She knew now that Kelsey wasn’t A—she and her friends had received a text from A while Kelsey was in the Preserve, which didn’t allow phones. But who else could know so much about all of them?
“I haven’t heard from Kelsey at all,” Spencer said, which was the truth. She snuck a look at Darren Wilden, who was diving into a slice of chocolate cake. Though he’d been the head investigator for the Alison DiLaurentis murder case, he wasn’t a cop anymore. But Spencer felt slightly uneasy in his presence all the same. Especially now that she was keeping dangerous new secrets.
The waitress reappeared and smiled hopefully. “Are the cakes okay?”
Mrs. Hastings nodded. Melissa waved her fork in the air, her mouth full of food. As the waitress pranced away, Spencer looked around the huge dining room. The walls were lined in stone and the floors were marble. Huge floral bouquets sat in small alcoves next to the floor-to-ceiling windows. Outside, an enormous hedge labyrinth stretched as far as the eye could see. There were a few other people eating in the dining room, most of them stuffy old men, probably conducting business deals. Then, she locked eyes with a tall, forty-something woman with ash-blond hair, steely gray eyes, and a Botoxed forehead. When she noticed Spencer looking, she quickly turned her attention to the menu in her hands.
Spencer looked away, too, feeling jittery. Ever since A had resurfaced, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched wherever she went.
Suddenly, Spencer’s iPhone let out a bloop. She pulled it out and inspected the screen. Princeton Dinner Reminder! the subject line read. Spencer pressed OPEN. Don’t forget! You are cordially invited to a dinner honoring all of the Princeton early-admits in Pennsylvania and New Jersey! The dinner was Monday night.
Spencer smiled. She loved correspondence from Princeton, especially since her future there had seemed so precarious last week—A had sent a letter saying that Spencer hadn’t been admitted after all, and Spencer had jumped through hoops trying to prove herself worthy until she realized the letter was a fake. She couldn’t wait until September, when she could start over somewhere fresh. Now that there was a new A, Rosewood felt more like a prison than ever.
Mrs. Hastings glanced at Spencer with curiosity, and Spencer flashed her phone screen. Mr. Pennythistle looked at it, too, and then took a sip of the coffee the waitress had just poured. “You’re going to really enjoy Princeton—you’ll make such great connections. Do you plan on joining an Eating Club?”
“Of course she does!” Melissa said matter-of-factly. “I bet you’ve already got your top three picked out, right, Spence? Let me guess. Cottage Club? Ivy? What else?”
Spencer fiddled with the wooden napkin ring next to her plate, not immediately answering. She’d heard of Eating Clubs, but hadn’t looked into them carefully—she’d been too busy studying vocabulary words, volunteering for a zillion community service activities, and chairing various school organizations just to get into Princeton. Maybe they were like the Rosewood Day Foodie Club, a group of kids who went out to fancy restaurants, had Top Chef viewing parties, and used the home ec ovens to cook boeuf bourguignon and coq au vin.
Wilden laced his fingers over his stomach. “Anyone care to enlighten me about what an Eating Club is?”
Melissa looked a little embarrassed for her boyfriend—preppy, Ivy-League Melissa and blue-collar Wilden came from very different worlds. “The Eating Clubs are like secret societies,” she explained in a slightly patronizing voice (which Spencer wouldn’t have stood for if she were Melissa’s boyfriend). “You have to compete to get in through this process called bicker. But once you’re in, it’s like instant popularity, instant friends, and tons of perks.”
“Sort of like a frat?” Darren asked.
“Oh, no.” Melissa looked appalled. “For one thing, Eating Clubs are coed. For another, they’re way classier than that.”
“You can go a long way if you’re part of an Eating Club,” Mr. Pennythistle interjected. “I had a friend who was in Cottage Club, and a Cottage Club alumni who worked in the senate snapped him up for a job, sight unseen.”
Melissa nodded excitedly. “The same thing happened to my friend Kerri Randolph. She belonged to Cap and Gown, and she got an internship with Diane von Furstenberg’s design team through an Eating Club connection.” She looked at Spencer. “You have to let them know you’re interested early, though. I knew people who started buttering up Eating Clubs when they were sophomores in high school.”
“Oh.” Spencer suddenly felt nervous. Maybe it was a huge gaffe that she hadn’t gotten on the Eating Club bandwagon earlier. What if every early admission student had already brown-nosed their way into the Eating Club of their choice, and, like in an elaborate game of musical chairs, she would be left without a seat when the music stopped? She was supposed to feel grateful that she was going to Princeton, period, but that wasn’t how she functioned. She couldn’t just be a regular old student there. She had to be the best.
“An Eating Club would be stupid not to invite me,” she said, pushing a lock of long blond hair over her shoulder.
“Absolutely.” Mrs. Hastings patted Spencer’s arm. Mr. Pennythistle gave an “Mm-hmm” of support.
When Spencer sat back again, a high-pitched, keening giggle echoed off the walls. She tensed and looked around, the hair on her arms standing on end. “Did you guys hear that?”
Wilden paused from his coffee and peered about the room. Mr. Pennythistle’s brow furrowed, then he tutted. “Bad windows. It’s just a draft.”
Then everyone went back to eating like nothing was amiss. But Spencer knew that noise wasn’t from a draft. It was the same laugh she’d been hearing for months. It was A.
3
THE BOY WHO GOT AWAY
Hanna Marin and her stepsister, Kate Randall, sat at a long table in the central corridor of the King James Mall. They tossed huge, irresistible, we’re-cute-and-we-know-it smiles at all the passersby.
“Are you registered to vote?” Hanna asked a middle-aged woman toting a bag from the artisanal cheese shop Quel Fromage!
“Want to come to Tom Marin’s town hall meeting Tuesday night?” Kate handed a flyer to a guy wearing a Banana Republic name tag.
“Vote for Tom Marin in the next election!” Hanna bellowed at a bunch of fashionable grandmothers checking out the Tiffany window display.
There was a lull in the crowd, and Kate turned to Hanna. “You should have been a cheerleader.”
“Nah, cheerleading isn’t my style,” Hanna said breezily.
It was seven o’clock on Saturday night, and they were trying to drum up interest for Mr. Marin’s senate run. He was gaining in the polls, and the hope was that the town hall meeting and fund-raiser he was holding the next week would give him an advantage over his competitor, Tucker Wilkinson. Hanna and Kate were the youth voices in the campaign, launching Twitter feeds and organizing flash mobs.
Kate fiddled with the large VOTE FOR TOM MARIN button she wore on the lapel of her fitted jacket. “By the way, I saw another picture of Liam in the paper this morning with some skank on South Street,” she whispered. “It looks like he gained weight.”
Ordinarily, Hanna would have thought that her stepsister’s mention of Liam, a boy Hanna had gotten burned by a week before, was just to make her squirm—especially since Liam was Tucker Wilkinson’s son. But amazingly, Kate had been really cool. She laid off the snarky, I’m-better-than-you comments at the dinner table. She let Hanna have the bathroom first three mornings in a row. And the night before, she dropped off the new LMFAO album, saying she thought Hanna would like it. Hanna had to admit the New Kate was kind of awesome, though she’d never actually tell Kate that.