Wednesday morning, Aria’s father, Byron, rubbed his bushy black hair and hand-signaled out the Subaru window that he was making a left-hand turn. The turn signals had stopped working last night, so he was driving Aria and Mike to their second day of school and taking the car to the shop.
“You guys happy to be back in America?” Byron asked.
Mike, who sat next to Aria in the backseat, grinned. “America rocks.” He went back to maniacally punching the tiny buttons of his PSP. It made a farting noise and Mike pumped one fist in the air.
Aria’s father smiled and navigated across the single-lane stone bridge, waving to a neighbor as he passed. “Well, good. Now, why does it rock?”
“America rocks because it has lacrosse,” Mike said, not taking his eyes off his PSP. “And hotter chicks. And a Hooters in King of Prussia.”
Aria laughed. Like Mike had been inside Hooters. Unless…Oh God, had he?
She shivered in her kelly green alpaca shrug and stared out the window at the thick fog. A woman wearing a long, red hooded stadium jacket that said, UPPER MAIN LINE SOCCER MOM, tried to stop her German shepherd from chasing a squirrel across the street. At the corner, two blondes with high-tech baby carriages stood together gossiping.
There was one word to describe yesterday’s English class: brutal. After Ezra blurted out, “Holy shit,” the whole class turned and stared at her. Hanna Marin, who sat in front of her, whispered in a not-so-quiet voice, “Did you sleep with the teacher?” Aria considered, for a half second, that maybe Hanna had written her the text message about Ezra—Hanna was one of the few people who knew about Pigtunia. But why would Hanna care?
Ezra—er, Mr. Fitz—had dispelled the laughing quickly, and come up with the lamest excuse for swearing in class. He said, and Aria quoted in her head, “I was afraid that a bee had flown into my pants, and I thought the bee was going to sting me, and so I yelled out in terror.”
As Ezra then started talking about five-paragraph themes and the class’s syllabus, Aria couldn’t concentrate. She was the bee that had flown into his pants. She couldn’t stop looking at his wolfish eyes and his sumptuous pink mouth. When he peeked in her direction out of the corner of his eye, her heart did two and a half somersaults off the high dive and landed in her stomach.
Ezra was the guy for her, and she was the girl for him—she just knew it. So what if he was her teacher? There had to be a way to make it work.
Her father pulled up to Rosewood’s stone-gated entrance. In the distance, Aria noticed a vintage powder-blue Volkswagen beetle parked in the teacher’s lot. She knew that car from Snooker’s—it was Ezra’s. She checked her watch. Fifteen minutes until homeroom.
Mike shot out of the car. Aria opened her door as well, but her father touched her forearm. “Hang on a sec,” he said.
“But I have to…” She glanced longingly at Ezra’s bug.
“Just for a minute.” Her father turned down the radio volume. Aria slumped back in her seat. “You’ve seemed a little…” He flicked his wrist back and forth uncertainly. “You okay?”
Aria shrugged. “About what?”
Her father sighed. “Well…I don’t know. Being back. And we haven’t talked about…you know…in a while.”
Aria fidgeted with her jacket’s zipper. “What’s there to talk about?”
Byron stuck a cigarette he’d rolled before they left into his mouth. “I can’t imagine how hard it’s been. Keeping quiet. But I love you. You know that, right?”
Aria looked out at the parking lot again. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “I have to go. I’ll see you at three.”
Before he could answer, Aria shot out of the car, blood rushing in her ears. How was she supposed to be Icelandic Aria, who left her past behind, if one of her worst memories of Rosewood kept bubbling to the surface?
It had happened in May of seventh grade. Rosewood Day had dismissed the students early for teacher conferences, so Aria and Ali headed to Sparrow, Hollis campus’s music store, to search for new CDs. As they cut through a back alley, Aria noticed her father’s familiar beat-up brown Honda Civic in a far-off space in an empty parking lot. As Aria and Ali walked toward the car to leave a note, they realized there was someone inside. Actually, two someones: Aria’s father, Byron, and a girl, about twenty years old, kissing his neck.