“Hanna!” Aria screamed. It sounded like she was coming closer. But Hanna wasn’t able to turn her head to look. And then it all faded away.
37
IT WAS NECESSARY
“Oh my God!” Aria screamed. She and Emily crouched down at Hanna’s contorted body and started yelling.
“Hanna! Oh my God! Hanna!”
“She’s not breathing,” Emily wailed. “Aria, she’s not breathing!”
“Do you have your cell?” Aria asked. “Call 911.”
Emily reached shakily for her phone, but it slid out of her hands and skidded across the parking lot, coming to a stop by Hanna’s exploded evening bag. Emily had begun panicking when she picked Aria up and Aria told her everything—about A’s cryptic notes, about her dreams, about Ali and Ian, and about how Spencer must have killed Ali.
At first, Emily had refused to believe it, but then a look of horror and realization washed over her. She explained that not long before Ali went missing, Ali had confessed that she was seeing someone.
“And she must have told Spencer,” Aria had answered. “Maybe that’s what they’d been fighting about all those months before the end of school.”
“911, what’s your emergency?” Aria heard a voice say on Emily’s speakerphone.
“A car just hit my friend!” Emily wailed. “I’m in the Rosewood Day School parking lot! We don’t know what to do!”
As Emily cried out the details, Aria put her mouth against Hanna’s lips and tried to give her mouth-to-mouth like she’d learned in lifeguarding class in Iceland. But she didn’t know if she was doing it correctly. “C’mon, Hanna, breathe,” she wailed, pinching Hanna’s nose.
“Just stay on the line until the ambulance gets there,” Aria could hear the 911 dispatcher’s voice say through Emily’s phone. Emily leaned down and reached out to touch Hanna’s faded Rosewood Day sweatshirt. Then she pulled back, as if she was afraid. “Oh my God, please don’t die….” She glanced at Aria. “Who could have done this?”
Aria looked around. The swings swayed back and forth in the breeze. The flags on the flagpole fluttered. The woods adjacent to the playground were black and thick. Suddenly, Aria saw a figure standing next to one of the trees. She had dirty blond hair and wore a short black dress. Something in her face looked wild and unhinged. She was staring right at Aria, and Aria took a step back across the pavement. Spencer.
“Look!” Aria hissed, pointing to the trees. But just as Emily raised her head, Spencer disappeared into the shadows.
The buzzing startled her. It took Aria a moment to realize it was her cell phone. Then Emily’s Call Waiting lit up. One new text message, Emily’s screen said. Aria and Emily exchanged a familiar, uneasy look. Slowly, Aria brought her Treo out of her bag and looked at the screen. Emily leaned over to look, too.
“Oh no,” Emily whispered.
The wind abruptly stopped. The trees stood still like statues. Sirens wailed in the distance.
“Please, no,” Emily wailed. The text was only four chilling words long.
She knew too much.
—A