Perfect

Aria swiveled around. Ezra stood a few feet away. His brown hair was standing up in messy peaks and his blazer was even more rumpled than it had been this morning. “I thought you literary types were hopeless when it came to cars,” she joked.

“I’m full of surprises.” Ezra shot her a seductive smile. He reached into his worn leather briefcase. “Actually, I have something for you. It’s an essay about The Scarlet Letter, questioning whether adultery is sometimes permissible.”

Aria took the photocopied pages from him. “I don’t think adultery is permissible or forgivable,” she said softly. “Ever.”

“Ever is a long time,” Ezra murmured. He was standing so close, Aria could see the dark-blue flecks in his light-blue eyes.

“Aria?” Sean was right next to her.

“Hey!” Aria cried, startled. She jumped away from Ezra as if he were loaded with electricity. “You…you all done?”

“Yep,” Sean said.

Ezra stepped forward. “Hey, Sean is it? I’m Ez—I mean, Mr. Fitz, the new AP English teacher.”

Sean shook his hand. “I just take regular English. I’m Aria’s boyfriend.”

A flicker of something—disappointment, maybe—passed over Ezra’s face. “Cool,” he stumbled. “You play soccer, right? Congrats on your win last week.”

“That’s right,” Sean said modestly. “We have a good team this year.”

“Cool,” Ezra said again. “Very cool.”

Aria felt like she should explain to Ezra why she and Sean were together. Sure, he was a Typical Rosewood Boy, but he was really much deeper. Aria stopped herself. She didn’t owe Ezra any explanations. He was her teacher.

“We should go,” she said abruptly, taking Sean’s arm. She wanted to get out of here before either of them embarrassed her. What if Sean made a grammatical error? What if Ezra blurted that they’d hooked up? No one at Rosewood knew about that. No one, that was, except for A.

Aria slid into the passenger seat of Sean’s tidy, pine-smelling Audi, feeling itchy. She longed for a few private minutes to collect herself, but Sean slumped into the driver’s seat right next to her and pecked her on the cheek. “I missed you today,” he said.

“Me too,” Aria answered automatically, her voice tight in her throat. As she peeked through her side window, she saw Ezra in the teacher’s lot, climbing into his beat-up, old-school VW Bug. He had added a new sticker to the bumper—ECOLOGY HAPPENS—and it looked like he’d washed the car over the weekend. Not that she was obsessively checking or anything.

As Sean waited for other students to back out in front of him, he rubbed his cleanly shaven jaw and fiddled with the collar of his fitted Penguin polo. If Sean and Ezra had been types of poetry, Sean would have been a haiku—neat, simple, beautiful. Ezra would have been one of William Burroughs’s messy fever dreams. “Want to hang out later?” Sean asked. “Go out to dinner? Hang with Ella?”

“Let’s go out,” Aria decided. It was so sweet how Sean liked to spend time with Ella and Aria. The three of them had even watched Ella’s Truffaut DVD collection together—in spite of the fact that Sean said he really didn’t understand French films.

“One of these days you’ll have to meet my family.” Sean finally pulled out of the Rosewood lot behind an Acura SUV.

“I know, I know,” Aria said. She felt nervous about meeting Sean’s family—she’d heard they were wildly rich and super-perfect. “Soon.”

“Well, Coach wants the soccer team to go to that big swim meet tomorrow for school support. You’re going to watch Emily, right?”

“Sure,” Aria answered.

“Well, maybe Wednesday, then? Dinner?”

“Maybe.”

As they pulled onto the wooded road that paralleled Rosewood Day, Aria’s Treo chimed. She pulled it out nervously—her knee-jerk response whenever she got a text was that it would be A, even though A seemed to be gone. The new text, however, was from an unfamiliar 484 number. A’s notes always came up “unavailable.” She clicked READ.

Aria: We need to talk. Can we meet outside the Hollis art building today at 4:30? I’ll be on campus waiting for Meredith to finish teaching. I’d love for us to chat.

—Your dad, Byron

Aria stared at the screen in disgust. It was disturbing on so many levels. One, her dad had a cell phone now? For years, he’d shunned them, saying they gave you brain cancer. Two, he’d texted her—what was next, a MySpace page?

And three…the letter itself. Especially the qualifying Your dad at the end. Did he think she’d forgotten who he was?

“You all right?” Sean took his eyes off the winding, narrow road for a moment.

Aria read Sean Byron’s text. “Can you believe it?” she asked when she finished. “It sounds like he just needs someone to occupy him while he waits for that skank to finish teaching her class.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Not go.” Aria shuddered, thinking of the times she’d seen Meredith and her father together. In seventh grade, she and Ali had caught them kissing in her dad’s car, and then a few weeks ago, she and her younger brother, Mike, had happened upon them at the Victory Brewery. Meredith had told Aria that she and Byron were in love, but how was that possible? “Meredith is a homewrecker. She’s worse than Hester Prynne!”

“Who?”

