The girls jumped off the cliff and hit the warm, tropical water at exactly the same time. They surfaced, giggling—they’d all won and lost!—and staring at the The Cliffs, the Jamaican resort high above their heads. The pink stucco building, which housed the rooms, yoga studio, dance club and spa, towered into the clouds, and several people loitered on their shaded balconies or swilled cocktails on the deck. Palm trees swayed, and island birds cawed. The faintest tinkling of a steel drum rendition of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song floated through the air.

“Paradise,” Spencer whispered. The others murmured in agreement.

This was the ideal spring break retreat, the complete opposite of Rosewood, Pennsylvania, where the four girls lived. Sure, the Philadelphia suburb was like a picture-postcard, resplendent with thick, lush woods, expansive mansions, idyllic horse trails, quaint old barns, and crumbling 17th-century estates, but after what had happened just a few months before, the girls needed a change of scenery. They needed to forget that Alison DiLaurentis, the girl they used to admire and adore, the girl everyone wanted to be, had almost killed them.
Forgetting was impossible, though. Even though two months had passed since it happened, the memories haunted them, visions rising up like ghosts. Like how Alison took their hands and told each of them she wasn’t her twin sister, Courtney, as her parents had claimed, but their best friend back from the grave. Or how Ali invited them into her family’s Poconos house, saying it would be the perfect reunion. How, shortly after they’d arrived, Ali led them to an upstairs bedroom and begged them to let her hypnotize them just like she had done the night she disappeared in seventh grade. Then she slammed the door, locked it from the outside, and slid a note underneath telling them exactly who she was…and who she wasn’t.

Her name was Ali, all right. But it turned out they hadn’t been friends with the real Ali at all. The girl who wrote that note at the Poconos house wasn’t the same girl who’d plucked Spencer, Aria, Emily, and Hanna out of obscurity at the Rosewood Charity Drive at the beginning of sixth grade. Nor was she the girl with whom they’d swapped outfits, gossiped, competed, and crushed on for a year and a half. That had been Courtney all along, posing as Ali, stepping into her life shortly after sixth grade began. This Ali, the real Ali, was a stranger. A girl who hated them with every ounce of her being. A girl who was A, the evil text-messager who’d killed Ian Thomas, burned down the woods behind Spencer’s house, got the girls arrested, murdered Jenna Cavanaugh for knowing too much, and killed her twin sister Courtney—their Ali—the fateful night of the girls’ seventh-grade sleepover. And now she planned on offing them next.

As soon as the girls read the last horrible sentence of the letter, their noses twitched with the scent of smoke—the real Ali had doused the house in gas and lit a match. They’d escaped just in time, but Ali hadn’t been as lucky. When the cabin exploded, Ali was still inside.

Or was she? There were lots of rumors that she’d made it out alive. The whole story was public now, including the twin switch, and even though she was a cold-blooded killer, some people were still fascinated with the real Ali all the same. There had been claims of Ali sightings in Denver, or Minneapolis, or Palm Springs. The girls tried not to think of that, though. They had to move on. They had nothing to fear anymore.

Two figures appeared at the top of the cliff. One was Noel Kahn, Aria’s boyfriend; the other was Mike Montgomery, her brother and Hanna’s boyfriend. The girls paddled for the steps carved into the rock.

Reply · Report Post