24
ET TU, KATE?
“On your left!” Hanna screamed.
A woman walking a wiener dog jumped and scuttled out of Hanna’s way. It was Friday evening after dinner, and Hanna was running the Stockbridge Trail, a three-mile loop that wound behind the old stone mansion that was now owned by the Rosewood Y. It probably wasn’t the safest thing, running on a secluded path with Ian Thomas allegedly on the loose. Although if Spencer had just sucked it up and told the cops Ian had broken house arrest and visited her the day before, he wouldn’t have escaped.
But Ian be damned—Hanna needed a run tonight. She usually came here to purge her stomach after she’d binged on too many Cheez-Its, but tonight, it was Hanna’s memory that needed purging instead.
The notes from A had begun to plague her. She didn’t want to believe that this new A was real…but what if what the notes said was true? And if New A was Ian and he’d been able to break house arrest, then it made sense that he could know what Kate was up to, right?
Hanna flew past the snow-covered benches and a big green sign that said, PLEASE CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR DOG!
Had she been a fool to so easily befriend Kate? Was this another one of Kate’s tricks? What if Kate was as diabolical as Mona was, and this was all a well-laid plan to ruin Hanna’s life? Slowly, she let her mind creep over the intricate details of her and Mona’s friendship—or maybe enemy-ship. They had become friends in eighth grade, after Ali had been missing for months. Mona had been the one who’d approached Hanna, complimenting her D&G sneakers and the David Yurman bracelet she’d gotten for her birthday. Hanna was weirded out at first—Mona was a dork, after all—but eventually, she’d seen beyond Mona’s exterior. Besides, she needed a new BFF.
But maybe Mona was never her BFF. Maybe she had just been waiting for the precise moment to take Hanna down, to get revenge for all the horrible things Hanna and her friends had said to her. It was Mona who cut Hanna off from her old friends, and it was Mona who had further perpetuated the animosity with Naomi and Riley. Hanna had considered trying to make amends with them after Ali was presumed dead, but Mona had said absolutely not. Naomi and Riley were strictly B-listers, and they should have nothing to do with them.
It was Mona, too, who first suggested that they shoplift, telling Hanna that it would give her such a high. And then there were the things Mona had pulled off as A. Mona had had it so easy with Hanna—she was witness to so many of Hanna’s blunders. Who’d been sitting next to Hanna the night she’d totaled Sean Ackard’s father’s BMW? Who’d been with Hanna when she’d gotten busted for shoplifting from Tiffany?
Her feet sank into random pockets of slush, but she kept running. Everything else Mona had done gushed into her mind, as sloppy and uncontrollable as champagne fizzing out of an uncorked bottle. Mona-as-A had sent her that child-size court dress, knowing that Hanna would wear it to Mona’s birthday party and the dress’s seams would burst. Mona-as-A had gleefully sent Hanna that note that Sean was at Foxy with Aria, knowing for sure that Hanna would rush back to Rosewood and chew Sean out, ruining her dinner with her dad and making Kate look like the perfect, obedient little daughter yet again.
Wait a minute. Hanna stopped short under a copse of trees. Something about that didn’t fit. Hanna had told Mona that she was back in touch with her dad, but she hadn’t told her she was ditching Foxy to hang out with him in Philly. Even if Mona somehow found out about it some other way, she couldn’t have known that Kate and Isabel would be there too. Hanna remembered how Isabel and Kate had knocked on the door of her father’s suite in the Four Seasons. “Surprise!” they’d called. Mona couldn’t have known that was going to happen.
Unless…
Hanna breathed in sharply. The sky seemed to darken a few shades. There was only one way Mona could have known Kate and Isabel were going to show up in Philly: if Mona and Kate had secretly corresponded beforehand.
It made sense. Mona knew about Kate, obviously. An early A note had been a newspaper clipping about Kate receiving yet another school award. Maybe Mona had called Kate and told her the whole evil scheme. And since Kate hated Hanna so much, she’d gone along with it. That could explain how Kate knew to press Hanna to tell her what was wrong in Le Bec-Fin’s bathroom. Or how Kate knew to glance in Hanna’s purse—maybe Kate already knew Hanna had a Percocet stash. “She bragged that she had some,” Mona might have whispered to Kate over the phone, prepping her. “And she’ll totally trust that you won’t tell on her if you ask if you can have one. But after she’s gone for about an hour or so, when her dad’s starting to freak, bust it out. Tell him Hanna forced you to take it.”
“Oh my God,” Hanna whispered, looking around. The sweat on her neck began to drip icily down her back. Kate and Hanna bonding together as the school’s queen bees, Naomi and Riley becoming their BFFs—what if it was all part of Mona’s grand scheme? And what if Kate was doing Mona’s bidding…and really was planning to bring Hanna down?
Hanna’s knees buckled. She lowered herself to the ground, dropping awkwardly on her right arm.
What if it never ended?
Her stomach turned over. She lunged to the edge of the trail and threw up into the grass. Tears came to her eyes, and her throat burned. She felt so lost. And lonely. She had no idea anymore what in her life was true and what wasn’t.
After a few minutes, she wiped her mouth and turned around. The paved trail was empty in both directions. It was so quiet, Hanna could hear her stomach loudly gurgling. The bushes across the path started to shake. It seemed like there was someone caught between them, trying to get out. Hanna tried to move, but all her limbs felt the way her arm had after her accident—useless. The thrashing in the bushes grew more and more frantic.