❝ I genuinely thought the worst of this nightmare was over ❞
Halle Brewster told a lie, and the secrets kept growing. After slaying one stalker, another reared its nasty head, and Halle was starting to wonder if she'd ever be free from the friendshi...
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Pink hair curled at the undergrowth of Halle's hair. Halle stared down at it. She liked how, compared to Aria's, it was only a few one-inch thick locks of her hair that were bleached then dyed the electric pink the Montgomery girl desperately wanted to go but was too afraid to do alone. Alison had forced Halle into it. She said, smiling wickedly, that it would signal to the others — the girls Alison had thrust upon Halle several months back — that Halle welcomed them the same way Alison did. Halle didn't do welcoming, but she did cave to enough pressure.
Everyone did to Alison.
Alison had twisted Halle's arm, polished fingernails as crescent moons in flesh, one too many times. The bleach had stung, burnt, and Halle likened that to her exhausting friendship and how it was take, take, take. Alison never gave fully. She would trickle it. Her love was like a leaking tap, aggravating and gifted in small droplets. Halle remembered crying to her mother that night her brown curls were fried a yellowish blonde then dyed pink. The lack of defined curls in three parts of Halle's hair on the right side of her head were reminders of that. Of everything she had sacrificed for Alison, willing or unwilling. The other was the gathering of girls around Halle's kitchen table.
Night had fallen, and the five had pulled themselves a chair and took the risk of being there. This was treason. An uprising. A mutiny. They all meant the same thing currently. After tonight, if they were all on board and agreed, there was no coming back from this. Not that all of them knew what this was.
They'd go back if they knew how That Night played out now.
Emily and Hanna were on the outskirts. Sat side-by side, they were the most clueless, looking around for answers coming out in trickles. Aria and Spencer were opposite them, urging the other duo on with determined stares and pleading gazes. We have to do this, was said, this is the only way. Then Halle was at the head, a position she had naturally found herself in. After all, this was her idea.
Hers, and Spencer's.
But mainly hers.
Now, Spencer was missing.
Halle walked back into the kitchen. Her hand was still on the doorknob as she looked up to meet wary faces. It was the same before. Eerily similar, they hadn't even meant to sit the same spots but compulsion and history ran deep and moulded within them. They hadn't even questioned the seating. Halle had. She was seeing it from a distance, and it looked just like it did two years ago.
But, everything had changed. Alison was dead, Halle thought one of them did it, and now A was pressuring her — and them — to figure it out. It was the murder that started it all and it still went unanswered.
