Stunning (20 page)

Quinn pulled out her cell phone. “This is amazing. It should be our film for the festival!”

“And I want us all to be the stars!” Harper said sloppily, stumbling over the syllables. She looked at Spencer. “Can you record us on your phone?”

“Okay,” Spencer said. She called up the video function on her iPhone and started recording. Harper yanked down more curtains and pulled the stuffing out of the pillows on the leather couch, looking crazed.

“Yeah!” Daniel, the boy who’d hosted the party on Friday, grabbed a swath of curtain fabric and wrapped it around his naked body—he’d been part of the streaking parade—like a toga. A few other guys followed suit, and they all marched around in a circle chanting “To-
ga
! To-
ga
! To-
ga
!”

As they paraded past, Spencer caught a glimpse of a guy with longish dark hair. Was that
Phineas
? She hadn’t seen him since before her run-in with the law at Penn last year. But when she blinked, he’d vanished, like he’d never been there at all. She pressed her fingers to her temples and made several slow circles. She was
so
high.

Spencer turned back to Harper. She had seemingly grown bored of ruining the curtains and was now lying on the carpet with her legs up in the air. “I just feel so . . .
alive
,” she trilled. Then she eyed Spencer. “Hey. I have something to tell you. You know that guy, Raif—Reefer? He has a crush on you.”

Spencer groaned. “What a loser. How’d he get into Princeton, anyway? Is he a legacy?”

Harper’s eyes grew wide. “You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

Harper put her fingers to her lips and giggled. “Spencer, Reefer is, like, a
genius
. Like Einstein.”

Spencer snickered. “Uh, I don’t think so.”

“No, I’m serious.” Suddenly Harper looked dead sober. “He got a full scholarship. He invented some chemical process that, like, converts plants into renewable energy really cheaply. He received a MacArthur Genius Grant.”

Spencer snorted. “Um, are we talking about the same person?”

Harper’s expression was still serious. Spencer leaned back on her elbows and let this sink in. Reefer was . . . smart?
Ridiculously
smart? She thought about what he said yesterday at his house.
Don’t judge a book by its cover.
She started to laugh. The giggles came so fast and furious tears started to stream from her eyes and she could barely breathe.

Harper started laughing, too. “What’s so funny?”

Spencer shook her head, not even sure. “I’ve had one too many pot brownies, I think. I’m a lightweight.”

Harper frowned. “Pot brownies? Where?”

The muscles in Spencer’s mouth felt gummy and loose. She studied Harper carefully, wondering if this was a hallucination, too. “I baked pot into the brownies I brought,” she said in an isn’t-it-obvious voice.

Harper’s mouth made an
O
. “No
way
,” she whispered, slapping Spencer five. “That’s the best idea
ever.
” She started to laugh for real. “No wonder I feel so bubbly! And here I thought someone spiked the punch with absinthe!”

Spencer laughed nervously. “Well, it’s not
necessarily
my brownies, is it?” Harper had eaten all kinds of other dishes, after all. Who knew what
they
had baked into them.

When she noticed the puzzled look on Harper’s face, everything turned upside-down. Maybe none of those other dishes had illegal substances inside them. What if Spencer’s brownies were what was making everyone so crazy?

She looked around the room. In one corner, a girl was feeding another girl a bite of something gooey and brownie-like. Two guys by the window chowed down on the brownies like they were their last meal. The brownies were everywhere. On plates left on side tables. In people’s hands as they swigged back sips of punch. On cheeks and under fingernails and ground into the fibers of the carpet. A half-eaten tray sat on the coffee table. Another tray was balanced on the radiator. Spencer peeked into the kitchen. Her three trays of brownies were still there, the bottoms scraped clean. Had someone
else
brought brownies, or had she brought five instead of three? Her mind felt so cloudy right now she couldn’t think clearly at all.

Her skin prickled. Harper seemed thrilled by the pot-brownie prank. But it was one thing if her brownies were one of many illegal foods at the party, and another for them to be the singular secret potion that made everyone act insane.

