things like “Us Five, #1,” or “Ali and Me, #6,” and the dates were from when they’d last been viewed, not when they were made. She had no idea how to find the video that had been leaked to the press…besides going through all of them.
She clicked randomly on a video titled “Meow!” Aria, Ali, and the others were in Ali’s bedroom. They were struggling to dress up Ali’s Himalayan cat, Charlotte, in a hand-knit sweater, giggling as they stuffed her legs through the armholes.
She watched another movie called “Fight #5,” but it wasn’t what she thought it would be—she, Ali, and the others were making chocolate-chip cookies and got in a food fight, flinging cookie dough around Hanna’s kitchen. In another, they were playing foosball on the table in Spencer’s basement.
When Aria clicked on a new MPEG that was simply called “DQ,” she noticed something.
By the looks of Ali’s haircut and all their new warm-weather clothes, the video was from a month or so before Ali had gone missing. Aria had zoomed in on a shot of Hanna downing a monster-size Dairy Queen Blizzard in record time. In the background, she heard Ali start making retching noises. Hanna paused, and her face quickly drained of color. Ali giggled in the background. No one else seemed to notice.
A strange sensation slithered over Aria. She’d heard the rumors that Hanna had a bulimia problem. It seemed like something that A—and Ali—would know.
She clicked on another. They were flipping through the channels at Emily’s house. Ali stopped on a newscast of a Gay Pride parade that had taken place in Philly earlier that day. She turned pointedly to Emily and grinned. “That looks fun, doesn’t it, Em?” Emily turned red and pulled her sweatshirt hood around her head. None of the others batted an eye.
And another. This one was only sixteen seconds long. The five of them were lounging around Spencer’s pool. They all wore massive Gucci sunglasses—or, in Emily and Aria’s case, knockoffs. Ali sat up and pushed her glasses down her nose. “Hey, Aria,” she said abruptly. “What does your dad do if, like, he gets sexy students in his class?”
The clip ended. Aria remembered that day—it had been shortly after the time she and Ali had discovered Byron and Meredith kissing in Byron’s car, and Ali had begun dropping hints that she was going to tell the others.
Ali really did know all their secrets, and she’d been dangling them over their heads. It had all been right in front of them, and they hadn’t realized it. Ali had known everything. About all of them. And now, A did, too.
Except…what was Spencer’s secret?
Aria clicked on another video. Finally, she saw the familiar scene. There was Spencer, sitting on her couch with that crown on her head. “Want to read her texts?” She pointed at Ali’s LG phone, which was lying between the couch cushions.
Spencer opened Ali’s phone. “It’s locked.”
“Do you know her password?” Aria heard her own voice ask.
“Try her birthday,” Hanna whispered.
“Were you looking at my phone?” Ali screamed.
The phone clattered to the ground. Just then, Spencer’s older sister, Melissa, and her boyfriend, Ian, walked past the camera. Both of them smiled into the lens. “Hey, guys,” Melissa said. “What’s up?”
Spencer batted her eyes. Ali looked bored. The camera zoomed in on her face and panned down to the closed phone.
“Oh, this is the clip I’ve seen on the news,” said a voice behind Aria. The waitress was leaning against the counter, filing her nails with a Tweety Bird nail file.
Aria paused the clip and whirled around. “I’m sorry?”
The waitress blushed. “Oops. When it’s dead like this, I turn into my evil eavesdropping twin. I didn’t mean to look at your computer. That poor boy, though.”
Aria squinted at her. She noticed for the first time that the waitress’s name tag said ALISON. Spelled the same way and everything. “What poor boy?” she asked.
Alison pointed at the screen. “No one ever talks about the boyfriend. He must have been so heartbroken.”
Aria stared at the screen, baffled. She pointed at Ian’s frozen image. “That’s not her boyfriend. He’s with the girl who’s in the kitchen. She’s not on-screen.”
“No?” Alison shrugged and started wiping the counter again. “The way they’re sitting…I just assumed.”
Aria didn’t know what to say. She set the video back to the beginning, confused. She and her friends tried to hack Ali’s phone, Ali came back, Melissa and Ian smiled, cinematic shot of closed phone, finis.
She restarted the movie one more time, this time at half-speed. Spencer slowly readjusted her crown. Ali’s cell phone dragged across the screen. Ali came back, every expression languid and contorted. Instead of scurrying past, Melissa plodded. Suddenly, she noticed something in the corner of the screen: the edge of a small, slender hand. Ali’s hand. Then came another hand. It was larger and masculine. She slowed down the frame speed. Every so often, the big hand and the little hand bumped each other. Their pinkies intertwined.
