Emily picked her bike up off the ground. “I shouldn’t have come.”
“Wait! Come back! I…I need to talk to you!” Aria called out.
Emily paused and looked up. Aria felt all of her words swarming like bees in her mouth. Emily seemed terrified.
But suddenly Aria was too afraid to ask. How would she talk about the texts from A without mentioning her secret? She still didn’t want anyone to know. Especially with her mom just upstairs.
Then she thought of Byron in his bathrobe and how uncomfortable Emily seemed around him just now. Emily had asked, Did Alison tell you something about me in seventh grade? Why would she ask that?
Unless…
Aria bit her pinkie nail. What if Emily already knew Aria’s secret? Aria clamped her mouth shut, paralyzed.
Emily shook her head. “I’ll see you later,” she mumbled, and before Aria could compose herself, Emily was biking furiously away.
28
BRAD AND ANGELINA ACTUALLY MET AT THE ROSEWOOD POLICE STATION
“Ladies, discover yourselves!”
As Oprah’s audience clapped wildly, Hanna sank into her coffee-colored leather couch cushions, balancing the TiVo remote on her bare stomach. She could use a little self-discovery on this crisp Saturday morning.
Last night was pretty blurry—like she’d gone through the night without her contacts in—and her head was throbbing. Had it involved some sort of animal? She’d found some empty candy wrappers in her purse. Had she eaten them? All of them? Her stomach hurt, after all, and it looked a little puffy. And why did she have a distinct memory of a Wawa dairy truck? It felt like piecing together a puzzle, except Hanna was too impatient for puzzles—she always jammed pieces together that didn’t actually fit.
The doorbell rang. Hanna groaned, then rolled off the couch, not bothering to fix her army-green ribbed tank top, which was turned around and practically exposing her boob. She cracked the oak door and then slammed it shut again.
Whoa. It was that cop, Mr. April. Er, Darren Wilden.
“Open up, Hanna.”
She checked him out through the peephole. He stood with his arms crossed, seeming all business, but then his hair was a mess and she didn’t see his gun anywhere. And what kind of cop worked at 10 A.M. on a cloudless Saturday morning like this?
Hanna glanced at her reflection in the round mirror across the room. Jesus. Sleep marks from the pillow? Yes. Puffy eyes, lips in need of gloss? Absolutely. She quickly ran her hands over her face, pushed her hair into a ponytail, and put on her round Chanel sunglasses. Then she flung open the door.
“Hey!” she said brightly. “How are you?”
“Is your mom home?” he asked.
“Nope,” Hanna said flirtatiously. “She’s out all morning.”
Wilden pursed his lips together, looking stressed. Hanna noticed Wilden had a little clear Band-Aid right above his eyebrow. “What, did your girlfriend deck you?” she asked, pointing at it.
“No…” Wilden touched the Band-Aid. “I banged it on my medicine cabinet when I was washing my face.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m not the most graceful person in the morning.”
Hanna smiled. “Join the club. I fell on my ass last night. It was so random.”
Wilden’s kind expression was suddenly grim. “Was that before or after you stole the car?”
Hanna stood back. “What?”
Why was Wilden looking at her as if she were the love child of space aliens? “There was an anonymous tip that you stole a car,” he enunciated slowly.
Hanna’s mouth fell open. “I…what?”
“A black BMW? Belonging to a Mr. Edwin Ackard? You crashed it into a phone pole? After you drank a bottle of Ketel One? Any of this sound familiar?”
Hanna shoved her sunglasses up her nose. Wait, that was what happened? “I wasn’t drunk last night,” she lied.
“We found a vodka bottle on the driver’s-side floor in the car,” Wilden said. “So, someone was drunk.”
“But—” Hanna started.
“I have to bring you into the station,” Wilden interrupted, sounding a little disappointed.
“I didn’t steal it,” Hanna squeaked. “Sean—his son—said I could take it!”
Wilden raised an eyebrow. “So you admit you were driving it?”
“I—” Hanna started. Shit. She took a step back into the house. “But my mom’s not even here. She won’t know what happened to me.” Embarrassingly, tears rushed to her eyes. She turned away, trying to get her shit together.
Wilden shifted his weight uncomfortably. It seemed like he didn’t know what to do with his hands—first he put them in his pockets, then they hovered near Hanna, then he wrung them together. “Listen, we can call your mom at the station, all right?” he said. “And I won’t cuff you. And you can ride up front with me.” He walked back to his car and opened the passenger door for her.
An hour later, she sat on the police station’s same yellow plastic bucket seats, staring at the same Chester County’s Most Wanted poster, fighting back the urge to start crying again. She’d just been given a blood test to see if she was still drunk from last night. Hanna wasn’t sure if she was—did alcohol stay in your body for that long? Now Wilden was hunching over his same desk, which held the same Bic pens and a metallic Slinky. She pinched her palm with her fingernails and swallowed.
Unfortunately, the events of last night had coalesced in her head. The Porsche, the deer, the airbag. Had Sean said she could take the car? She doubted it; the last thing she could remember was his little self-esteem speech before he’d ditched her in the woods.