“Ever is a long time,” Ezra murmured. He was standing so close, Aria could see the dark-blue flecks in his light-blue eyes.
“Aria?” Sean was right next to her.
“Hey!” Aria cried, startled. She jumped away from Ezra as if he were loaded with electricity. “You…you all done?”
“Yep,” Sean said.
Ezra stepped forward. “Hey, Sean is it? I’m Ez—I mean, Mr. Fitz, the new AP English teacher.”
Sean shook his hand. “I just take regular English. I’m Aria’s boyfriend.”
A flicker of something—disappointment, maybe—passed over Ezra’s face. “Cool,” he stumbled. “You play soccer, right? Congrats on your win last week.”
“That’s right,” Sean said modestly. “We have a good team this year.”
“Cool,” Ezra said again. “Very cool.”
Aria felt like she should explain to Ezra why she and Sean were together. Sure, he was a Typical Rosewood Boy, but he was really much deeper. Aria stopped herself. She didn’t owe Ezra any explanations. He was her teacher.
“We should go,” she said abruptly, taking Sean’s arm. She wanted to get out of here before either of them embarrassed her. What if Sean made a grammatical error? What if Ezra blurted that they’d hooked up? No one at Rosewood knew about that. No one, that was, except for A.
Aria slid into the passenger seat of Sean’s tidy, pine-smelling Audi, feeling itchy. She longed for a few private minutes to collect herself, but Sean slumped into the driver’s seat right next to her and pecked her on the cheek. “I missed you today,” he said.
“Me too,” Aria answered automatically, her voice tight in her throat. As she peeked through her side window, she saw Ezra in the teacher’s lot, climbing into his beat-up, old-school VW Bug. He had added a new sticker to the bumper—ECOLOGY HAPPENS—and it looked like he’d washed the car over the weekend. Not that she was obsessively checking or anything.
As Sean waited for other students to back out in front of him, he rubbed his cleanly shaven jaw and fiddled with the collar of his fitted Penguin polo. If Sean and Ezra had been types of poetry, Sean would have been a haiku—neat, simple, beautiful. Ezra would have been one of William Burroughs’s messy fever dreams. “Want to hang out later?” Sean asked. “Go out to dinner? Hang with Ella?”
“Let’s go out,” Aria decided. It was so sweet how Sean liked to spend time with Ella and Aria. The three of them had even watched Ella’s Truffaut DVD collection together—in spite of the fact that Sean said he really didn’t understand French films.
“One of these days you’ll have to meet my family.” Sean finally pulled out of the Rosewood lot behind an Acura SUV.
“I know, I know,” Aria said. She felt nervous about meeting Sean’s family—she’d heard they were wildly rich and super-perfect. “Soon.”
“Well, Coach wants the soccer team to go to that big swim meet tomorrow for school support. You’re going to watch Emily, right?”
“Sure,” Aria answered.
“Well, maybe Wednesday, then? Dinner?”
“Maybe.”
As they pulled onto the wooded road that paralleled Rosewood Day, Aria’s Treo chimed. She pulled it out nervously—her knee-jerk response whenever she got a text was that it would be A, even though A seemed to be gone. The new text, however, was from an unfamiliar 484 number. A’s notes always came up “unavailable.” She clicked READ.
Aria: We need to talk. Can we meet outside the Hollis art building today at 4:30? I’ll be on campus waiting for Meredith to finish teaching. I’d love for us to chat.
—Your dad, Byron
Aria stared at the screen in disgust. It was disturbing on so many levels. One, her dad had a cell phone now? For years, he’d shunned them, saying they gave you brain cancer. Two, he’d texted her—what was next, a MySpace page?
And three…the letter itself. Especially the qualifying Your dad at the end. Did he think she’d forgotten who he was?
“You all right?” Sean took his eyes off the winding, narrow road for a moment.
Aria read Sean Byron’s text. “Can you believe it?” she asked when she finished. “It sounds like he just needs someone to occupy him while he waits for that skank to finish teaching her class.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Not go.” Aria shuddered, thinking of the times she’d seen Meredith and her father together. In seventh grade, she and Ali had caught them kissing in her dad’s car, and then a few weeks ago, she and her younger brother, Mike, had happened upon them at the Victory Brewery. Meredith had told Aria that she and Byron were in love, but how was that possible? “Meredith is a homewrecker. She’s worse than Hester Prynne!”
“Who?”
“Hester Prynne. She’s the main character in The Scarlet Letter—we’re reading it for English. It’s about this woman who commits adultery and the town shuns her. I think Rosewood should shun Meredith. Rosewood needs a town scaffold—to humiliate her.”
“How about that pillory thing at the fairgrounds?” Sean suggested, slowing down as they passed a cyclist.
“You know that wooden contraption with the holes you can stick your head and arms through? They lock you up in it and you just hang there. We always used to get our pictures taken in that thing.”
“Perfect,” Aria practically shouted. “And Meredith deserves to have ‘husband-stealer’ branded on her forehead. Just stitching a red letter A to her dress would be too subtle.”