Sara Shepard - Pretty Little Liars

Sean shrugged. ‘Okay.’

Yes.

Hanna led Sean down a path to the Manhood Woods, the trees casting long, dark shadows across their bodies. The only other time Hanna had ever been here was in seventh grade, when her friends had a secret rendezvous with Noel Kahn and James Freed. Ali made out with Noel, Spencer made out with James, and she, Emily, and Aria sat on logs, shared cigarettes, and miserably waited for them to finish. Tonight, she vowed, would be different.

She sat down on a thick patch of grass and pulled Sean down with her. ‘You having fun?’ She passed her drink to Sean.

‘Yeah, it’s cool.’ Sean took a small sip. ‘You?’

Hanna hesitated. Sean’s skin shone in the moonlight. His shirt had a tiny smear of dirt on it near the collar. ‘I guess.’

All right, chatting time was over. Hanna took the drink out of Sean’s hand and grabbed his sweet, square jaw and started to kiss him. There. It sort of sucked that the world was kind of spinning, and that instead of tasting the inside of Sean’s mouth, she tasted Mike’s Hard Lemonade, but whatever.

After a minute of kissing, she felt Sean pulling away. Maybe this called for upping the ante a little. She hiked up her navy dress, exposing her legs and tiny lavender Cosabella lace thong. The woodsy air was cold. A mosquito landed on her upper thigh.

‘Hanna,’ Sean said gently, reaching to pull her dress back down. ‘This isn’t...’

He wasn’t fast enough, though; Hanna had already torn the dress over her head. Sean’s eyes canvassed her whole body. Amazingly, this was only the second time he’d seen her in her underwear – unless you counted the week they spent at his parents’ place in Avalon on the Jersey Shore, when she was in her bikini. But that was different.

‘You don’t really want to stop, do you?’ She reached toward him, hoping she looked smoldering yet wholesome.

‘Yeah.’ Sean caught her hand. ‘I do.’

Hanna wrapped herself up in her dress as best she could. She probably had a hundred mosquito bites already. Her lip trembled. ‘But . . . I don’t get it. Don’t you love me?’

The words felt very small and frail coming out of her mouth.

Sean took a long time to respond. Hanna heard another couple from the party giggling nearby. ‘I don’t know,’ he answered.

‘Jesus,’ Hanna said, rolling away from him. The vodka lemonades sloshed in her stomach. ‘Are you gay?’ It came out a little meaner than she meant it to.

‘No!’ Sean sounded hurt.

‘Well then what? Am I not hot enough?’

‘Of course not!’ Sean said, sounding shocked. He thought for a moment. ‘You’re one of the prettiest girls I know, Hanna. Why don’t you know that?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Hanna asked, disgusted.

‘I just . . . ,’ Sean started. ‘I just think that maybe if you could have a little more respect for yourself—’

‘I have plenty of self-respect!’ Hanna shouted at him. She shifted onto her butt, rolling onto a pine cone.

Sean stood up. He looked deflated and sad. ‘Look at you.’ His eyes traveled from her shoes to the top of her head. ‘I’m just trying to help you, Hanna – I care about you.’

Hanna felt tears gathering at the corners of her eyes and tried to choke them back down. She would not cry right now. ‘I respect myself,’ she repeated. ‘I just wanted to . . . to . . . show you how I feel.’

‘I’m just trying to be choosy about sex.’ He sounded not kind, but not mean, either. Just . . . detached. ‘I want it to be at the right time with the right person. And it doesn’t look like that’s going to be you.’ Sean sighed and took a step away from her. ‘I’m sorry.’ Then he pushed through the trees and was gone.

Hanna was so embarrassed and angry, she couldn’t speak. She tried to stand up to follow Sean, but her heel caught again and she fell over. She splayed her arms out and stared up at the stars, holding her thumbs over her eyes, so tears wouldn’t pour out of them.

‘She looks like she might puke.’

