Maya tossed the pi hall pass from one hand to the other. She gave Emily a quick kiss on the cheek, then sauntered out of the gym, her tall, sandstone-colored Frye boots clunking heavily against the wood floor. As Maya rounded the corner into the hall, Emily pulled out her cell phone, took a deep breath, and looked at the screen again.
Hey, Emily! I just heard the news that you’re GONE! I’m really going to miss you! Where do you live in PA? If you were a famous Philadelphia historical figure, who would you be? I’d be that guy on the Quaker Oats box…. He counts, right?
Maybe I could visit sometime? xxx, Trista
The gym’s central heater came on with a clank. Emily snapped her phone shut, and, after a pause, turned it off completely. Years ago, right before Emily had kissed Ali up in the DiLaurentises’ old tree house, Ali had confessed that she was secretly seeing an older guy. She’d never said what his name was, but Emily realized now that she must have been talking about Ian Thomas. Ali had grabbed Emily’s hands, full of giddy emotion. “Whenever I think about him, my stomach swoops around like I’m on a roller coaster,” she’d swooned. “Being in love is the best feeling in the world.”
Emily zipped up her hoodie to her chin. She thought she was in love, too, but it certainly didn’t make her feel like she was on a roller coaster. Inside the fun house was more like it—with surprises at every turn, and absolutely no idea what would happen next.
20
NO SECRETS BETWEEN FRIENDS
Thursday afternoon, Hanna stared at her reflection in the downstairs powder room mirror. She dabbed a bit of foundation on the stitches in her chin and winced. Why did stitches have to hurt so much? And why did Dr. Geist have to sew up her face with Frankenstein black thread? Couldn’t he have used a nice flesh-tone color?
She picked up her brand-new BlackBerry, considering. The phone had been waiting for her on the kitchen island when her father brought her home from the hospital earlier today. There was a card on the BlackBerry’s box that said, WELCOME HOME! LOVE, MOM. Now that Hanna wasn’t on the brink of death, her mother had returned to her round-the-clock hours at work, business as usual.
Hanna sighed, then dialed the number on the back of her foundation bottle. “Hello, Bobbi Brown hotline!” a cheerful voice on the other end chirped.
“This is Hanna Marin,” Hanna said briskly, trying to channel her inner Anna Wintour. “Can I book Bobbi for a makeup job?”
The hotline girl paused. “You’d have to go through Bobbi’s booking agent for something like that. But I think she’s really busy—”
“Can you get me her agent’s number anyway?”
“I don’t think I’m allowed to—”
“Sure you can,” Hanna cooed. “I won’t tell.”
After a bit of hemming and hawing, the girl put Hanna on hold, and someone else picked up the line and gave Hanna a 212 phone number. She wrote it down in lipstick on the bathroom mirror and hung up, feeling ambivalent. On one hand, it rocked that she could still push people to do exactly what she wanted. Only queen-of-the-school divas could do that. On the other hand, what if even Bobbi couldn’t fix Hanna’s mess of a face?
The doorbell rang. Hanna dabbed more foundation on her stitches and headed into the hall. That was probably Mona, coming over to help audition male models for her party. She’d told Hanna she wanted to book her the best hotties money could buy.
Hanna paused in the foyer next to her mother’s giant raku ceramic pot. What had Lucas meant at the hospital yesterday, when he said that Hanna shouldn’t trust Mona? And more than that, what had that kiss been about? Hanna had thought of little else since it happened. She’d expected to see Lucas at the hospital this morning, greeting her with magazines and a Starbucks latte. When he wasn’t there, she’d felt…disappointed. And this afternoon, after her father dropped her off, Hanna had lingered on All My Children on TV for three whole minutes before changing the channel. Two characters on the soap were passionately kissing, and she’d watched them, wide-eyed, with tingles running up and down her back again, suddenly able to relate.
Not that she liked Lucas or anything. He wasn’t in her stratosphere. And just to make sure, she’d asked Mona last night what she thought of Lucas, when Mona dropped off the coming-home-from-the-hospital outfit she’d selected from Hanna’s closet—skinny Seven jeans, a cropped plaid Moschino jacket, and an ultrasoft tee. Mona had said, “Lucas Beattie? Huge loser, Han. Always has been.”
So there you had it. No more Lucas. She would tell no one about the kiss, ever.
Hanna reached the front door, noticing the way Mona’s white-blond hair glowed through the frosted panels. She nearly fell over when she opened the door and saw Spencer standing there behind Mona. And Emily and Aria were walking up the front path. Hanna wondered if she’d accidentally told all of them to visit at the same time.
“Well, this is a surprise,” Hanna said nervously.
But it was Spencer who pushed around Mona and walked into Hanna’s house first. “We need to talk to you,” she said. Mona, Emily, and Aria followed, and the girls assembled on Hanna’s toffee-colored leather couches, sitting in the exact same seats they used to sit in when they used to be friends: Spencer in the big leather chair in the corner, and Emily and Aria on the couch. Mona had taken Ali’s seat, on the chaise by the window. When Hanna squinted, she could almost mistake Mona for Ali. Hanna snuck a look at Mona to see if she was pissed, but Mona looked sort of…okay.
Hanna sat down on the leather chair’s ottoman. “Um, we need to talk about what?” she asked Spencer. Aria and Emily looked a little confused too.
“We got another note from A after we left your hospital room,” Spencer blurted.
“Spencer,” Hanna hissed. Emily and Aria gaped at her too. Since when did they talk about A around other people?
“It’s okay,” Spencer said. “Mona knows. She’s been getting notes from A too.”