Emily Fields unlocked her sister’s dorm room, where she was hiding out for the summer. She dropped her keys in the STANFORD SWIMMING mug on the counter and stripped off a sweaty, fried-food-smelling T-shirt, rumpled black pants, and a pirate’s hat she’d worn to her waitress job at Poseidon’s, a gimmicky seafood restaurant on Penn’s Landing. All Emily wanted to do was to lie on her sister’s bed and take a few long, deep breaths, but the lock turned in the door almost as soon as she’d shut it. Carolyn swept into the room, her arms full of textbooks. Even though there was no hiding her pregnancy anymore, Emily covered her bare stomach with her T-shirt. Carolyn’s gaze automatically went to it anyway. A disgusted look settled over her features, and Emily turned away in shame.
A half mile away, near the University of Pennsylvania campus, Spencer Hastings staggered into a small room in the local police precinct. A thin trickle of sweat dripped down her spine. When she ran her hand through her dirty-blond hair, she felt greasy, snarled strands. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window in the door, and a gaunt girl with hollowed-out, lusterless eyes and a turned-down mouth stared back. She looked like a dirty corpse. When had she last showered?
A tall, sandy-haired cop entered the room behind Spencer, pulled the door closed, and glared at her menacingly. “You’re in Penn’s summer program, aren’t you?”
Spencer nodded. She was afraid if she spoke, she’d burst into tears.
The cop pulled an unmarked bottle of pills from his pocket and shook it in Spencer’s face. “I’m going to ask you one more time. Is this yours?”
The bottle blurred before Spencer’s eyes. As the cop leaned close, she caught a whiff of Polo cologne. It made her think, suddenly, about how her old best friend Alison DiLaurentis’s brother, Jason, went through a Polo phase when he was in high school, drenching himself in the stuff before he went to parties. “Ugh, I’ve been Polo’d,” Ali would always groan when Jason passed by, and Spencer and her old best friends Aria, Hanna, and Emily would burst into giggles.
“You think this is funny?” the cop growled now. “Because I assure you, you are not going to be laughing when we’re done with you.”
Spencer pressed her lips together, realizing she’d been smirking. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. How could she think about her dead friend Ali—aka Courtney, Ali’s secret twin—at a time like this? Next she’d be thinking about the real Alison DiLaurentis, a girl Spencer had never been friends with, a girl who’d returned to Rosewood from a mental hospital and murdered her own twin sister, Ian Thomas, Jenna Cavanaugh, and almost Spencer, too.
Surely these scattered thoughts were a side effect of the pill she’d swallowed an hour before. It was just kicking in, and her mind was speeding at a million miles a minute. Her eyes darted all over the place, and her hands twitched. You got the Easy A shakes! her friend Kelsey would say, if she and Spencer were in Kelsey’s dorm room at Penn instead of locked in two separate interrogation cells in this dingy station. And Spencer would laugh, swat Kelsey with her notebook, and then return to cramming nine months’ worth of AP Chemistry III information into her already jam-packed head.
When it was clear Spencer wasn’t going to own up to the pills, the cop sighed and slipped the bottle back into his pocket. “Just so you know, your friend’s been talking up a storm,” he said, his voice hard. “She says it was all your idea—that she was just along for the ride.”
Spencer gasped. “She said what?”
A knock sounded on the door. “Stay here,” he growled. “I’ll be back.”
He exited the cell. Spencer looked around the tiny room. The cinder-block walls had been painted puke-green. Suspicious yellowish-brown stains marred the beige carpet, and the overhead lights gave off a high-pitched hum that made her teeth hurt. Footsteps sounded outside the door, and she sat very still, listening. Was the cop taking Kelsey’s statement right now? And what exactly was Kelsey saying about Spencer? It wasn’t like they’d rehearsed what they’d say if they got caught. They never thought they would get caught. That police car had come out of nowhere. . . .
Spencer shut her eyes, thinking about what had happened in the last hour. Picking up the pills from South Philly. Peeling out of that scary neighborhood. Hearing the sirens scream behind them. She dreaded what the next hours would bring. The calls to her parents. The disappointed looks and quiet tears. Rosewood Day would probably expel her, and Spencer would have to finish high school at Rosewood Public. Or else she’d go to juvie. After that, it would be a one-way trip to community college—or worse, working as a hoagie-maker at the local Wawa or as a sandwich board–wearer at the Rosewood Federal Credit Union, advertising the new mortgage rates to all the drivers on Lancaster Avenue.
Spencer touched the laminated ID card for the University of Pennsylvania Summer Program in her pocket. She thought of the graded papers and tests she’d received this week, the bright 98s and 100s at the top of each and every one. Things were going so well. She just needed to get through the rest of this summer program, ace the four APs she was taking, and she’d be at the top of the Rosewood Day pyramid again. She deserved a reprieve after her horrible ordeal with Real Ali. How much torment and bad luck did one girl have to endure?