Hanna opened one eye and saw two freshman boys – most likely crashers – hovering over her as if she were a girl they’d created on their computers.

‘Fuck off, pervs,’ she said to the ogling freshmen as she stood up. Across the lawn, she could see Sean running after Mason Byers, wielding a yellow croquet mallet. Hanna sniffed as she brushed herself off and headed back toward the party. Didn’t anyone care about her? She thought of the letter she’d gotten yesterday. Even Daddy doesn’t love you best!

Hanna wished, suddenly, that she had her dad’s number, her mind flashing back to that day she’d met her dad and Isabel and Kate with Ali.

Although it had been February, the weather in Annapolis had been freakishly warm, and Hanna, Ali, and Kate had been sitting outside on the porch, trying to get tan. Ali and Kate were bonding over their favorite shades of MAC nail polish, but Hanna couldn’t get into it. She felt heavy and awkward. She’d seen Kate’s relieved expression when she and Ali first emerged from the train – surprise at how gorgeous Ali was, and then relief when she laid eyes on Hanna. It was as if Kate was thinking, Well, I don’t need to worry about her!

Without realizing it, Hanna had eaten the entire bowl of cheese popcorn that was on the table. And six of the profiteroles. And some of the Brie wedge that was meant for Isabel and her dad. She clutched her bloated stomach, gazed at Ali’s and Kate’s flat six-packs, and groaned out loud, without meaning to.

‘Little piggy doesn’t feel good?’ Hanna’s dad asked, squeezing her small toe.

Hanna shuddered at the memory and touched her now-slim stomach. A – whoever A was – was totally right. Her dad didn’t love her best.

‘Everyone in the pond!’ Noel shouted, snapping Hanna out of her thoughts.

Across the field, Hanna watched Sean pull off his T-shirt and run toward the water. Noel, James, Mason, and some other boys threw off their shirts, but Hanna didn’t even care. Of all the nights to see Rosewood’s hottest boys without their shirts on . . .

‘They’re all so gorgeous,’ murmured Felicity McDowell, who was mixing tequila with Fanta Grape, next to her. ‘Aren’t they?’

‘Mmm,’ she muttered.

Hanna ground her teeth together. Fuck her happy father and his perfect soon-to-be stepdaughter, and fuck Sean and his choosiness! She grabbed a bottle of Ketel One from the table and drank straight from it. She put the bottle back down but at the last second decided to bring it to the pond with her. Sean wasn’t going to get away with dumping her, insulting her, and then straight-up ignoring her. No way.

She stopped at a pile of clothes that were no doubt Sean’s – the jeans were neatly folded, and he’d anally stuffed his little white socks into his Pumas. Making sure no one was looking, she balled up the jeans in her hands and started backing away from the pond. What would the V Club say if they caught him driving home in his boxers?

As she walked toward the trees with Sean’s jeans, something fell and bounced off her foot. Hanna picked it up and stared at it for a moment, waiting for her vision to undouble.

The key to the BMW.

‘Sweet,’ she whispered, stroking the alarm button with her finger. Then she dropped the jeans back on the ground and shoved the keys into her blue quilted Moschino bag.

It was a gorgeous night for a drive.

‘Check it out,’ Maya whispered excitedly. ‘There used to be one of these in my favorite café back in Cali!’

Emily and Maya stared at the old-school photo booth at the perimeter of Noel’s yard and the woods. A long, orange extension cord wound its way to the booth from Noel’s house across the lawn. As they admired it, Noel’s older brother, Eric, and a very-giddy Mona Vanderwaal fell out of the booth, grabbed their photos, and skipped away.

Maya glanced at Emily. ‘Wanna try it?’

Emily nodded. Before they ducked inside, she quickly glanced around the party. Some kids were gathered around the keg and a lot of other people held their red plastic cups in the air as they danced. Noel and a bunch of boys were swimming in the duck pond in their boxers. Ben was nowhere to be seen.

