Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A/N: I’ve seen a few of these around and so I don’t take credit for the concept. This fic will be 26 chapters, one per letter, and I am always open to suggestion. I don’t own Pretty Little Liars.

Chapter 1: Anonymous.
Character: A, any of the A-Team that you want.
Quote: One may smile, and smile, and be a villain. (Hamlet)

Anonymous.

It’s the perfect setup, really: a person in a hoodie pretending to be someone but at the same time not. It’s kind of like a Venn diagram, tilted just enough one way to look like Alison, but by now those girls know Alison would step out of the shadows, the better to manipulate.

Tilted the other way, it looks like someone who knows exactly what Alison knew, and isn’t that a lovely thing, putting the liars into a frenzy of who else knew?

Who else did Alison tell?

Even Spencer, for all her intellect, hasn’t guessed at the existence of a diary. Still, it wouldn’t matter if she did because by now those diaries are scanned onto a heavily protected computer that isn’t even in Rosewood.

Anonymity never suited Alison, but then her actions generally were not illegal. She was a performer, the one to proudly take the stage and then confirm or deny her actions as she pleased and then twist your words until you were the one in the wrong and she was the innocent party. I am not the same breed of performer: I have to slink on and off the stage before my presence is realized, and I cannot tell anyone of my deeds. I would like to, but numerous rules forbid me from doing so.

It has occurred to me that there are loopholes and that I could surely get around the rules as I’ve been doing for so long now, but I choose not to – not because I am modest about my misdeeds, but because I cannot trust in any confidante. Instead I rely on the memory that people don’t expect me to have and the sensations that rush through me.

The scent of the gas station, cloying and heavy but still necessary because I’ve just been for a long drive; the feel of a thick black hoodie that masks my body; the panic that will filter across a face with a message; the mishmash of four ringtones simultaneously sounding; the bad diner coffee singeing my taste buds – these are the things that make me what I am.

I’m sure regular people, the ones outside of the Rosewood bubble, are afraid to see me in my A-gear, hood obscuring my hair and bleaching my skin pale, but it matters little when I see the end results. People need to realize that they cannot trust a pretty smile or friendly greeting: what lies beneath could be far more dangerous. They do not realize that the person greeting you politely is a stalker, has blackmailed and lied and cheated for months to punish people for the same crimes.

Fools. They are sheep, trusting and unassuming and this makes it the perfect way for me to pounce. I am the one to whom they tell their deepest secrets, the one who sits with them at lunches or in classes and shares a friendly eye-roll when the teacher is being strict. My anonymity works best in this way, hiding me in a shroud of dark fabric and sharp text messages while I learn new things.

And the best part – for me, anyway – is that they never guess.

In all the times I’ve sent a message or blocked them from learning something that might just help their mystery, they have never figured me out. I’m so far off their A-radar that I doubt they’ve ever thought of me.

Being anonymous was once drab, dull. It meant having no friends to speak of, of never having someone talk to me unless I was the target of the week’s rumour (no doubt instigated by Alison DiLaurentis) and of always being bored.

Until one day Alison herself realized she wasn’t invincible, wasn’t immune to a little illegal activity and it became oh-so-easy to direct her spying elsewhere, because how else to take the heat off me? And that proved to be the first challenge of many, because I quickly learned that she was frighteningly clever, much more so than I’d expected her to be. Still, I was grateful in time, because it made her a worthy adversary. It made shadowing her fun, rather than have her run straight to the nearest adult and demand they fix it like many others might have.

And in time, being anonymous took on a new enjoyment for me. It meant I could continue my various plans and schemes and what did it matter if I had to sneak out of Rosewood to plan, too wary of prying parents and diligent house staff? I was on the radars that mattered, and off the ones that didn’t – the rest could be taken care of along the way.

