Sara Shepard - Unbelievable

“Ali,” Hanna urged. “What do you mean, you’re okay?”

Ali wasn’t paying attention. She watched Melissa as she strode through the Hastingses’ bordering yard, her graduation gown slung over her arm. “Hey, Melissa!” Ali cooed. “Excited to go to Prague?”

“Who cares about her?” Hanna shouted. “Answer my question!”

“Is Hanna… talking ?” a far-off voice gasped. Hanna cocked her head. That didn’t sound like any of her old friends.

Across the yard, Melissa put her hand on her hip. “Of course I’m excited.”

“Is Ian going?” Ali asked.

Hanna grabbed the sides of Ali’s face. “Ian doesn’t matter,” she said forcefully. “Just listen to me, Ali!”

“Who’s Ian?” The far-off voice sounded like it was coming from the other end of a very long tunnel. Mona Vanderwaal’s voice. Hanna looked around Ali’s backyard, but didn’t see Mona anywhere.

Ali turned to Hanna, heaving an exasperated sigh. “Give it a rest, Hanna.”

“But you’re in danger,” Hanna sputtered.

“Things aren’t always what they seem,” Ali whispered.

“What do you mean?” Hanna urged desperately. When she reached out for Ali, her hand went right through Ali’s arm, like Ali was just an image projected onto a screen.

“What does who mean?” Mona’s voice called.

Hanna’s eyes popped open. A bright, painful light practically blinded her. She was lying on her back on an uncomfortable mattress. Several figures stood around her—Mona, Lucas Beattie, her mother, and her father.

Her father ? Hanna tried to frown, but her face muscles were in excruciating pain.

“Hanna.” Mona’s chin wobbled. “Oh my God. You’re… awake .”

“Are you okay, honey?” her mother asked. “Can you talk?”

Hanna glanced down at her arms. At least they were thin and not ham hocks. Then, she saw the IV tube sticking out of the crook in her elbow and the clunky cast on her arm. “What’s going on?” she croaked, looking around. The scene in front of her eyes seemed staged. Where she’d just been—on Ali’s back porch, with her old best friends—seemed far more real. “Where’s Ali?” she asked.

Hanna’s parents exchanged uneasy looks. “Ali’s dead,” Hanna’s mother said quietly.

“Go easy on her.” A white-haired, hawk-nosed man in a white coat swept around a curtain to the foot of Hanna’s bed. “Hanna? My name’s Dr. Geist. How do you feel?”

“Where the hell am I?” Hanna demanded, her voice rising with panic.

Hanna’s father took her hand. “You had an accident. We were really worried.”

Hanna looked fitfully at the faces around her, then at the various contraptions that fed into different parts of her body. In addition to the IV drip, there was a machine that measured her heartbeat and a tube that sent oxygen into her nose. Her body felt hot, then cold, and her skin prickled with fear and confusion. “Accident?” she whispered.

“A car hit you,” Hanna’s mother said. “At Rosewood Day. Can you remember?”

Her hospital sheets felt sticky, like someone had drizzled nacho cheese all over them. Hanna searched her memory, but nothing about an accident was there. The last thing she remembered, before sitting in Ali’s backyard, was receiving the champagne-colored Zac Posen dress for Mona’s birthday party. That had been Friday night, the day before Mona’s celebration. Hanna turned to Mona, who looked both distraught and relieved. Her eyes had huge, kind of ugly purple circles under them, too, as if she hadn’t slept in days. “I didn’t miss your party, did I?”

Lucas made a sniffing noise. Mona’s shoulders tensed. “No…”

“The accident happened afterward,” Lucas said. “You don’t remember?”

Hanna tried to pull the oxygen tube out of her nose—no one looked attractive with something dangling from a nostril—and found that it had been taped down. She closed her eyes and grappled for something, anything, to explain all this. But the only thing she saw was Ali’s face looming over her and whispering something before dissipating into black nothingness.

“No,” Hanna whispered. “I don’t remember any of that at all.”

Late Monday evening, Emily sat on a faded blue bar stool at the counter of the M&J diner across from the Greyhound station in Akron, Ohio. She hadn’t eaten anything all day and contemplated ordering a piece of nasty-looking cherry pie to go with her metallic-tasting coffee. Next to her, an old man slowly slurped a spoonful of tapioca pudding, and a bowling pin–shaped man and his knitting needle–shaped friend were shoveling down greasy burgers and fries. The jukebox was playing some twangy country song, and the hostess leaned heavily against the register, polishing dust off the Ohio-shaped magnets that were on sale for ninety-nine cents.

“Where you headed?” a voice asked.

Emily looked into the eyes of the diner’s fry cook, a sturdy man who looked like he did a lot of bow hunting when he wasn’t making grilled cheese. Emily searched for a name tag, but he wasn’t wearing one. His red ball cap had a big, singular letter A stitched in the center. She licked her lips, shivering a little. “How do you know I’m headed somewhere?”

He gave her a knowing look. “You’re not from here. And Greyhound’s across the street. And you have a big duffel bag. Clever, aren’t I?”

Emily sighed, staring into her cup of coffee. It had taken her less than twenty minutes to power-walk the mile from Helene’s to the mini mart down the road, even with her heavy duffel in tow. Once there, she’d found a ride to the bus station, and had bought a ticket for the first bus out of Iowa. Unfortunately it had been going to Akron, a place where Emily knew absolutely no one. Worse, the bus smelled like someone had bad gas, and the guy sitting next to her had his iPod cranked up to maximum volume while he sang along to Fall Out Boy, a band she detested. Then, weirdly, when the bus pulled into the Akron station, Emily had discovered a crab scuttling around under her seat. A crab, even though they were nowhere near an ocean. When she’d stumbled into the terminal and noticed that the big departures board said there was a 10 P.M. bus to Philadelphia, an ache had welled up inside her. She’d never missed Pennsylvania as much as she did now.

Emily shut her eyes, finding it hard to believe that she was really, truly running away. There were many times she’d imagined running away before—Ali used to say she’d go with her. Hawaii was one of their top five choices. So was Paris. Ali said they could assume different identities. When Emily protested, saying that sounded difficult, Ali shrugged and said, “Nah. Becoming someone else is probably really easy.” Wherever they chose, they promised to spend tons of uninterrupted time together, and Emily had always secretly hoped that maybe, just maybe, Ali would have realized she loved Emily as much as Emily loved her. But in the end, Emily always felt bad and said, “Ali, you have no reason to run away. Your life is perfect here.” And Ali would shrug in response, saying Emily was right, her life was pretty perfect.

Until someone killed her.

The fry cook turned up the volume on the tiny TV sitting next to the eight-slice toaster and an open package of Wonder Bread. When Emily looked up, she saw a CNN reporter standing in front of the familiar Rosewood Memorial Hospital. Emily knew it well—she passed it every morning on her drive to Rosewood Day.

“We have reports that Hanna Marin, seventeen-year-old resident of Rosewood and friend to Alison DiLaurentis, the girl whose body mysteriously turned up in her old backyard about a month ago, has just awakened from the coma she’d been in since Saturday night’s tragic accident,” the reporter said into her microphone.