“Is this a dream?” she asked her friends, her grin stretched wide.
“Maybe,” Spencer said, looking just as dazed. Then she reached out and took Hanna’s hand, breaking out into a smile. Hanna reached for Emily on her other side, and Em reached for Aria.
Hand-in-hand, the four girls walked into the lobby together. Reporters pounced on them immediately with questions, microphones thrust in their faces. “What did you think when you saw Alison today?” one yelled. “Do you think she’ll get the death penalty?” “Emily, how did you find her?” “What are your thoughts on this whole ordeal?”
For some reason, Hanna felt compelled to answer that last one. She leaned toward the reporter and took a deep breath. “What are my thoughts on this whole ordeal?” she repeated, pausing to contemplate. And then she thought of the perfect answer. “Ali didn’t manage to kill us,” she said. “She only made us stronger.”
32
A CLEAN SLATE
The smell of something salty and delicious woke Aria from a deep dream. She opened her eyes, expecting to feel the immediate aches and pains of sleeping on a hard prison mattress, but instead she was lying in her old, familiar bed, surrounded by a million pillows. Her art posters hung on the walls, and her pig puppet, Pigtunia, peered out from the foot of the bed. Her recently returned cell phone blinked cheerfully on her desk.
She shot up like a start, everything rushing back. A miracle had happened. She was home. And Ali was in jail.
Aria leapt out of bed and grabbed her phone. There were a ton of Google Alerts for Ali, all of them mentioning her capture. Aria scrolled down to the bottom, searching. There was no mention of Ali escaping from jail this morning, though. No prison attacks, no strange disappearances. Ali was behind bars, for real.
But Aria still felt uneasy. Last night before bed, she’d checked every window and door to make sure it was locked. When she’d called her friends, they’d seemed just as paranoid. It would take a little time for them to shake the Ali fear. Aria just hoped it would go away eventually.
She pulled on her favorite robe, slipped the phone in her pocket, and strode downstairs.
Her mom stood at the stove, scrambling eggs. She looked up at Aria and smiled. “Morning,” she said, pushing the hair out of Aria’s eyes. “How did you sleep?”
“Really well,” Aria said in a froggy voice, still feeling a little bewildered. “I guess a sleepless night in prison will do that.”
Ella paused from making eggs to wrap her arms around Aria. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” she said gently.
Aria shrugged. “I’m sorry I took off for Europe without telling you.” She peeked at Ella. “Are you really mad?” she asked in a small voice.
Ella sighed. “Just don’t do it again, okay?” She shook a spatula at her. “I mean it. You have nothing to hide now. Everyone believes you about Alison.”
Her gaze drifted toward the TV in the corner. Not surprisingly, Ali’s face flashed on the screen. The report was a rehash of yesterday’s events—Ali coming into the courthouse, the ruling overturned, the girls going free, and Ali being locked up. The latest news, though, was that Ali had been put into the prison’s psych ward, and she’d suddenly changed her story, confessing to framing the girls, faking the journal, and constructing an elaborate murder scene.
The prison psychiatrist appeared on TV. “Miss DiLaurentis keeps calling herself A,” he told the reporter. “She has said, repeatedly, I’m A. I did it. It was me all along.”
“Whoa,” Aria whispered. Ali, confessing to being A? That was a new one.
Ella let out a tsk. “I guess she’s trying to plead insanity. Otherwise, why would she admit to all that?”
Aria winced. “Does that mean she might get out sooner?”
Ella shook her head. “Doubtful. In prison, you serve your sentence, and then you can go. At the psych ward, they can extend your stay indefinitely.”
Aria rolled her jaw. Maybe that was so, but Ali was smart. She wouldn’t have gotten herself thrown into the psych ward if she didn’t think there was something in it for her. Probably she thought she could figure out how to escape from it.