On Wednesday afternoon, Spencer stood in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom, inspecting her reflection. Agent Fuji was coming to interview all of them in a few minutes, and Spencer couldn’t remember the last time she’d agonized over her outfit so much.
Was a pin-striped blazer too corporate? She frowned and pulled it off and tried on a pink blouse, but that just made her look like a big square of bubble gum. She needed casual but serious. Girl next door—no, smart girl next door. Someone who would never, ever break the law.
Her gaze drifted to the shimmering pearl-gray Zac Posen gown that hung in plastic in her closet. The tag was still on, but she didn’t have the heart to return it. Two days later, Reefer’s rejection still stung. Spencer had sent him a few plaintive texts, begging for another conversation. Maybe she’d misinterpreted what he’d meant when he said they shouldn’t be tied down. Maybe he’d had a change of heart. But Reefer hadn’t written back, and she’d begun to feel foolish and desperate. What she needed, she decided, was a prom date to take her mind off things. But who? All the eligible boys had been claimed months ago. Spencer considered calling her old boyfriend, Andrew Campbell, who had graduated early and was now at Cornell, but they hadn’t spoken since last spring.
The doorbell rang, and she shed the blouse, changed again, and padded downstairs in a blue oxford shirt and skinny khakis. Aria, Emily, and Hanna stood on the porch, bouncing and quivering like a trio of shaken-up soda bottles. They rushed inside.
“We’ve got to do something,” Hanna said.
“I think A’s reading my e-mails,” Emily wailed at the same time.
“I got a note on an unlisted phone,” Aria blurted out.
“Hold up.” Spencer stopped at the border of the hall and the living room. “Start over.”
Each girl explained that they’d all gotten A notes in the past forty-eight hours. All of them had to do with telling the cops on them, like Spencer’s had, and several mentioned Agent Fuji by name. Aria’s was especially disconcerting—A had cracked her unlisted number in a matter of hours.
“Does A have an in with Verizon or something?” she moaned. “And I think A is trying to frame us for hurting Graham. As if I set off that explosion.”
“A could try to do that with Gayle, too,” Emily said. “We were in her driveway when she was shot. I’m sure A has something up his or her sleeve about all of that.”
“Don’t forget A’s threat to kill us,” Hanna added.
“This is getting ridiculous. It’s like A’s everywhere.” Spencer thought about how A had texted her almost the minute Reefer left. But how had A known? Spencer had been inside her house. It was like A had bugged the place or something.
She blinked. Was it possible? She peered into the corners of the room, the spaces under the couches, at the high windowsills. A rearing horse in the garish Civil War painting Mr. Pennythistle had hung in the hall leered at her.
Suddenly, she hit on an idea. “Come on,” she commanded the others over her shoulder, heading toward the backyard.
Everyone followed her out the sliding door. It was wet and gray outside, and the air smelled like freshly cut grass and the swampy creek in the woods at the back of the property. A big blue tarp covered the family’s swimming pool. An eerie haze hung over the trees where the Hastingses’ refurbished barn had once stood—before Ali burned it down. To the left was the DiLaurentises’ old house, though the only reminder that they’d lived there was the big boulder in the middle of the backyard that they never dug up—the new family had removed all other traces of them by now, including their old deck, and there was no longer an Ali shrine on the front curb.
Spencer marched to the shed Mr. Pennythistle had installed a few weeks ago, unlocked the door, and looked around. An orange leaf blower leaned against the left wall. She grabbed it, dragged it to the middle of the yard, and pulled the starter chain. Her three friends stared at her like she was crazy, but there was a method to her madness. Everyone’s hair flew about until Spencer pointed the nozzle at the ground. The air filled with the noxious scent of gasoline. The best and most important part was the deafening noise the thing made. No one, not even A, would be able to hear the girls over it.
Spencer gestured for the girls to move in closer. “This has got to stop,” she said angrily. “If A knows where we are at all times, then A must be bugging us somehow. A’s trying to pin all these crimes we didn’t commit on us, and if we don’t act soon, A might just succeed.”
“What do we do?” Hanna yelled over the leaf blower.
“I say we go rogue,” Spencer declared. “We get rid of our current phones and phone numbers. If we need cell phones for absolute emergencies, we can get a burner cell, but we can’t tell one another anything critical on calls or voicemails. We should use a code phrase.”
“What about not it?” Emily piped up.
“That’s perfect,” Spencer said. “And we can’t give the number out to anyone else except for our parents.”
Aria shifted her weight. “What about boyfriends?”