Pretty Little Liars

Hanna talks to some of Noel’s friends at the party and some girls from another school in the area. She suddenly sees Sean, who’s been missing for two hours, running through the pines. As she runs to catch up with him, she falls onto the grass, feeling “way off her game” (185). Sean puts out a hand to help her up and she notices how good he looks. She’s upset because he’s been talking to every guy there and completely avoiding her. She asks if they can go to the woods to talk.

They sit down on some grass and Hanna starts kissing Sean. He almost immediately pulls away, so she takes her dress off, asking him if he really wants to stop. He tells her he does. When she asks him if he loves her, he pauses then responds that he doesn’t know. She then asks him if he’s gay, to which he quickly responds no. He tells her she’s one of the prettiest girls he knows but he wants her to have more respect for herself. He wants to have sex with the right girl at the right time and it isn’t her. He apologizes, then heads back into the woods and is suddenly gone.

Hanna heads back to the party, feeling like no one cares about her. She thinks of the note from A—that even her dad doesn’t love her best. She remembers back to the day she met Kate. When Hanna and Ali first got off the train, Kate seemed to have a look of relief when she saw Hanna, as if she didn’t need to worry about her. Later, when they were all sitting on the porch together, Hanna ate most of the food on the table. She groaned at the realization and her dad asked her if “Little piggy doesn’t feel good?” (190) She touches her now flat stomach and thinks that what A said about her dad is the truth: She isn’t the one her dad loves best. Back at the party, all the boys at the party decide to jump into the pond. Angry at what he did to her, Hanna takes Sean’s clothes so that he’ll have to drive home in his boxers. The keys to his BMW fall out and she decides to take it for a drive.

Maya and Emily decide to go into the photo booth at Noel’s party. Once they take the pictures, Emily wants to see how they look but Maya asks if they can stay in there a bit longer. Maya asks Emily how she is while pushing hair out of Emily’s face. Emily is feeling several different emotions from her experiences over the past few days but simply responds that she’s okay. Maya says she doesn’t believe her and asks Emily what’s been happening. But instead of talking about her recent problems, Emily starts discussing Alison.

Emily tells Maya that she was best friends with Alison and loved her. She explains that one day she kissed Alison, but Alison rejected her. Later that day, she wrote Alison a love letter but she’s not sure if Alison ever got it. She tells Maya she still thinks about Alison and wonders if her emotions might go beyond friendship. Maya reciprocates by sharing one of her secrets and tells Emily the scar on her arm is from cutting herself with a razor blade. She didn’t realize the cut was so deep and had to go to the emergency room. She tells Emily she can touch the scar and it “felt like the most intimate thing Emily had ever done” (196). Emily and Maya hug, and Maya begins to kiss her. She thinks how much better it feels than kissing Ben. As they’re making out, the photo booth curtain pulls back, and Ben stands outside. He angrily tells her this explains everything and throws a cup of beer on her. He throws his other cup on Maya. Calling them derogatory names, he runs into the darkness.

Noel finds Aria at the party coming out of the photo booth after emerging from the pond in his soaking wet boxers. brother, Mike, looks over at her and sees her talking to Noel. He nods in approval. Noel comments on how good Aria’s photo strip looks from the photo booth. In her boredom she’d resorted to taking pictures of herself for 20 minutes. She fantasized that maybe Ezra would come and “whisk her away” (200) but that clearly isn’t happening. Noel’s friend James yells that the keg is tapped, and Noel tells Aria to stay put.

Mona Vanderwaal, who sits on the ground with Noel’s brother, Eric, tells Aria that Noel really likes her. As Aria thinks of something to say, her phone beeps. It’s Ezra and he asks her if she’s bored at the party. He tells her he’s home drinking and thinking about her. He asks if she wants to come by and gives her directions to his house. As she’s leaving, Eric says he recognizes her as the friend of the girl who disappeared. Aria tells him she doesn’t know what he’s talking about and leaves.

Ezra lives in one of the old Victorian houses near the college that have been turned into apartments. He shows her into his place, which Aria feels is much more her “style” (203) than Noel Kahn’s sprawling estate. Ezra tells her he can’t stop thinking about her and ignoring her in class was “torture” (203). He admits he was jealous when she kissed Noel and starts kissing her passionately. He tells her he doesn’t want to talk about class anymore and takes her into the bedroom.

