Maya brought the joint back inside. “Want a hit?”
Emily had never tried pot in her entire life—she always thought her parents would somehow know, like by smelling her hair or forcing her to pee in a cup or something. But as Maya pulled the joint gracefully from her cherry-frosted lips, it looked sexy. Emily wanted to look sexy like that too.
“Um, okay.” Emily slid closer to Maya and took the joint from her. Their hands brushed and their eyes met. Maya’s were green and a little yellow, like a cat’s. Emily’s hand trembled. She felt nervous, but she put the joint to her mouth and took a tiny drag, like she was sipping Vanilla Coke through a straw.
But it didn’t taste like Vanilla Coke. It felt like she’d just inhaled a whole jar of rotten spices. She hacked an old man–ish cough.
“Whoa,” Maya said, taking back the joint. “First time?”
Emily couldn’t breathe and just shook her head, gasping. She wheezed some more, trying to get air into her chest. Finally she could feel air hitting her lungs again. As Maya turned her arm, Emily saw a long, white scar running lengthwise down her wrist. Whoa. It looked a little like an albino snake on her tan skin. God, she was probably high already.
Suddenly there was a loud clank. Emily jumped. Then she heard the clank again. “What is that?” she wheezed.
Maya took another drag and shook her head. “The workers. We’re here for one day and my parents have already started on the renovations.” She grinned. “You just totally freaked, like you thought the cops were coming. You been busted before?”
“No!” Emily burst out laughing; it was such a ridiculous thought.
Maya smiled and exhaled.
“I should go,” Emily rasped.
Maya’s face fell. “Why?”
Emily shuffled off the bed. “I told my mom I’d only stop over for a minute. But I’ll see you in school Tuesday.”
“Cool,” Maya said. “Maybe you could show me around?”
Emily smiled. “Sure.”
Maya grinned and waved good-bye with three fingers. “You know how to find your way out?”
“I think so.” Emily took one more look around Ali’s—er, Maya’s—room, and then stomped down the all-too-familiar stairs.
It wasn’t until Emily shook her head out in the open air, passed all of Alison’s old stuff on the curb, and climbed back into her parents’ car, that she saw the Welcome Wagon basket on the backseat. Screw it, she thought, wedging the basket between Alison’s old chair and her boxes of books. Who needs a guide to Rosewood’s inns, anyway? Maya already lives here.
And Emily was suddenly glad she did.
2
ICELANDIC (AND FINNISH) GIRLS ARE EASY
“Omigod, trees. I’m so happy to see big fat trees.”
Aria Montgomery’s fifteen-year-old brother, Michelangelo, wagged his head out of the family’s Outback window like a golden retriever. Aria; her parents, Ella and Byron—they wanted their kids to call them by their first names—and Mike were all driving back from Philadelphia International Airport. They’d just gotten off a flight from Reykjavík, Iceland. Aria’s dad was an art history professor, and the family had spent the last two years in Iceland while he helped do research for a TV documentary on Scandinavian art. Now that they were back, Mike was marveling at the Pennsylvania cow-country scenery. And that meant…Every. Single. Thing. The 1700s-era stone inn that sold ornate ceramic vases; the black cows staring dumbly at their car from behind a wooden roadside fence; the New England village–style mall that had sprung up since they’d been gone. Even the dingy twenty-five-year-old Dunkin’ Donuts.
“Man, I can’t wait to get a Coolata!” Mike gushed.
Aria groaned. Mike had spent a lonely couple of years in Iceland—he claimed that all Icelandic boys were “pussies who rode small, g*y horses”—but Aria had blossomed. A new start had been just what she needed at the time, so she was happy when her dad made the announcement that her family was moving. It was the fall after Alison went missing, and her girls had grown far apart, leaving her with no real friends, just a school full of people she’d known forever.
Before she left for Europe, Aria would sometimes see boys look at her from afar, intrigued, but then look away. With her coltish, ballet-dancer frame, straight black hair, and pouty lips, Aria knew she was pretty. People were always saying so, but why didn’t she have a date to the seventh-grade spring social, then? One of the last times she and Spencer had hung out—one of the awkward get-togethers that summer after Ali disappeared—Spencer told Aria she’d probably get a lot of dates if she just tried to fit in a little bit more.
But Aria didn’t know how to fit in. Her parents had drilled it into her head that she was an individual, not a follower of the herd, and should be herself. Trouble was Aria wasn’t sure who Aria was. Since turning eleven, she’d tried out punk Aria, artsy Aria, documentary film Aria, and, right before they moved, she’d even tried ideal Rosewood girl Aria, the horse-riding, polo-shirt-wearing, Coach-satchel-toting girl who was everything Rosewood boys loved but everything Aria wasn’t. Thankfully, they moved to Iceland two weeks into that disaster, and in Iceland, everything, everything, everything changed.
Her father got the job offer in Iceland just after Aria had started eighth grade, and the family packed up. She suspected they’d left so quickly because of a secret about her dad that only she—and Alison DiLaurentis—knew about. She’d vowed not to think about that again the minute the Icelandair plane took off, and after living in Reykjavík for a few months, Rosewood became a distant memory. Her parents seemed to fall back in love and even her totally provincial brother learned both Icelandic and French. And Aria fell in love…a few times, actually.