Ali thought a moment. “Both,” she decided. “And some bacon,” she added. “And grapefruit juice, if you can find some.”
A shadow flickered under the door. “Okay,” came the voice. “Be back soon.”
Ali listened as the footsteps grew softer. She turned back to her closet and pulled on a white T-shirt and a long, white, gauzy skirt, which was beyond hideous but fit her expanding hips. She glanced at herself in the mirror and almost didn’t recognize the girl looking back, a larger, unwieldy creature with mousy-brown hair and blotchy, messed-up skin. It was only a temporary situation, though—soon enough, she would go back to being beautiful. This was who she needed to be right now: someone other than herself. A nobody. A nothing. A ghost, which made it even more appropriate that most of her new clothes were white.
Outside, a car swished past. A boat horn honked. As Ali thought of her imminent breakfast, all the wary twinges faded away. How unbelievably luxurious that deciding what she would eat was her one and only concern! All that other stuff? She didn’t feel shitty about it at all. Only the strong survive, after all. And soon enough, she’d have a new life. A better one than what she’d had in a long, long time.
And those four bitches would have no life at all.
1
BAD NEWS, AND MORE BAD NEWS
On a balmy Thursday morning in mid-June, Emily Fields sat next to her best friends Hanna Marin, Spencer Hastings, and Aria Montgomery in a large, airy conference room that overlooked the Philadelphia waterfront. The room smelled like coffee and Danishes, and the office bustled with the sounds of ringing phones, whirring printers, and click-clacking high heels on female attorneys rushing off to court. When Seth Rubens, their new lawyer, cleared his throat, Emily looked up. By his pained expression, she suspected she wasn’t going to like what he had to say.
“Your case doesn’t look good.” Rubens stirred his coffee with a thin wooden stick. He had bags under his eyes, and he wore the same cologne as Emily’s dad, a summery scent called Royall Bay Rhum. The smell used to cheer Emily up, but not anymore.
“The district attorney has gathered a lot of evidence against you for Alison’s murder,” he went on. “You being on the scene when the crime happened. The shoddy cleanup job. Your prints all over the house. The tooth they found at the scene. Emily’s, er, episode”—here he glanced nervously at Emily—“prior to the event. I’m happy to represent you, and I’ll do all I can, but I don’t want to give you false hope.”
Emily slumped down. Ever since their arrest for the murder of Alison DiLaurentis—also known as A, their longtime enemy, almost-killer, and diabolical text-messager—Emily had lost ten pounds, couldn’t stop crying, and thought she was going crazy. They were all out on bail after only a few hours in jail, but their trial would begin in five days. Emily had been through six lawyers, and her friends had done the same. None of the lawyers had given them hope—including Rubens, who’d allegedly gotten mafia bosses out of mass-killing charges.
Aria leaned forward and looked the lawyer square in the eye. “How many times can we explain this? Ali set us up. She knew we were staking out that pool house. She knew we were getting desperate. That blood was on the floor when we got there. And we were upstairs when whoever it was cleaned it up.”
Rubens looked at them tiredly. “But you didn’t see who that was, did you?”
Emily picked at her thumbnail. And then, suddenly, she heard a giddy, taunting, crystal-clear voice: You didn’t. You know I’ve got you right where I want you.
It was Ali’s voice, but no one else seemed to hear it. Emily felt another barb of worry. She’d started to hear Ali a few days ago, and her voice was growing louder.
She thought about the lawyer’s question. In their hunt for Ali, they’d targeted a house in Ashland, Pennsylvania, the property of Ali’s boyfriend Nick Maxwell’s parents. At the very back of the property was a dilapidated pool house, the perfect place for Ali to hide out and plot her next move against them. They’d started to monitor the place, but then Spencer unwittingly told her friend Greg that they’d set up surveillance cameras. In a horrible turn of events, Greg ended up being an Ali Cat, one of Ali’s online minions. Their camera feed of the cabin was disconnected almost the second Spencer broke the news.