Later, Aria lays on Ezra’s bed staring at the ceiling while Ezra is in the bathroom. They agreed to wait to have sex but cuddled together naked. They shared stories about their childhoods and Aria imagines them travelling the world together. As she’s waiting for Ezra to get out of the bathroom, her phone beeps. She ignores it at first, but it doesn’t stop. Finally, she looks at it and there are seven texts with the same subject line: “STUDENT-TEACHER CONFERENCE!” (206). The messages are all the same and refer to what just happened with Ezra as “extra credit” (206). They also ask what her mom would think if she found about her dad and that Aria had known all along. They’re signed from A. Aria grabs her things and tells a surprised Ezra she’s leaving. She tells him she’ll call him and runs out the door.

Spencer is stressing about her calculus homework on the first Friday night of the school year. Last year, she would’ve gone to Noel’s party and probably made out with someone but now she must maintain her status as the family “Star” (207). Wren knocks at the barn door and asks if he’s interrupting, to which Spencer replies he’s not. She’s wearing a casual outfit, shorts, and a baby tee, but the look is “still sexy” (208) in case Wren stopped by. Spencer asks him where Melissa is, and he says she’s sleeping. He asks for a tour of the “fabulous” (209) barn that he’s never seen, and she invites him inside to look.

They bond over Spencer’s Radiohead poster since they both love the band. Wren says he’s seen them live in London several times and if they come to Philly, they’ll go see them. Spencer almost interjects and says she doesn’t think Melissa likes them but thinks twice because he may not be including Melissa in the plan. She shows him the walk-in closet first, which she tells him he doesn’t have to see since if he’s not interested, but he insists. He points out that he’s never seen a window in a closet and asks her if she likes people seeing her naked. She responds that the window has blinds, which Wren says is “Too bad” (211) because she looked “so beautiful” (211) the other night in the bathroom. He starts walking slowly towards her.

Spencer thinks that a more polite version of herself would move around Wren and finish the tour. But she’s not that person so she kisses him, and he kisses her back. They fall onto the closet floor, and she rolls on top of him, feeling something so intense it overpowers any sense of guilt. Suddenly he gets up and tells her he’ll be back. She notices her computer screen flashing. There are hundreds of instant messages from A that all say the same thing—“Kissing her sister’s boyfriend is wrong” (213). Spencer knows they’re not from Andrew Campbell.

She remembers when she told Ali about kissing Ian and Ali advised her to tell Melissa. Ali told Spencer that she was usually on her side regarding Melissa, but this situation was “different” (213). When Spencer dismissed the idea, Ali said she just might tell Melissa herself. In response, Spencer threatened to tell everyone about The Jenna Thing. Ali laughed it off initially, saying they were all guilty, but Spencer corrected her by pointing out that only Ali was seen by anyone. Ali then gave her the meanest look Spencer had ever seen and said Spencer knew that she’d taken care of that. The night Ali disappeared, when Ali told Melissa that she and Ian were a cute couple, Spencer was truly worried she might say something. But Spencer decided in that moment she didn’t care. She just “wanted to be free of Ali, right then and there” (214).

When Wren comes out of the bathroom, Spencer notices a refection in her computer screen. She looks towards her closet window and sees Melissa standing there, smoking a cigarette. She’s looking in at both Wren and Spencer. All Spencer can say, while holding her shirt to her chest, is that she didn’t know Melissa smoked. Melissa, her hands shaking, puts out the cigarette and asks Wren if he’s coming.

Hanna texts Mona a picture of Sean’s BMW and tells Mona to “Come ride with me” (216). Mona comes to gawk at the car and gets into the passenger seat. She sees that Hanna looks slightly distraught and asks what happened with Sean. Hanna dismisses the question, puts on her sunglasses, and starts the car. She can barely see but starts driving down the road with a lit cigarette. As she turns the radio up, she has a flashback of Sean telling her it’s not going to be her. Then she thinks of the message in her note that her dad doesn’t love her best. She hits the accelerator even harder.

Mona tells her they should go somewhere and show off the car. They park at Wawa and load up on snacks. Hanna shoves most of hers in her purse. As they head back out to the highway, a Porsche with tinted windows pulls up next to them. It revs its engines twice and Mona tells Hanna the car wants to race. Hanna, feeling “completely invincible” (219), accepts the challenge and starts racing the Porsche. She hits speeds of 100 miles per hour with the pedal pushed to the floor. Suddenly, a deer jumps out and Hanna swerves. The car starts spinning and they crash into something. The airbags deploy but the girls are unharmed.

