Sara Shepard - Perfect

“Did he go to Rosewood Day?” Hanna asked.

“Yeah, but he’s six years older than us. You probably wouldn’t remember him.”

“God. I’m so sorry,” Hanna whispered. “That sucks.”

Lucas shrugged. “A lot of people would probably just sit in their room and get stoned, but keeping busy works better for me.”

Hanna crossed her arms over her chest. “My way of staying sane is to eat a ton of cheese-based snacks and then throw them up.”

She covered her mouth. She couldn’t believe she just said that.

Lucas raised an eyebrow. “Cheese-based snacks, huh? Like Cheez-Its? Doritos?”

“Uh-huh.” Hanna stared at the balloon basket’s wooden bottom.

Lucas’s fingers fidgeted. His hands were strong and well proportioned and looked like they could give really great back rubs. All of a sudden, Hanna wanted to touch them. “My cousin had that…problem…too,” Lucas said softly. “She got over it.”

“How?”

“She got happy. She moved away.”

Hanna stared over the basket. They were flying over Cheswold, Rosewood’s wealthiest housing development. Hanna had always wanted to live in a Cheswold house, and up here, the estates looked even more amazing than they did at street level. But they also looked stiff and formal and not quite real—more like an idea of a house instead of something you’d actually want to live in.

“I used to be happy,” Hanna sighed. “I hadn’t done…the cheese thing…in years. But my life’s been awful lately. I am upset about Mona. But there’s more. It’s everything. Ever since I got that first note, things have gone from bad to worse.”

“Rewind.” Lucas leaned back. “Note?”

Hanna paused. She hadn’t meant to mention A. “Just these notes I’ve been getting. Someone’s teasing me with all this personal stuff.” She peeked at Lucas, hoping he wasn’t interested—most boys wouldn’t be. Unfortunately, he looked worried.

“That sounds mean.” Lucas furrowed his brow. “Who’s sending them?”

“Don’t know. At first, I thought it was Alison DiLaurentis.” She paused, pushing the hair out of her eyes. “I know that’s moronic, but the first notes talked about this thing that only she knew.”

Lucas made a disgusted face. “Alison’s body was found, what, a month ago? Someone’s impersonating her? That’s…that’s freaky.”

Hanna waved her arms. “No, I started getting the notes before Ali’s body was found, so no one knew she was dead yet….” Her head started to hurt. “It’s confusing and…don’t worry about it. Forget I said anything.”

Lucas looked at her uneasily. “Maybe you should call the cops.”

Hanna sniffed. “Whoever it is isn’t breaking any laws.”

“You don’t know who you’re dealing with, though,” Lucas said.

“It’s probably some dumb kid.”

Lucas paused. “Don’t the cops say that if you’re being harassed, like getting prank calls, it’s most likely from someone you know? I saw that on a crime show once.”

A chill went through Hanna. She thought of A’s note— One of your old friends is hiding something from you. Something big . She thought again about Spencer. Once, not long after Ali vanished, Spencer’s dad had taken the four of them to Wildwater Kingdom, a water park not too far from their house. As Hanna and Spencer were climbing the steps to the Devil’s Drop, Hanna had asked her if she and Ali were mad at each other about something.

Spencer’s face had turned the exact shade of her merlot-colored Tommy Hilfiger string bikini. “Why are you asking that?”

Hanna frowned, holding her foamy raft to her chest. “I was just curious.”

Spencer stepped closer. The air became very still, and all splashing and squealing sounds seemed to evaporate. “I wasn’t mad at Ali. She was mad at me. I have no clue why, okay?” Then she did a 180 and started marching back down the wooden staircase, practically knocking over other kids as she went.

Hanna curled her toes. She hadn’t thought of that day in a while.

Lucas cleared his throat. “What are the notes about? The cheese thing?”

Hanna stared at the skylights on top of the Rosewood Abbey, the site of Ali’s memorial. Screw it, she thought. She’d told Lucas about A—why not everything else? It was like that trust exercise she’d done on her sixth-grade camping trip: a girl in her bunk named Viviana Rogers had stood behind her and Hanna had to fall into her arms, having faith that she would catch Hanna instead of letting her clunk to the grass.

“Yeah, the cheese,” she said quietly. “And…well, you may have heard some of the other things. Plenty of stuff is going around about me. Like my father. He moved out a couple years ago and now lives with his beautiful stepdaughter. She wears a size two .”

“What size do you wear?” Lucas asked, confused.

She took a deep breath, ignoring that question. “And I got caught stealing, too—some jewelry from Tiffany, and Sean Ackard’s father’s car.”

She looked up, surprised to see that Lucas hadn’t jumped over the side of the balloon in disgust. “In seventh grade, I was a fat, ugly spaz. Even though I was friends with Alison, I still felt…like a nothing. Mona and I worked hard to change, and I thought we’d both become… Alison. It worked for a while, but not anymore.”

Hearing her problems out loud, she sounded like such a loser. But it also felt like the time she’d gone with Mona to a spa in the country and had a colonic. The process was gross, but afterward she felt so free.

“I’m glad you’re not Alison,” Lucas said quietly.

Hanna rolled her eyes. “Everyone loved Alison.”

“I didn’t.” Lucas avoided Hanna’s startled look. “I know that’s terrible to say, and I feel horrible about what happened to her. But she wasn’t very nice to me.” He blew a plume of fire into the balloon. “In seventh grade, Ali started a rumor that I was a hermaphrodite.”

Hanna looked up sharply. “Ali didn’t start that rumor.”

“She did. Actually, I started it for her. She asked if I was a hermaphrodite at a soccer game. I said I didn’t know—I had no idea what a hermaphrodite was . She laughed and told everyone. Later, when I looked it up, it was too late—it was everywhere.”

Hanna stared at him in disbelief. “Ali wouldn’t do that.”

But…Ali would do that. It was Ali who had gotten everyone to call Jenna Cavanaugh Snow. She’d spread the rumor that Toby had fish gills. Everyone had taken everything Ali said as gospel.

Hanna peered over the edge of the basket. That rumor about Lucas being a hermaphrodite had started after they found out he was going to send Hanna a heart-shaped box on Candy Day. Ali had even gone with Hanna to buy new glitter-pocketed Sevens to mark the occasion. She’d said she loved them, but she was probably lying about that, too.

“And you shouldn’t say you’re ugly, Hanna,” Lucas said. “You’re so, so pretty.”

Hanna stuck her chin into the collar of her shirt, feeling surprisingly shy.

“You are. I can’t stop looking at you.” Lucas grimaced.

“Yikes. I probably way overstepped the friends thing, huh?”

“It’s okay.” Heat spread over her skin. It made her feel so good to hear she was pretty. When had someone last told her that? Lucas was as different from perfect Sean as a boy could get. Lucas was tall and lanky, and not in the slightest bit cool, with his Rive Gauche job and ESP club and the sticker on the back of his car that said, SCISSOR SISTERS, which could be a band or a salon or a cult. But there was something else there, too—you just had to dig down to get to it, like how Hanna and her dad had once plundered the New Jersey beaches with their metal detector. They’d searched for hours and had found not one but two diamond earrings hiding under the sand.