I knew enough to get me by and was able to learn the rest: for all the radars I worked to stay on, I generally kept people at a distance so as to stop them from prying too. It let me hone discipline and practice various things that I might not have in public, work on letting people underestimate me so that I became a well-known face but overall nothing too special. It wouldn’t do to give away all my secrets right away and so I kept it all hidden, kept things secret by smoothing my face impassive and silently memorizing snippets of things.

So far it has paid off, being anonymous. I’ve learnt more about my targets than I ever thought I would. It’s no longer just me, alone as I stand in my hoodie and boots. I have a team now and tonight we are scattered throughout the Lair and Rosewood. Some of us are doing surveillance, others are brainstorming and it’s all working beautifully.

It still sends a rush through me, my body straightening as I survey the pages in front of me and feel the power. I am not in the background tonight, I am in the front of the room and the one that gives guidance, approval as the others work through the night. None of us fully trusts the others – we would be fools to do so, stupid to expect no mutiny in a group of strong personalities.

No matter – I have the final say on everything, I am the leader here.

Time to sign off on a few plans I’m approving, and tonight will be done. Each sheet is marked with my favourite method: a hand-drawn, contrasting curly capital, rather than the serious typed counterpart.

A.

Chapter Text

Thanks to nick2951 for the ‘B’ suggestion.

Chapter 2: Brilliant.
Character: Mona.
Quote: Nothing is more creative… nor destructive… than a brilliant mind with a purpose. (Dan Brown)

She’s pretty sure that she’s brilliant.

See, her mother once allowed her to take an IQ test, the kind done in a doctor’s office and she’s not allowed to see the results no matter how much she begs. When pleading doesn’t work she takes to hopeful bribery, involving breakfasts made and puppy eyes and random comments about IQ tests threaded into dinner conversation.

And still her mother stays firm, adamant that Mona isn’t to know until she’s older, but one night her mother is working late and she stumbles across the test quite by accident. The numbers are not a let-down, they almost glow on the page, and she folds the page precisely.

It explains how she knows so much of her classwork without trying, explains how she still managed to pull good grades even when she went through the phase of not doing work because that was what Alison did. The number is probably on par with that of a Hastings, and maybe this is how she’ll get Alison to accept her.

So she does all her homework and tacks on extra credit, pulls her G.P.A right up, but all that gets her is a new harsher nickname and a fresh new hatred for Alison and her clique.

Midway through tenth grade, she gets sick of it all. She’s kept making herself smarter and is basically fluent in French from the summers she and her mother spend there, visiting relatives, but she’s still not pretty, she’s not athletic, and it’s starting to look like Alison will never accept her. Maybe it’s time for Alison to disappear and get others to accept her, because she is desperate for recognition beyond being a nerd and a smart girl. She’s too clever to fade into the pages of a yearbook as just a face.

Computers are a favourite of hers, it’s a thing her dad taught her. She likes the predictability of entering numbers and letters, knows how to code and create or destroy things at will. It’s how she gleans information remotely from Alison, who doesn’t know how to truly get rid of emails and thinks that deleting her texts will be the end of them. Alison is intelligent, but this is one area where she cannot match Mona.

She buys a black hoodie because she likes the way it’s anonymous, androgynous, and it’s comfortable to wear on a cold night of hacking. Soon enough she realizes how it drowns her body entirely, disguises any form of femininity and when she has the hood up, she looks like a completely different person. And when she isn’t hacking and making herself pretty, she studies. Reads law and history and poetry and economics, because with an IQ like hers why limit herself?

Only it’s not enough, keeping herself immersed in ancient words and French novels and all the new subjects she can find is never enough. She reads and learns and memorizes easily, almost mechanically, feeling a little like a computer downloading things. And eventually there’s new information to seek out, more than once a subject dovetails into other subjects to read and learn and discard if they don’t interest her, and soon enough she decides she needs a project. She’s bored of so much reading, so she finds practical subjects, and masters them – or doesn’t, it isn’t important.

And in the end she decides to become a second person. She breaks off a piece of her personality, dresses this piece in a plain black outfit, and slips a blank new cell phone into her hand. This other person is anonymous and bold, hides behind technology and might just make Alison disappear.