The walls felt like they were closing in on her. “I’ll be back,” she murmured to Harper, pushing to stand. She wove around a bunch of kids making snow angels on the carpet and two guys dueling with antique swords pulled from hooks on the wall and grabbed her coat from a pile near the kitchen. Ahead of her was a heavy door that led to the backyard; she pushed through it and stood in the crisp, late-winter air. To her surprise, only a thin strip of sunlight gleamed through the trees. Hours must have passed since she’d arrived.

Spencer stepped off the patio, taking deep breaths of cold air. The university buildings shone on the horizon. A billboard cut through the sky, bearing a picture of a newborn baby and the words CHOOSE PRINCETON HOSPITAL FOR YOUR MOST PRECIOUS MOMENTS.

It made Spencer think of the day she’d met Emily at the hospital for her C-section. By the time she got there, still flummoxed by Emily’s news, Aria and Hanna were standing by her side. Spencer’s jaw had dropped at the sight of Emily’s swollen belly. Her heart had picked up speed when she saw the shadowy image of the baby on the fetal monitor screen next to Emily’s bed. This was
real
.

“Emily?” a nurse had said, popping her head into the room. “They’re ready for you. It’s time to have your baby.”

There was no question whether Spencer and the others would be there for Emily’s surgery. They dressed in blue scrubs and followed the gurney into an operating room. Emily was freaking out, but the three of them held her hands the whole time, telling her she was strong and amazing. Spencer didn’t have the guts to peek over the curtain to watch as the OB cut through Emily’s midsection, but within minutes, he let out a happy whoop. “A healthy baby girl!”

The doctor lifted a tiny, perfect creature over the partition. She had red, wrinkled skin, tiny, closed eyes, and a big screaming mouth. Tears welled in all of their eyes. It was amazing and sad, all at the same time. They squeezed Emily’s hands hard, so grateful they’d been able to share this with her.

Luckily, the baby didn’t need to be in the NICU, which meant the girls could follow through with their plans of sneaking mother and baby out of the hospital that very night. At midnight, when there was a nurse shift change, the girls helped Emily out of bed and into her clothes. They dressed the baby as quietly as they could and tiptoed out of Emily’s room. The maternity ward was silent and still. Nurses were tending to newborns in the nursery. When a doctor rounded the corner, Spencer distracted her by asking for directions to the cafeteria. The others spirited Emily and baby into the elevator. Once they were on the main floor, no one looked at them twice.

They crept to the parking garage, the lights of Philadelphia blazing all around them. But as they were getting into Aria’s car, a flutter of activity behind one of the concrete beams caught Spencer’s eye. Nerves streaked through her belly. Was checking a baby out of the hospital before it was discharged illegal? She stood very still for a few moments, waiting for whomever it was to reveal herself, but no one did. She figured she was just tired, although now she wasn’t sure. Maybe A had been there. Maybe A had seen everything.

Snap.

Spencer returned to the present with a start. Dark trees surrounded her. Branches scratched her skin. The bark on the trees spiraled psychedelically; the stars were huge and garish in the sky, like a Van Gogh painting. What the hell was in this pot, anyway?

There was a whooshing sound of someone crunching through leaves. Spencer rubbed her eyes. “Hello? Who’s there?”

No answer. The crunching sounds grew louder and louder. Spencer blinked, searching for the path back to the Ivy House, but her vision was distorted and blurred. “Hello?” she cried again.

A hand clapped on her shoulder, and she screamed. She flailed her arms, trying to see who it was, but her senses were too muddled, the night too dark. Her legs gave out from under her, and she felt herself falling, falling, falling. The last thing she remembered seeing was a dark shape standing next to her, glaring. Maybe wanting to hurt her. Maybe wanting to get rid of her forever.

And then everything went black.

24

HANNA BRINGS HER A GAME

Hanna knew she was supposed to be in the stretch limo with her father, Isabel, and Kate, heading to the fund-raising ball, not balanced on her four-inch Louboutin platform heels outside the familiar Victorian house in Old Hollis that was home to Jeffrey Lebrecque’s photo studio. But here she was, like it or not. Ready to nail Colleen once and for all.

The porch light was on, throwing golden light onto Hanna’s professionally made-up face. The front parlor window was all lit up, too, which meant the photographer was home. Just before Hanna climbed the steps, her phone chimed. It was Richard, one of her dad’s campaign assistants.
Just wanted to let you know the voter registration records database is back up
, he wrote.