Emily sat beside Maya on the photo booth’s little orange seat and closed the curtain. They were so squeezed together, their shoulders and thighs touched.

‘Here.’ Maya handed her the Jack Daniel’s bottle and hit the green start button. Emily did a shot, then held it up triumphantly as the camera snapped the first picture. Then they squished their faces together and donned huge grins. Emily rolled her eyes back into her head, and Maya puffed her cheeks out like a monkey for the third picture. Then the camera caught them looking seminormal, if maybe a bit nervous.

‘Let’s go see how they look,’ Emily said.

But as she stood up, Maya grabbed her sleeve. ‘Can we stay in here a sec? This is such a great hiding spot.’

‘Um, sure.’ Emily sat back down. She swallowed loudly, without meaning to.

‘So, how have you been?’ Maya asked, pushing hair out of Emily’s eyes.

Emily sighed, trying to get comfy on the cramped seat. Confused. Upset at my possibly racist parents. Afraid I made the wrong decision about swimming. Kinda freaked that I’m sitting so close to you.

‘I’m all right,’ she said finally.

Maya snorted and took a swig of whiskey. ‘I don’t believe that for one second.’

Emily paused. Maya seemed like the only person who actually understood her. ‘Yeah, I guess not,’ she said.

‘Well, what’s going on?’

But suddenly, Emily didn’t want to talk about swimming or Ben or her parents. She wanted to talk about . . . something else completely. Something that had been slowly dawning on her. Maybe seeing Aria had triggered it. Or maybe finally having a real friend again had brought the feeling back. Emily thought Maya would understand.

She took a deep breath. ‘So, you know that girl Alison, the one who used to live in your house?’

‘Yeah.’

‘We were really close and I, like, really loved her. Like, everything about her.’

She heard Maya breathe out and nervously took another sip of Jack Daniel’s from the bottle.

‘We were best friends,’ Emily said, rubbing her fingers between the ratty blue fabric of the photo booth curtain. ‘I cared about her so much. So this one day, sort of out of the blue, I did it.’

‘Did what?’

‘Well, Ali and I were in this tree house in her backyard – we went there a lot to talk. We were sitting up there, talking about this guy that she liked, some older boy whose name she wouldn’t say, and I just felt like I couldn’t hold any of it in anymore. So I leaned over . . . and kissed her.’

Maya made a small sniffing noise.

‘She wasn’t into it, though. She was even kind of distant and said, like, “Well, now I know why you get so quiet when we’re changing for gym!”’

‘God,’ Maya said.

Emily took another sip of whiskey and felt dizzy. She’d never had this much to drink. And here was one of her biggest secrets, hanging out like granny underwear on a clothesline. ‘Ali said she didn’t think best friends should kiss,’ she went on. ‘So I tried to play it off as a joke. But when I went home, I realized how I really felt. So I wrote her this letter, telling her that I loved her. I don’t think she ever got it, though. If she did, she never said anything.’

A tear plopped on Emily’s bare knee. Maya noticed it, and smeared it with her finger.

‘I still think about her a lot.’ Emily sighed. ‘I’d sort of pushed that memory back, told myself it was just about her being my very best friend but not anything, you know . . . else . . . but now I don’t know.’

They sat there for a few minutes. The party sounds filtered in. Every few seconds, Emily heard the rough flicker of someone’s Zippo lighting a cigarette. She wasn’t that surprised about what she’d just said about Ali. It was scary, of course – but it was also the truth. In a way, it felt good to have finally figured it out.

‘Since we’re sharing,’ Maya said quietly, ‘I have something to tell you, too.’

She turned her forearm over to show Emily the white, raised scar on her wrist. ‘You might have seen this.’

‘Yeah,’ Emily whispered, squinting at it in the pale, semidarkness of the booth.

‘It’s from one of the times I cut myself with a razor blade. I didn’t know it was going to go so deep. There was so much blood. My parents took me to the emergency room.’

‘You cut yourself on purpose?’ Emily whispered.