The weeks drag on and she taunts Alison in secret, feeling the adrenaline rush as she sneaks in and out of the empty DiLaurentis home, the muffled delight as Alison seeks out her hidden attacker in a crowded courtyard. This is what was lacking in all her books, even the novels for all their research and imagination didn’t show how good it felt to have the power in this sort of situation.

These activities are illegal, she knows this, and the rational part of her brain does not let her forget. Even so, she pushes down the rational, plans out her next move. This is going well; it is time to begin setting goals.

Soon enough she’s met her goal, Alison is out of town and none the wiser of her tormentor’s identity.

The problem is, now she’s invested in it. She has found that she likes tormenting people, likes knowing the answers that you don’t find in books, and she wants to keep going. Only Alison is out of town – ah, but she has left behind her four best friends. Perversely, she wonders if Spencer will be the one to catch on, wonders if this display of intelligence will be the one to gain a kind of grudging respect.

And what do you know, it does. Okay, so they respect A and not Mona, and so it’s under duress because she’s just hit her best friend with a car, but none of that matters.

Finally, she’s the girl she wanted to be: pretty and popular and respected, feared and clever and always challenged. It’s tough being four places at once, and she sets up a chess board with tiny dolls to represent each girl. No – better to have four boards, four versions of herself because essentially that’s what there is right now. And even despite this, or in spite of, she thrives. It’s the challenge, the rush of something, the sheer illegality of what she’s doing. Every time, she puts pressure on herself to be creative, to custom-design a cupcake or look up something for a clever wordplay that will send the girls spinning into a panic just that little bit more. She’s kind of a genius, after all, just really good at hiding it.

Alison is gone, she has her best friend, and the rest of the girls are all but dancing on strings to keep A happy. She can’t help but be satisfied.

At the mall a few weeks later, she decides on a pair of diamond earrings for her next birthday.

Chapter Text

Chapter 3: Civilian
Character: Alison
Quote: I’m a civilian, a citizen. (David Remnick)

Some days she laughs at them.

It’s easy for her to spin a tale, to work words to fit the situation and get people on board with her. They’re sheep, mindless and sweet and in need of a shepherdess, and for a while she is that girl. Of course, it’s all fascination, because how often do you know someone who comes back from the dead? And once the fascination wears off, she becomes the monster, the one accused of deeds that she’s never done, becomes the one who has to corral a new group of lost little lambs together because she can’t be a leader without someone to lead.

On the other days, they are unaware, and sometimes she pities them because they know nothing of the horrors this beautiful town hides.

It’s all so intriguing, all such a neat little crime-mystery-drama-romance-everything novel and it’s all playing out right in front of their eyes.

(don’t you see, she wants to shout at them, how the lives of others are twisting and warping while you live yours)

They don’t know that a girl fakes her death to get away from an unknown assailant, and all they see is the remnants of what happens when she goes: two girls who throw themselves into their work, one who leaves entirely, and one who drifts until she’s adopted, taken under someone’s wing. They see life moving on, but they don’t see the ugliness underneath, the dark circles under the concealer and the fraying nerves from constant surveillance. All they see here is strength and sympathy and sorrow.

And on the last of the days, she envies them for their blissful ignorance. Envies them because they don’t receive photo emails of their mother being buried, envies them for the way they can lock their houses and not worry that some lunatic has a skeleton key, the better to break in and create mischief of the worst kind. These are the days where she is angry, wonders why they deserve so much better than she, wonders why her life has become so twisted and warped.

It only serves to make her angrier though, because she knows that the reasons are all with her. It’s all because of her that this began, and some days she thinks it’ll be with her that this all ends. She is to blame for the endless lies that are spun, the countless stories that spill from glossed lips with the practiced ease of a Broadway actress – and she knows that these are stories that have been stored up, bottled up like potions ready to spill at a moment’s notice, because there are increasingly more situations which call for a quick story, a good lie.

