Perfect (Book Two)

One: And We Thought We Were Friends.

Spencer Hastings stood on the apple-green lawn of the Rosewood Abbey with her three ex-best friends, Hanna Marin, Aria Montgomery, and Emily Fields. The girls had stopped speaking more than three years ago, not long after Alison DiLaurentis mysteriously went missing, but they'd been brought back together today for Alison's memorial service. Two days ago, construction workers had found Ali's body under a concrete slab behind what used to be her house.

Spencer looked again at the text message she'd just received on her Sidekick.

I'm still here, bitches. And I know everything. —A

"Oh my God," Hanna whispered. Her BlackBerry's screen read the same thing. So did Aria's Treo and Emily's Nokia. Over the past week, each of them had gotten e-mails, texts, and IMs from someone who went by the initial A. The notes had mostly been about stuff from seventh grade, the year Ali went missing, but they'd also mentioned new secrets...stuff that was happening now.

Spencer thought A might have been Alison—that somehow she was back—except that was out of the question now, right? Ali's body had decayed under the concrete. She'd been...dead...for a long, long time.

"Do you think this means...The Jenna Thing?" Aria whispered, running her hand over her angular jaw.

Spencer slid her phone back in her tweed Kate Spade bag. "We shouldn't talk about this here. Someone might hear us." She glanced nervously at the abbey's steps, where Toby and Jenna Cavanaugh had stood just a moment before. Spencer hadn't seen Toby since before Ali even went missing, and the last time she saw Jenna was the night of her accident, limp in the arms of the paramedic who'd carried her down.

"The swings?" Aria whispered, meaning the Rosewood Day Elementary playground. It was their old special meeting place.

"Perfect," Spencer said, pushing through a crowd of mourners. "Meet you there."

It was the late afternoon on a crystal-clear fall day. The air smelled like apples and wood smoke. A hot-air balloon floated overhead. It was a fitting day for a memorial service for one of the most beautiful girls in Rosewood.

I know everything.

Spencer shivered. It had to be a bluff. Whoever this A was, A couldn't know everything. Not about The Jenna Thing...and certainly not about the secret only Spencer and Ali shared. The night of Jenna's accident, Spencer had witnessed something that her friends hadn't, but Ali had made her keep it a secret, even from Emily, Aria, and Hanna. Spencer had wanted to tell them, but when she couldn't, she pushed it aside and pretended that it hadn't happened.

But...it had.

That fresh, springy April night in sixth grade, just after Ali shot the firework into the tree house window, Spencer ran outside. The air smelled like burning hair. She saw the paramedics bringing Jenna down the tree house's shaky rope ladder.

Ali was next to her. "Did you do that on purpose?" Spencer demanded, terrified.

"No!" Ali clutched Spencer's arm. "It was—"

For years, Spencer had tried to block out what had come next: Toby Cavanaugh coming straight for them. His hair was matted to his head, and his goth-pale face was flushed. He walked right up to Ali.

"I saw you." Toby was so angry he was shaking. He glanced toward his driveway, where a police car had pulled in. "I'm going to tell."

Spencer gasped. The ambulance doors slammed shut it's sirens screamed away from the house. Ali was calm. "Yeah, but I saw you, Toby," she said. "And if you tell, I'll tell, too. Your parents."