Perfect (Book Two)

Four: There's Truth In Wine...Or, In Aria's Case, Amstel.

As Aria Montgomery slipped into her family's boxy, avant-garde house—which stuck out on their typical Rosewood street of neoclassical Victorians—she heard her parents talking quietly in the kitchen.

"But I don't understand," her mother, Ella—her parents like Aria call them by their first names—was saying. "You told me you could make it to the artists' dinner last week. It's important. I think Jason might buy some of the paintings I did in Reykjavik."

"It's just that I'm already behind on my papers," her father, Byron, answered. "I haven't gotten back into the swing of grading yet."

Ella sighed. "How is it they have papers and you've only had two days of class?"

"I gave them their first assignment before the semester started." Byron sounded distracted. "I'll make it up to you I promise. How about Otto's? Saturday night?"

Aria shifted her weight in the foyer. Her family had just returned from two years in Reykjavik, Iceland, where her dad had been on sabbatical from teaching at Hollis, Rosewood's liberal arts college. It had been a perfect reprieve for all of them—Aria needed the escape from Ali went missing, her brother, Mike, needed some culture and discipline, and Ella and Byron, who'd begun to go days without speaking, seemed to fall back in love in Iceland. But now that they were back home, everyone was reverting back to their dysfunctional ways.

Aria passed the kitchen. Her dad was gone, and her mom was standing over the island, her head in her hands. When she saw Aria, she brightened. "How you doing, pumpkin?" Ella asked carefully, fingering the memorial card they'd received from Ali's service.

"I'm all right," Aria mumbled.

"You want to talk about it?"

Aria shook her head. "Later, maybe." She scuttled into the living room, feeling spastic and distracted, as though she'd drunk six cans of Red Bull. And it wasn't just from Ali's funeral.

Last week A had taunted Aria about one of her darkest secret: In seventh grade, Aria caught her father kissing one of his students, a girl named Meredith. Byron had asked Aria not to tell her mother, and Aria never had, although she always felt guilty about it. When A threatened to tell Ella the whole ugly truth, Aria had assumed A was Alison. It was Ali who'd been with Aria when she caught Byron and Meredith together, and Aria had never told anyone else.

But now Aria knew A couldn't be Alison, but A's threat was still out there, promising to ruin Aria's family. She knew she should tell Ella before A got to her—but she couldn't make herself do it.

Aria walked to the back porch, winding her fingers through her long black hair. A flash of white zoomed by. It was her brother, Mike, racing around the yard with his lacrosse stick. "Hey," she called, getting an idea. When Mike didn't answer, she walked out onto the lawn and stood in his path. "I'm going downtown. Wanna come?"

Mike made a face. "Downtown's full of dirty hippies. Besides, I'm practicing."

Aria rolled her eyes. Mike was so obsessed with making the Rosewood Day varsity lacrosse team, he hadn't even bothered to change out of his charcoal gray funeral suit before starting drills. Her brother was so cookie-cutter Rosewood—dirty white baseball cap, obsessed with PlayStation, saving up for a hunter-green Jeep Cherokee as soon as he turned sixteen. Unfortunately, there was no question they shared the same gene pool—both Aria and her brother were tall and had blue-black hair and unforgettable angular faces.

"Well, I'm going to get bombed," she told him. "You sure you want to practice?"

Mike narrowed his grayish-blue eyes at her, processing this. "You're not secretly dragging me to poetry reading?"