So there are days that she blends into shabby seats in a movie theatre, drinks bad coffee in a cheap café a couple of minutes out of town because here she isn’t the girl who faked her death, she’s just one of many in a crowd. She watches, always, from a corner table, hides in the darkest shadowy corner she can find, and waits for someone to pick her out of the crowd, but it never comes. Of course, it helps that she still can be Vivian, slip on the dark wig and be someone else entirely for an hour. Vivian looks nothing like her, the wig darkening her eyes and paling her skin, and she adopts an unfamiliar accent just because she can, and anyway Alison DiLaurentis doesn’t have a foreign accent.

Here, on these days, she can relish in being one of many, rather than the one individual who stood out. She used to love standing out, but now, after so long of being pursued for it, she’d rather blend in, rather fit into a group of civilians who know nothing about her or her life. Standing out means being the girl whose mother was murdered, the one who still has a target on her back if she leaves town and is a sitting duck if she stays, because all of her lies and stories and games have mutated into something far bigger than she is, and she doesn’t know how to handle it all.

Some days she feels like a monster, like all her lies and deceits are burning through her skin, written in her veins for all to see, and she hugs her arms close to her, pretends that if she makes herself smaller they won’t see her and the darkness engulfing her.

They call her that too, they call her a killer and a sociopath and worst of all, they call her A.

Her blood boils at the last one because it isn’t just the girls saying this, it is the others who don’t even know the significance of it and so she continues to twist and warp them.

She collects up her four new girls, dresses them in lies and paints them in poison honey, and they’re pathetically grateful for it because they get to step out of the wallpaper and walk with her along the school halls. It’s so easy for her to twist them, pose them as she wants them, and of course the best method is two flanking her on either side. They are grateful to have their limbs arranged and strings pulled, and she sees the scorn in others when the new quintet debuts, knows what they are thinking.

She’s become the pathetic one, is what they think, assembling a new clique to resemble the old, and so she cuts down would-be insults with sharpened darts.

The effort is tiring, and she wishes for the safety of her old group because they knew their roles, and half the time her new lambs step out of line, say or do the wrong things and she is left to clean up after them. It’s so tedious to smile politely at parents, make small talk about the weather for god’s sake, pretend to be perfectly civil when all she wants to do is cry and yell and rail at people, rip things apart because no-one will open their eyes and see what is being wrought.

Her world is falling in, she’s no longer the centre of things like she once was, like she once longed to be, and it’s driving her mad because there’s no security to be had here and she doesn’t know if she will even last the year out. The people around her are becoming harder to control, harder to keep in line with a few sweet words and a pretty smile, and she hates it, hates that she is losing control.

The residents of this town are turning against her, seeing her in a different light, and it’s not a light that anyone likes.

It’d almost be enough for her to consider joining her enemy, start wreaking havoc across the town until people see that the prettiness hides so much hate and bitterness and ugliness, see the façade stripped away and the dark wounds that are hidden beneath. She wants to wreak her own mischief, tell more lies and spin more stories until the town is drawn in again, to hide her own flaws with a concealer of others’ flaws and survive, because some days she’s sure there will be some battle.

Perhaps it will take the town being razed to the ground before people will see.

Chapter Text

Chapter 4: Detective
Character: Hanna
Quote: Look and you will find it – what is unsought will go undetected. (Sophocles)

She fully admits that she isn’t the super-smart one, but she isn’t stupid either.

People always look at her and see blonde, see fashion and cute and spacey, but Spencer is breaking down and Emily’s occupied and so is Aria. So hey, maybe it’s time to step into the role Spencer is leaving behind.

Her method is probably not one Spencer would ever use, but she digs into her detective-crime novels anyway and the patterns aren’t hard to see once she looks properly.

(She doesn’t mention that she keeps a notebook with the observations, starts a fresh page for a new book and writes diligently quotes and repeated behaviour patterns of the criminal and her own theories. Somewhere in the fourth novel, she stops skipping to the last chapter and starts trying to figure out whodunit for herself.)