Perfect
, Hanna replied. That meant she could search for where the Bakers had moved. The site had been down, and she’d had to resort to asking Richard about it, but she didn’t dare ask him to look up the family himself.

Then, rolling her shoulders back, she rang the bell. There were footsteps, and the door creaked open and the same graying man she’d seen the day before answered.

“Hello?” Jeffrey Lebrecque looked Hanna up and down, from the big ringlets in her hair to her navy chiffon dress to the faux-mink shrug around her shoulders she’d picked out for the ball. There was a gaudy gold ring on his pinkie finger, and he had the top two buttons of his shirt unbuttoned, exposing quite a bit of chest hair.
Ick.

“Hi!” Hanna said brightly. “Are you Mr. Lebrecque?”

“That’s right.” The man furrowed his brow. “Do we have an appointment?”

“Actually, I’m here to pick up photos for Colleen Bebris,” Hanna said in her most innocent voice, batting her eyelashes at him. “I’m her best friend, and she asked me to do it. She got held up at an exercise class. She’s a pole dancer, did you know that?”

The photographer frowned. “I’m not sure I can do that. Ms. Bebris didn’t say someone else was going to pick them up. Maybe I should call her.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a cell phone.

“No need!” Hanna said quickly, whipping out her own phone and showing him a text on the screen. “See?” The sender was Colleen Bebris, and the text asked if Hanna could pick up her photos. Of course it wasn’t
really
from Colleen—Hanna just used her mom’s phone to send the text, temporarily changing her mom’s contact information to Colleen’s name.

Jeffrey Lebrecque read the text, and his caterpillar-esque eyebrows knitted together. “There’s also the matter of payment.”

“Oh, she told me to pay for it and then she’d pay me back,” Hanna piped up, proud she’d thought to raid her emergency cash shoebox before coming.

The photographer peered at Hanna, and for a moment, she was afraid he was going to call her bluff. Did Mona-as-A and Real Ali-as-A worry they were going to get caught when they skulked, stole, and lied to get top-secret information on Hanna and the others? Was it wrong of her to do this? It wasn’t like she was ruining Colleen’s life, though. All she wanted was her boyfriend back.

“Follow me,” Mr. Lebrecque said, turning and heading down the hallway and into his studio. Slides and printouts covered a work desk, and a large-screen Apple monitor glowed in the corner. A fluffy white cat padded lazily through the room, and a calico preened itself on the windowsill. The place smelled like a mix of dust and cat litter and seemed sketchy in a way Hanna couldn’t quite put her finger on. She hunted around for telltale signs that this guy was running a covert Internet-porn operation, though she wasn’t entirely sure what she should be looking for.
Playboy
magazines? Blackout shades? Bottles of Cristal, like they drank in hip-hop videos?

Mr. Lebrecque shuffled to a table at the back of the room, sorted through a pile of envelopes, and pulled one out. “I picked these up from the printer today. Tell Colleen that I printed all of them, just like she asked, but if she wants more copies it’ll cost her extra.” He punched some numbers into a calculator. “So . . . that’ll be $450.”

Hanna gritted her teeth. Couldn’t Colleen have chosen a slightly cheaper photographer? Begrudgingly, she traded the cash for the envelope of photos and bid the photographer good-bye, scurrying out of the apartment as fast as she could. Her eyes were starting to itch from all that cat hair.

Her phone chirped when she stepped onto the porch, but it was just her father—he, Isabel, and Kate were at the event space, and he was wondering where Hanna was.
Be there soon
, Hanna typed back before slipping her phone into her bag and excitedly ripping open the envelope. She wondered if the various As had sometimes felt like this, too, when they’d gotten their hands on valuable evidence. There
was
something satisfying about it.

She stared at the stack of photos under the street lamp. The first was of Colleen looking fresh-faced and oh-so-sweet, like an actress on a Disney Channel show. The next shots were pretty much the same, just with slightly different facial expressions and camera angles. Hanna flipped through the stack, gazing at Colleen looking elated, then brooding, then bookish. Before she knew it, Hanna was looking at the last photo, a shot of Colleen winking at the camera from over her shoulder. She riffled through them once more just to make sure she hadn’t missed any, but she hadn’t.