Sara Shepard: Heartless

“Of course she’d miss us,” Emily snapped. And then she burst into tears.

Spencer looked over, rolling her eyes. “God, Emily. Do you have to do that right now?”

“Lay off her,” Aria snapped.

Spencer turned her gaze to Aria, canvassing her up and down. “Your nose ring is crooked,” she pointed out, more than a tinge of nastiness in her voice.

Aria felt for the stick-on, bedazzled nose stud on her left nostril. Somehow, it had slipped almost to her cheek. She pushed it back into position and then, in a rush of self-consciousness, pulled it off altogether.

There was a rustling noise, and then a loud crunch. They turned and saw Hanna reaching into her purse for a handful of Cheez-Its. When Hanna noticed them watching warily, she froze. “What?” she said, a halo of orange around her mouth.

Each girl stood silently for a moment. Emily blotted her tears. Hanna took another sneaky handful of Cheez-Its. Aria fiddled with the buckles of her motorcycle boots. And Spencer crossed her arms, looking bored with them. Without Ali there, the girls suddenly seemed so defective. Uncool, even.

A deafening roar sounded from Ali’s backyard. The girls turned and saw a red cement truck positioned next to a large hole. The DiLaurentises were building a twenty-person gazebo. A scruffy, scrawny worker with a stubby blond ponytail raised his mirrored sunglasses at the girls. He gave them a lascivious smile, revealing a gold front tooth. A bald, beefy, heavily tattooed worker in a skimpy wifebeater and torn jeans whistled. The girls shivered uneasily—Ali had told them stories about how the workers were constantly calling out lewd comments as she passed. Then one of the workers signaled to the guy at the wheel of the cement mixer, and the truck slowly backed up. Slate gray concrete oozed down a long chute into the hole.

Ali had been telling them about this gazebo project for weeks. It was going to have a hot tub on one side and a fire pit on the other. Big plants, bushes, and trees would surround the whole thing so the gazebo would feel tropical and serene.

“Ali’s going to love that gazebo,” Emily s aid confidently. “She’ll have the best parties there.”

The others nodded cautiously. They hoped they’d be invited. They hoped this wasn’t the end of an era.

And then they parted ways, each girl going home. Spencer wandered into her kitchen, gazing out the back windows at the barn where the dreadful sleepover had taken place. So what if Ali ditched them forever? Her friends might be devastated, but maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Spencer was over Ali pushing her around.

When she heard a sniffle, she jumped. Her mother was sitting at the island counter, staring into space, her eyes glassy. “Mom?” Spencer said softly, but her mother didn’t answer.

Aria walked down the DiLaurentises’ driveway. The family’s trash cans sat on the curb, waiting for the Saturday garbage collection. One of the lids had fallen off, and Aria saw an empty prescription bottle sitting on top of a black plastic bag. The label was mostly scratched off, but Ali’s name was printed there in block letters. Aria wondered if they were antibiotics or spring allergy meds—the pollen in Rosewood was brutal this year.

Hanna waited on one of the boulders in Spencer’s front yard for her mom to pick her up. Mona Vanderwaal was riding her scooter around the cul-de-sac. Could Mrs. DiLaurentis be right? Had someone dared to tease Ali, just like Ali and the others taunted Mona?

Emily grabbed her bike and walked to Ali’s backwoods for the shortcut back to her house. The gazebo workers were taking a break. That same scrawny guy with the gold tooth was horsing around with someone sporting a wispy mustache, inattentive to the concrete as it flowed from the cement mixer into the hole. Their cars—a dented Honda, two pickups, and a bumper sticker-slathered Jeep Cherokee—were parked along the curb. At the very end of the line was a vaguely familiar black vintage sedan. It was nicer than the others, and Emily could see her reflection in the shiny doors as she biked past. Her face looked pensive. What would she do if Ali didn’t want to be her friend anymore?

As the sun rose higher in the sky, each girl wondered what would happen if Ali dropped them cold, like she had Naomi and Riley. But none of them paid any attention to Mrs. DiLaurentis’s frantic questions. She was Ali’s mom—it was her job to worry.

None of them could have predicted that by the following day, the DiLaurentises’ front lawn would be filled with news vans and police cars. Nor could they have known where Ali truly was or whom she’d really planned on meeting when she’d run out of the barn that night. No, on that pretty June day, the first full day of summer vacation, they pushed Mrs. DiLaurentis’s concerns aside. Bad things didn’t happen in places like Rosewood. And they certainly didn’t happen to girls like Ali. She’s fine, they thought. She’ll be back.

And three years later, maybe, just maybe, they were finally right

Emily Fields opened her eyes and looked around. She was lying in the middle of Spencer Hastings’s backyard, surrounded by a wall of smoke and flames. Gnarled tree branches snapped and dropped to the ground with deafening thuds. Heat radiated from the woods, making it feel like it was the middle of July, not the end of January.

Emily’s other old best friends, Aria Montgomery and Hanna Marin, were nearby, dressed in soiled silk and sequined party dresses, coughing hysterically. Sirens roared behind them. Fire truck lights whirled in the distance. Four ambulances barreled onto the Hastingses’ lawn, giving no heed to the perfectly shaped shrubs and flower beds.

A paramedic in a white uniform burst through the billowing smoke. “Are you all right?” he cried, kneeling down at Emily’s side.

Emily felt as if she’d awakened from a yearlong sleep. Something huge had just happened . . . but what?

The paramedic caught her arm before she collapsed to the ground again. “You’ve inhaled a lot of smoke,” he yelled. “Your brain isn’t getting enough oxygen. You’re lapsing in and out of consciousness.” He placed an oxygen mask over her face.

A second person swam into view. It was a Rosewood cop Emily didn’t recognize, a man with silvery hair and kind green eyes. “Is there anyone else in the woods besides the four of you?” he shouted over the din.

Emily’s lips parted, scrambling for an answer that felt just beyond her reach. And then, like a light switching on, everything that had happened in the last few hours flooded back to her.

All those texts from A, the torturous new text messager, insisting that Ian Thomas hadn’t killed Alison DiLaurentis. The sign-in book Emily had found at the Radley hotel party with Jason DiLaurentis’s name all through it, indicating he might have been a patient back when the Radley was a mental hospital. Ian confirming on IM that Jason and Darren Wilden, the cop working on Ali’s murder case, had been the ones to kill Ali—and warning them that Jason and Wilden would stop at nothing to keep them quiet.

And then the flicker. The horrible sulfuric smell. The ten acres of woods bursting into flames.

They’d run blindly to Spencer’s yard, catching up with

Aria, who’d cut through the woods from her new house one street over. Aria had a girl with her, someone who’d been trapped in the fiery woods. Someone Emily thought she’d never see again.

Emily pulled the oxygen mask away from her face. “ Alison, ” she shouted. “Don’t forget Alison!”

The cop cocked his head. The paramedic cupped his hand to his ear. “Who?”