And one day, inscribed in one of the cover pages, is the quote about how if someone wants to find something they have to look for it.

It spurs her on, so she snaps a photo of the page and buries it in her email, hides it from the average person who might be looking at her phone.

There are the new cops in town, and the one is always willing to talk about the novels with her, doesn’t laugh or make jokes when she goes all Spencer on her theories or tries to discuss a random symbol. Somewhere along the way she finds herself genuinely interested, keeps taking notes and eventually highlighting things to make it extra-clear what patterns and connections are in place.

The problem is this: she isn’t actually detecting a thing. She hasn’t learned anything about her fellow Rosewood residents, and she’s an armchair detective at best. This is all passive, it doesn’t mean a goddamn thing when there are actual people being buried and maybe alive and probably a whole group of stalkers on the loose around town. This is playing pretend, like when she was little and would steal her mother’s makeup and totter around in shoes meant for a woman much older than her.

She isn’t any kind of psychologist or doctor, can’t deduce someone’s thought patterns just by looking at them, and if she were another kind of person maybe she’d break into the doctor’s office for files and records – but she isn’t, is she, she’s the one who does the least of the heavy lifting.

All she’s got now is the knowledge of a fictional criminal’s psyche, half a dozen times over, and when she compares it to Spencer’s drugged-out dream that brings her one giant subconscious clue, it looks pretty pathetic.

So she buries the notebook in an old handbag, dumps the novels and goes about her day-to-day.

Even A isn’t interested in her attempt at detective work, because there are no notes taunting her, nothing suggesting how she and Holbrook could work together or how she’s eighteen miles away from any truth. And she’s relieved because even though A probably knows about the notebook, it’s not enough to make her a target. She relaxes slowly about this, doesn’t bother to make sure the book is where she left it until one day when she moves it to the top shelf of her wardrobe.

It’s still there, because why would A have any interest in fictional theories? As long as the theories don’t start to prove an identity, A isn’t interested.

She continues digging with her friends, but never skates close enough to the truth to be at risk. It’s partially deliberate on her side: she’s decided she doesn’t want to know who A is because then they’ll have reason to come after her and she can’t handle any more being a target. Ignorance is supposed to be bliss. Besides, if the others don’t know, A can’t come after them either.

Only it doesn’t work like that because they get clues thanks to Spencer, and Aria brings in knowledge with Ezra’s book, so now she’s back to trying to solve an unsolvable mystery. It’s back to the “secret” meetings, the schemes and the new plans that will be the thing to uncover A once and for all (it never works like that, because hasn’t anyone learned anything by now? Even Spencer’s brainpower hasn’t put those pieces together, or maybe she’s just denying it all)

And they continue struggling on, collecting pieces to the puzzle and discarding them when they don’t fit, keep finding new leads that die or get cut short because they’re the mice in this game and A isn’t just a cat, they’re a panther or lion.

Some nights, when it’s quiet in Rosewood, she’ll dig out the notebook and go through it all again, trying to apply the clues and details in there to the situation she’s in, try to guess who fits the profile best. Other nights, she’ll add to the profiles, and eventually she creates a series of entries in a notebook, because it’s the best way she can think of writing it all down without being hacked – you can’t hack a piece of paper – and burns them when she finds reason to disprove a theory.

This is her life and she decides that even pretending to be a detective is better than doing nothing and she can see the reason Spencer likes to make lists and sub-lists, makes slideshows and spreadsheets because that way the uncontrollable can be controlled and made into a neat little bundle. It’s a false sense of security, but they cling to it anyway because their real security has been steadily lessened ever since the first A note.

She’s pretty sure that one day, this all will be over because surely A can’t keep finding new ways and reasons to torment people for things they did years ago, and it’s not much consolation to her. It’s beginning to feel like she’s living inside of a movie, and some days it’s like she’s stepping outside of herself and watching as she and her friends investigate their own lives, watching herself try to not stumble.