“Hester Prynne. She’s the main character in The Scarlet Letter—we’re reading it for English. It’s about this woman who commits adultery and the town shuns her. I think Rosewood should shun Meredith. Rosewood needs a town scaffold—to humiliate her.”

“How about that pillory thing at the fairgrounds?” Sean suggested, slowing down as they passed a cyclist.

“You know that wooden contraption with the holes you can stick your head and arms through? They lock you up in it and you just hang there. We always used to get our pictures taken in that thing.”

“Perfect,” Aria practically shouted. “And Meredith deserves to have ‘husband-stealer’ branded on her forehead. Just stitching a red letter A to her dress would be too subtle.”

Sean laughed. “It sounds like you’re really into The Scarlet Letter.”

“I don’t know. I’ve only read eight pages.” Aria grew silent, getting an idea. “Actually, wait. Drop me off at Hollis.”

Sean gave her a sidelong glance. “You’re going to meet him?”

“Not exactly.” She smiled devilishly.

“Ohhhhkay…” Sean drove a few blocks through the Hollis section of town, which was filled with brick and stone buildings, old bronze statues of the college founders, and tons of shabby-chic students on bicycles. It seemed like it was permanently fall at Hollis—the colorful cascading leaves looked perfect here. As Sean pulled into a two-hour parking spot on campus, he looked worried. “You’re not going to do anything illegal, are you?”

“Nah.” Aria gave him a quick kiss. “Don’t wait. I can walk home from here.”

Squaring her shoulders, she marched into the Arts Building’s main entrance. Her father’s text flashed before her eyes. I’m on campus waiting for Meredith to finish teaching. Meredith had told Aria herself that she taught studio art at Hollis. She slid by a security guard, who was supposed to be checking IDs but was instead watching a Yankees game on his portable TV. Her nerves felt jangled and snappy, as if they were ungrounded wires.

There were only three studio classrooms in the building that were big enough for a painting class, which Aria knew, because she’d attended Saturday art school at Hollis for years. Today, only one room was in use, so it had to be the one. Aria burst noisily through the doors of the classroom and was immediately assaulted by the smell of turpentine and unwashed clothes. Twelve art students with easels set up in a circle swiveled around to stare at her. The only person who didn’t move was the wrinkly, hairless, completely naked old drawing model in the center of the room. He stuck his bandy little chest out, kept his hands on his hips, and didn’t even blink. Aria had to give him an A for effort.

She spied Meredith perched on a table by the far window. There was her long, luscious brown hair. There was the pink spiderweb tattoo on her wrist. Meredith looked strong and confident, and there was an irritating, healthy pink flush to her cheeks.

“Aria?” Meredith called across the drafty, cavernous room. “This is a surprise.”

Aria looked around. All of the students had their brushes and paints within easy reach of their canvases. She marched over to the student closest to her, snatched a large, fan-shaped brush, swiped it in a puddle of red paint, and strode over to Meredith, dribbling paint as she went. Before anyone could do anything, Aria painted a large, messy A on the left breast of Meredith’s delicate, cotton eyelet sundress.

“Now everyone will know what you’ve done,” Aria snarled.

Giving Meredith no time to react, she whirled around and strode out of the room. When she got out onto Hollis’s green lawn again, she started gleefully, crazily laughing. It wasn’t a “husband-stealer” brand across her forehead, but it might as well have been. There, Meredith. Take that.

6

SIBLING RIVALRY’S A HARD HABIT TO BREAK

Monday afternoon at field hockey practice, Spencer pulled ahead of her teammates on their warm-up lap around the field. It had been an unseasonably warm day and the girls were all a little slower than usual. Kirsten Cullen pumped her arms to catch up. “I heard about the Golden Orchid,” Kirsten said breathlessly, readjusting her blond ponytail. “That’s awesome.”

“Thanks.” Spencer ducked her head. It was amazing how fast the news had spread at Rosewood Day—her mother had only told her six hours ago. At least ten people had come up to talk to her about it since then.

“I heard John Mayer won a Golden Orchid when he was in high school,” Kirsten continued. “It was, like, an essay for AP music theory.”

“Huh.” Spencer was pretty sure John Mayer hadn’t won it—she knew every winner from the past fifteen years.

“I bet you’ll win,” Kirsten said. “And then you’ll be on TV! Can I come with you for your debut on the Today show?”

Spencer shrugged. “It’s a really cutthroat competition.”

“Shut up.” Kirsten slapped her on the shoulder. “You’re always so modest.”

Spencer clenched her teeth. As much as she’d been trying to downplay this Golden Orchid thing, everyone’s reaction had been the same—You’ll definitely win it. Get ready for your close-up!—and it was making her crazy. She had nervously organized and reorganized the money in her wallet so many times today that one of her twenties had split right down the center.

Coach McCready blew the whistle and yelled, “Crossovers!” The team immediately turned and began running sideways. They looked like dressage competitors at the Devon Horse Show. “You hear about the Rosewood Stalker?” Kirsten asked, huffing a little—crossovers were harder than they looked. “It was all over the news last night.”