When they get out of the car, Hanna assesses the damage. The front of the car hit a telephone pole and is completely damaged. Hanna laughs when Mona asks if the car is going to explode. She asks Mona what they should do. Mona suggests they leave the scene and walk home. Hanna stands in the middle of the empty highway, feeling empowered. She throws the keys next to the car and the alarm starts going off. She and Mona observe how loud it is.

Emily wakes up unusually early on Saturday morning after having been unable to sleep. She left the party without saying goodbye to anyone immediately after Ben saw her and Maya together. She called her sister, Carolyn to pick her up and went to bed as soon as she got home. In the morning “she felt worse than ever” (224).

Emily wants to think of kissing Maya as a mistake, but it doesn’t feel that way. It seems like no one ever even kissed her before that moment. She doesn’t think of herself as a lesbian and has only kissed one other girl—Alison—a long time ago. She just wants everything to go back to how it was and be happy with it. Everything feels complicated now and she’s ready to dismiss the whole situation as her and Maya being confused, but not gay. She decides to get some fresh air.

Her bike is outside, and she decides to take it for a ride, but a note is caught in the wheel. Emily starts reading it, recognizing her own handwriting. She quickly realizes it’s the love letter she wrote to Ali in seventh grade. On the back, it says, “Thought you might want this back” (226), signed from A. She drops her bike onto the ground, trying to think of who put it there. She wonders if maybe Maya did since Emily told her about the note last night, but the message on the back makes that impossible. She considers it might be Aria, who had been acting strangely at the party and seemed nervous. Maybe Ali told everyone about what happened with her and Emily. Ali held it over her in the aftermath and used it to make her do whatever she wanted. Emily’s frantic thoughts are suddenly interrupted by her parents, returning from their walk. They tell her she’s still grounded so she can’t go for a bike ride. They only let her go to the party so Ben could talk some sense into her. Emily gets on the bike anyway and starts pedaling, telling them she has somewhere to go.

Aria wakes up to her doorbell, although the sound has been changed to a Green Day song. She opens the door to find Alison looking “more glamorous and angular” (228) and with shorter hair. Aria asks where Ali’s been, and she tells her she went to visit an aunt in Miami in the summer after seventh grade and ended up staying. Ali asks Aria if she’s been getting her texts and laughs about the one regarding Aria’s mom. She tells Aria she also told all the girls about Aria’s dad. Suddenly black oil starts dripping from Ali’s eyes and nose. She tells Aria she’s rotting. Aria jolts awake in bed dripping with sweat.

Aria goes downstairs and sees Byron, her dad, at the espresso machine. She asks him if ghosts can send texts. He asks her what a text message is. Aria isn’t sure how Ali’s ghost could be sending texts, even to get revenge. Aria remembers that Ali was supportive right after they’d seen Aria’s dad. She hugged her and comforted her. A day later, however, she started asking lots of questions. It upset Aria so she avoided Ali in the days leading up to her disappearance. She felt angry not only that Ali knew about the situation but was gossiping about it. She realizes now she was mad at her dad, not Ali.

The doorbell rings and Emily is at the door. Before Emily says anything to Aria, Emily says she should go and starts to leave. Aria grabs her arm and asks her what’s going on before she can get away. Emily says she’s wondering if Alison ever told the other girls anything about her. Aria asks if she means recently which confuses Emily, who says no, she means back in seventh grade. Aria assures her Ali didn’t talk about her, then holds up her phone saying she’s been getting texts. Before Emily can see anything, Byron approaches and greets Emily. He says he hasn’t seen her in ages and asks if life is good. Looking like she’s about to cry, Emily responds “Absolutely” (233).

As Byron walks away, Aria turns back around to resume her conversation with Emily but she’s already across the lawn, telling Aria it was a mistake to come. Aria calls for her to wait but realizes she can’t say anything without sharing her secret. Suddenly, it occurs to her that Emily might already know. Aria thinks maybe Emily was asking if Alison ever told them anything because Alison told them all about Aria’s dad. Fear overtakes her and she can’t bring herself to talk. Emily just shakes her head and tells Aria she’ll see her later.

On Saturday morning, Hanna watches TV in bed, unable to remember much of the night before. She has some memory of an animal and a Wawa truck but little else. The doorbell rings and Hanna opens the door to see Darren Wilden. She quickly closes the door again and he tells her to open the door. She checks herself in the mirror and tries to fix herself as best she can, putting her hair up and throwing on some sunglasses. She opens the door again and Darren asks if her mom is home. Hanna “flirtatiously” (236) tells him she’s out at the moment.