They search and study and research and look at one detail from five perspectives and come up with everything and nothing.

It’s just too bad that finding some new detail brings more questions than it does answers.

Chapter Text

Chapter 5: Envy
Character: Aria
Quote: Beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on. (Othello)

For her it’s a slow-creeping process.

At first it’s casual longing to write a novel and occasional irrational anger when she reads of others her age with publishing deals or some other wonderful success.

(Why isn’t it her name on any of these deeds?)

And then it settles into her bones, the way Alison DiLaurentis gets to swan around school and bat her eyelashes, gets countless admirers while she feels like an oddball. Sometimes she notices the heavy athlete’s bag of uniform and towels and extra equipment Emily Fields carries, the way Spencer Hastings raises her hand in class as if it’s a competition, the sweetness in Hanna Marin’s smile.

She doesn’t stand out in sports, and she knows the various questions in English and History, wishes she could mimic the guilelessness of a smile because the worst thing is that these girls genuinely mean it, truly are dedicated to intellect or popularity or sports.

And one day, she picks up a pen to write in a journal because her parents encourage her to keep track of her thoughts. She finds that it becomes like a recycling system for the things she doesn’t want to think about, doesn’t want to deal with on a daily basis. It’s cathartic, to come home from school and purge her thoughts into an old notebook that she’ll burn before the ink dries on the last page.

For some reason Alison creates a clique and selects her, she doesn’t know why but she loves having friends and belonging, so she doesn’t question.

It amplifies her simmering envy though because up-close she can see Alison practically sparkling, the ink stains on Spencer’s fingers from holding pens and books, the dryness of Emily’s chlorine-soaked hair and the piles of fashion magazines around Hanna’s room. It’s kind of a reminder that she is quirky, but quirky isn’t a tangible thing you can hold and look at.

Overseas, writing becomes a comfort blanket at first, and she dips her hand into her bag to ruffle the corners, grasps it like a shield when there’s a word she doesn’t understand and wields it like homework.

So one day she tries fiction, and it turns out badly, bad enough that she rips out the pages and stuffs them down the garbage disposal, but she catches the bug that day. Writing isn’t just fun, it’s a way to create a world where she isn’t an oddball or a loner, and soon enough she writes fiction daily. Hours slip by unnoticed and she takes to writing after dinner in an effort to minimize distraction.

She keeps reading too, piles books haphazardly around her room and imagines having a loft piled high with broken-in books.

This is her comfort when she returns to Rosewood and she makes space in her bag to bring a separate notebook to school every day, because she’s seen her classmates and Alison is still missing, and in her absence the others have continued growing into themselves. She feels like she’s only just begun the process.

When the four of them reconnect the envy rushes back. Spencer and Emily have collected yet more trophies and awards, Hanna’s prettier than ever, and people still love Alison. She has nothing to show for her time other than a stack of notebooks, and so writing becomes her escape. Her fiction takes new twists, she learns to shut off her brain and let the words flow, not troubling to read until her wrist is cramped and her eyes bleary.

It’s a passion, but then she learns that Mona is the one stalking her and she’s kind of bewildered, because what’s it like to have something going beyond passion? She wants that.

(Maybe this is a side effect of having everyone and everything she loves endangered, but she wants so much more now. She wants to rule the school to see what it’s like to be loved so much, wants her name in newspapers and on TV screens. She wants the things she can hold and the things that she can’t, but that is way too many things for any girl to want and so she makes do with what she has)

And now the A-game has been levelled up, the stakes are higher than ever with Alison alive and she tries to think of everything with a writer’s eye, tries to act as though this is all a novel she’s writing so she can stay distant. It only works for so long because there’s secrecy shrouding the town

(absurdly, she wonders if the town is still on the map now because of all the secrecy that dwells here)

and once again she’s sucked in to the lies and half-truths and ugly truths.

