The bell rang, and everyone stood. “Call us later?” Hanna asked Ali, and Ali nodded. Usually the girls did a five-way phone call at the end of the day to catch up on gossip.
Ali held her head high as she rounded the corner toward the gym, her next class period, the jealous gazes of her classmates like warm summer sun on her skin. But suddenly, something in the hall stopped her short. There was a new display in one of the cases, called ROSEWOOD DAY DRAMA CLUB: A LOOK BACK. In the center of a poster board was a picture of this year’s drama club after the performance of their play, Fiddler on the Roof—there was Spencer, who’d played a supporting role, right in the front. Fanning out in a sunburst pattern around that central photo were pictures of plays from even earlier. Ali spied a younger Spencer playing a tree in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There was a picture of Mona Vanderwaal, her hair arranged in pigtails and her mouth full of braces, playing a cowgirl in Annie Get Your Gun. There was a younger Jenna Cavanaugh, singing a solo, her lips naturally pink, her hazel eyes wide, seeing everything.
And right next to that, delivering a line to eye-patch-wearing Noel Kahn, was her own face. Except this was a play before sixth grade. Before Courtney had become Ali, and Ali had become Courtney. If you really concentrated, the differences between the two girls were obvious. Her sister’s eyes were wider and a little bluer. She stood straighter, and her ears didn’t stick out as much. But not a single person had ever noticed those differences—people rarely paid attention to details.
Ali thought about the Preserve at Addison-Stevens. She’d visited a few times, and it was even worse than the rumors. The patient ward had peeling blue walls, dark corridors, and bars on the windows. Kids shuffled through the halls despondently, some of them muttering, others screaming, most twitching. Her sister was one of them now. She’d been insisting she was Alison DiLaurentis for over a year, working herself into a lather. It was a beautiful catch-22: The more the real Ali insisted she’d been unjustly imprisoned at the Preserve, the more ammunition that gave the staff to keep her there. They had her on so many meds she was drooling most of the time.
Ali glanced over her shoulder, suddenly getting the queasy sensation that someone was watching her. That feeling struck her now and then, though mostly she just chalked it up to being stressed about graduating.
She turned back to the photo. It felt dangerous, somehow. Ali could never, ever let anyone find out her secret; she wasn’t going to the Preserve as long as she lived. She twisted open the latch of the display case, stuck her hand inside, grabbed the picture of pretty, fifth-grade Alison, and slipped it into her bag. She would burn it when she got home tonight.
Out of sight, out of mind. Just like she used to be.
2
SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES
Later that afternoon, Ali sat in Cassie Buckley’s Jeep, in Cassie’s driveway. Cassie had just gotten her driver’s license, and she loved giving the girls rides home. They faced Cassie’s rickety Victorian house, where they and a few other girls on the field hockey team had been hanging out after school. The place had a wraparound porch, stained-glass windows, and a chicken-shaped weathervane on the roof. To the right was Cassie’s long and narrow side yard, which contained a garden that needed weeding, a stone wall that separated it from the neighbors, and an old claw-foot bathtub that wasn’t out of place here in funky Old Hollis. Ali actually preferred Hollis’s shabby-chic vibe to Rosewood’s uberfussy perfection, but, as it didn’t seem like an opinion Alison DiLaurentis would have, she never let on.
After she finished checking her mirrors, Cassie turned the key in the ignition. “I hope we pass some hot seniors on the road.”
“Which ones?” Zoe Schwartz asked from the backseat.
“I don’t know,” Cassie said. “Someone hot.”
“I’ll find you someone.” Zoe flipped through the pages of the latest Mule, Rosewood’s yearbook, which had just come out that day. No one knew why it was called The Mule—it was an apocryphal, private-school inside joke that the yearbook staff felt superstitious about messing with.
“Ian Thomas is pretty cute,” Zoe decided, pausing on Ian’s senior picture. His smile was wide, his eyes were ultrablue, and he actually looked cute in the graduation cap.
“Not as cute as Ali’s brother.” Cassie grabbed the communal Marlboro Light that was being passed around and took a long drag.
“Ew!” Ali said.