This morning, Spencer had said she wanted to steal Ali’s flag because she thought Ali had cheated her way to winning. Maybe Jason felt guilty about cheating too. Maybe he’d told Ali to keep quiet that he’d told her where he’d hidden his piece, and had gotten annoyed when he heard Ali bragging about it to everyone in the courtyard.
Aria crouched next to the shoe box, her body tingling. It had been so long since she’d looked at Ali’s piece of the Time Capsule flag, she’d nearly forgotten what Ali had drawn on it. The lid bent as she pulled it off. A cloud of dust dispersed into the air.
“Aria?” Byron’s voice floated from downstairs. “Come down for Meredith’s shower!”
Aria paused. The very edge of the shiny blue flag poked out from underneath a bunch of old papers. “I’m coming,” she called, a little relieved she’d been interrupted.
Meredith, Byron, a bunch of scruffy men Aria recognized as Byron’s colleagues at Hollis, and a few twentysomething girls in yoga pants or paint-spattered jeans were milling around in the living room. A French press coffeemaker, bottles of wine and sparkling water, and a large plate of cucumber-hummus sandwiches sat on the table, and there was a big pile of gifts next to the sofa. Then someone to Aria’s left coughed. Mike was sitting in the corner of the sectional, a pretty brunette by his side. Aria blinked, temporarily speechless. It was Hanna’s soon-to-be stepsister, Kate.
“Um, hi?” Aria said cautiously. Kate smiled smugly. Mike smiled even more smugly. He put his hand on Kate’s thigh, and Kate let him. Aria frowned, wondering if her brain had been damaged from the dust in her new attic bedroom.
Heels clacked down the foyer, and Aria turned just in time to see Hanna enter. She wore a green silk halter-neck dress with her decorated Time Capsule flag looped around her waist as a belt. She carried a box wrapped in stork-printed paper. Aria was about to say hello, but Hanna wasn’t looking in her direction. She was staring at Kate. Her mouth tightened. “Oh.”
“Hi, Hanna!” Kate waved. “Glad you made it!”
“You weren’t invited,” Hanna blurted.
“Yes, I was.” Kate’s smile didn’t falter.
A muscle beneath Hanna’s right eye twitched. A bloom of red traveled from her neck to her cheeks. Aria swiveled back and forth between the girls, feeling both confused and fascinated at the same time.
Meredith looked amused. “Mike, you brought two dates?”
“Hey, it’s a party,” Mike said, shrugging. “The more the merrier, right?”
“That’s what I say!” Kate crowed. When superthin Kate smiled a certain way, she reminded Aria of the screeching gibbon on her National Geographic Animals of the World poster that still hung on her old bedroom door. Hanna was definitely the prettier of the two.
Hanna rolled her shoulders back, strutted over to Meredith, and stuck out her hand. “Hanna Marin. I’m an old friend of the family.” She proffered her gift to Meredith, and Meredith put it in the pile with the other things. Hanna glowered at Kate, then settled on the other side of Mike, squishing in so that their butts shared a couch cushion.
Kate ogled Hanna’s Time Capsule flag belt. “What’s that thing?” She pointed at a black blob Hanna had drawn.
Hanna shot her a haughty look. “It’s a manga frog. Duh.”
Aria sat down on the rocker, overwhelmingly weirded out. She caught Hanna’s eye, pointed to her cell phone, and started typing Hanna a text—Hanna had reluctantly given Aria and the others the number to her iPhone that morning. What R U doing here?
Hanna’s iPhone beeped. She read the text, glanced at Aria, and typed. Seconds later, Aria’s phone buzzed. Y didn’t U tell us U were moving 4 drs down from Ian?
Aria opened up a reply text. Hanna couldn’t dodge the question that easily. I just found out myself, she wrote back. So do U like Mike?
Maybe, Hanna wrote. He’s the one guy you can’t steal from me.
Aria gritted her teeth. Hanna was referring to the time last fall when Aria had dated her ex, Sean Ackard. To this day, Hanna seemed certain that Aria had stolen Sean from her.
Meredith began unwrapping her large pile of gifts, displaying everything on the coffee table. So far, she’d received a bunch of baby toys, a receiving blanket, and a breast pump from Mike. When she got to a gift wrapped in striped paper, Kate sat up straighter. “Oh, that one’s mine!” She rubbed her hands together gleefully. Hanna’s scowl deepened.
Meredith sat back down on the couch and unwrapped the box. “Oh my God,” she breathed, lifting a cream-colored onesie from a layer of pink tissue paper.
“It’s organic Mongolian cashmere,” Kate recited. “Completely fair trade.”
“Thank you so much.” Meredith pressed the onesie to her face. Byron felt it between his fingers, nodding sagely as if he were a cashmere connoisseur. Frayed cotton T-shirts and flannel pajama pants were usually more his thing.
Hanna abruptly stood up, letting out a small squeak. “Did you snoop in my room?”
“Excuse me?” Kate asked, widening her eyes.
“You knew,” Hanna shrieked. “I searched for hours for the perfect thing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Kate shrugged.
At that moment, Meredith was unwrapping the stork-wrapped gift that Hanna had brought. Inside was another box from Sunshine. “Oh,” Meredith said pleasantly, lifting an identical cashmere onesie out of identical pink tissue paper. “It’s beautiful. Again.”
“One can never have too many of those,” Tate, one of Byron’s Hollis colleagues, guffawed, a glob of hummus falling into his scraggly beard.
Kate tittered good-naturedly too. “Great minds think alike, I guess,” she said, which made Hanna’s face contort with rage. Mike’s head swiveled from one girl to the other; he was obviously lapping up the catfight drama.
Suddenly, Aria noticed a dark shape moving outside the front window. Goose bumps rose on her arms. Someone was standing in the yard, watching the party.
She looked around the room, but no one else seemed to notice. Clearing her throat, she rose from the couch and crept down the hall. Her heart pounded as she turned the doorknob and stepped outside. The neighborhood was deathly quiet, and the air smelled like a woodstove. The sky was getting dark, and the lamp at the end of Aria’s new driveway cast a pale gold circle on the grass. When she saw the figure again by the mailbox, she jumped back. Thankfully, it wasn’t Ian. It was…
“Jenna?” Aria cried softly.
Jenna Cavanaugh was wearing a heavy quilted black coat, black mittens, and a gray hat with earflaps. Her golden retriever’s tongue dangled from his mouth. She cocked her head toward the sound of Aria’s voice. Her lips parted.
“It’s Aria,” Aria explained. “I moved here with my dad yesterday.”
Jenna nodded faintly. “I know.” She didn’t move. There was a guilty look on her face.
“Are you…okay?” Aria asked after a moment, her heart pounding. “Do you need something?”