Hanna notices a Band-Aid on Darren’s forehead and makes a joke about it. Darren is not in a joking mood and tells her he slipped and hit his head on his medicine cabinet. Hanna says that she fell last night too and Darren interjects, asking if it happened “before or after you stole the car?” (237). Hanna isn’t sure what he’s talking about, so he continues. He says there was an anonymous tip saying she stole a black BMW and crashed it into a telephone pole after drinking a bottle of Vodka. She lies and says she didn’t drink last night but he tells her they found the bottle on the floor of the car. When Darren says he must take her in to the police station, she says Sean let her take the car. Darren asks if she’s admitting she was driving it. Hanna realizes her mistake and starts to back into the house, telling Darren her mom isn’t there and won’t know where she is. She almost starts to cry. Darren is unsure of how to handle the situation and tells her she can call her mom at the station. He adds that he won’t put the handcuffs on her, and she can ride in the front of the car with him.

At the station, Hanna sits in the same seats she sat in for the shoplifting incident, trying not to cry. They tested her blood to see if she still has alcohol in her system. She slowly pieced together the events of the night before, not remembering clearly if Sean gave her permission to drive the car. The last solid memory of the night was Sean’s “little self-esteem speech” (236) in the woods. A young, drunk handcuffed guy sitting next to her starts up a conversation, telling her he was caught trespassing. He asks her name, and she tells him it’s Angelina. He introduces himself as Brad. Hanna’s mom enters, looking refreshed from being at the spa. Her mom asks if Hanna gave them any information, to which Hanna responds she hasn’t. She then angrily insists she’ll handle the situation.

Hanna’s phone is buzzing so she checks it. She has missed calls from Sean and Mona and some texts. There’s one from a number she doesn’t know. The message asks if she remembers “the KATE toothbrush” (240). After Hanna’s dad called her a pig on the day she met Kate, she ran into the bathroom and started crying. She wished she was pretty and “perfect” (241) like Ali and Kate. She saw a picture on the wall of three sets of eyes staring back at her: her dad’s, Isabel’s, and Kate’s—looking like a fashion ad. She felt so awful about herself she just wanted all the food she ate out of her. Nothing happened when she bent over the toilet, so she reached for a toothbrush.

As Hanna was sticking the toothbrush down her throat, Ali barged in. She reacted with surprise and asked Hanna if she wanted to talk. Hanna said no but Ali came in and sat down anyway, shutting the door. Ali asked her how long this had been going on. Hanna noticed then that the toothbrush said “KATE” (242) on it in white letters. She realizes that while other people might know about her eating disorder, no one knows about the toothbrush but Ali. Hanna always felt that if Ali was still alive, she would be impressed by Hanna, “now that her life was so perfect” (243). Suddenly the police station mobilizes into action. Cops start running around and the phones are ringing “maniacally” (243). The drunk guy says it looks like it’s something big, “very big” (243).

Spencer wakes up to the sound of sparrows, feeling achy and hungover despite not having had any alcohol. She couldn’t sleep after Wren left and she laid awake feeling “paranoid and immature” (244). She used her computer to see if she could track IMs and emails. She scoured Andrew Campbell’s blog but found nothing to suggest he was the culprit. She also did a search on Ali that yielded the same articles from three years ago.

Spencer goes into the main house, smelling coffee. Her parents and Melissa are at the kitchen table waiting for her. Melissa looks as though she’s been crying. Her mom asks her how she could do this. Spencer starts to talk but her mom stops her, saying she has no right to say anything. She reminds Spencer that Wren and Melissa were going to move in together. Her father tells her he’s “mortified” (246) that she is his daughter. He says he would lock her out of the house if she weren’t a minor. Melissa says she wishes she never has to see Spencer again. Her mom tells her Melissa is going to be moving into the barn until the townhouse is ready. Then her mom will make it into a pottery studio.

Spencer tries not to cry, thinking of all the perks that came with the barn. Her parents were going to help decorate and get her a kitten. Spencer felt they wanted this for her and that they “cared” (247). Spencer starts to apologize to her mom, who tells her she isn’t the one Spencer should be apologizing to. Spencer puts herself in Melissa’s position and realizes how horrible it would be and sincerely apologizes. Melissa tells her to “Rot in hell” (248). Her parents tell her to get her things out of the barn. Melissa leaves the table crying and slams her bedroom door. Spencer’s dad tells her Wren left last night and they won’t hear from him again and that if Spencer knows what’s best, she won’t bring him up again. Spencer hears a siren that sounds like it’s coming towards the house. She worries Melissa may have hurt herself and calls out to her, running up the stairs. Melissa calls her a “whore” (249) from inside her room.