One day she snaps, sick of it all. When she looks around her classmates she sees innocent smiles and pretty makeup and cute boys, and she’s paranoid enough that it’s all tainted. The smiles look predatory, the makeup clownish, and maybe the boys are only pretending foolishness.

So she runs home and writes about how the villain wins, wonders if it would satisfy A, because at this point the villains are winning and she doesn’t know anywhere enough to stop it. One lesson in hacking from Caleb wasn’t enough to even scratch the surface, and she’s tired of guessing how someone else thinks. Her villain is anonymous this time, in fact the whole story is autobiographical, and she finishes writing with tears on her cheeks and fingers that have gone numb from holding the pen so long.

She collapses back onto her bed and doesn’t feel the usual rush of satisfaction that comes with finishing up a story, thinks wistfully on how another girl in another county might be getting ready for a dance and not creating ulterior motives for going.

It’s been too long since she was able to relax, ever since A stole the game from Mona because Mona was just a schoolgirl with a grudge and this version is far too lethal.

The daydream is one that has become increasingly familiar over the months, one where she doesn’t have someone stalking her, one where she can live her life normally.

Only she’s forgotten what normal looks like because this is her normal, and she’s reduced to following her classmates’ lives for a glimpse of what she once had. It’s becoming a habit for her to randomly befriend someone for the sake of a pleasant hangout that doesn’t involve surveillance and paranoid, and people brush it off as a girl talking to someone she might never see again.

College is another cause for envy and it rises up again, hot in her throat, because college might be her escape if she can get in. She’s listened to a lot of conversations these past few months, knows people are gaining scholarships and planning their dorms, knows that they are the lucky ones who are aiming for degrees and careers, not survival and escape.

A text comes in; there’s a new crisis that needs to be dealt with, because she’s in Rosewood and there’s always a crisis. It’s tempting to shut off her phone, but that won’t make it go away because then there’ll be calls to her home line, knocks at the door until she ventures out from her haven.

Once, she envied others for shining in a crowd, for having something about which they were really passionate, but the past few months have been like acid to fabric and stolen away some of the energy she used to dedicate to her writing.

She stands with the others to look at the latest problem and wishes for a trade.

Chapter Text

Chapter 6: Faithful
Character: A, whichever you choose
Quote: At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

There are the days when being a genius stalker becomes tiring.

These days are few and far between, but they do still happen. Some mornings I have to awaken after a sleep broken by beeping devices and new alerts of what is going on – this is when I have to rely on technology to monitor what my human self cannot.

This is the reliance that I loathe most, having to trust that my computers and bugs and spies throughout Rosewood will be accurate. I’ve come to fear losing some precious detail because a computer didn’t pick up something, because one of my spies wasn’t quite paying attention.

Then there are the morality days, the ones where I question the safety of what I’m doing. Sometimes I list off all the ways I’ve broken the law since I began this: blackmail and stalking and harassment, obstructing justice – and the thrill is always there. There’s something wicked, illicit, about writing down my crimes in black and white, reading it over and then burning the paper. I’ve continued to get away with everything, after all.

At times I even feel a little guilty for it, and waver from the path.

It’s becoming harder to have an endgame. I once dreamed of having a grand finale, some glorious ending where I’d triumph and the girls I target have their names and reputations dragged through the mud.

Only, the problem is this: I’m not completely omniscient. My minions and I hide things from each other all the time: I’m the only one who knows the identity of every person on the team, and I like to keep it that way. I know they hide things from me, I can see it in their eyes when they report in person or read into a text message what they’re not saying. This is when I only have my inferences to go on.

I can’t predict every move the girls will make, because for all that I have come to know them better they still remain a bit unpredictable, and sometimes I have to go into a situation not knowing every detail I need.

Sometimes, I even want to quit.

It’d be easy, to just crush the phone and burn the hoodies, strip the lairs of every last item and fade into memories.

And then I see another of the liars doing something she shouldn’t, telling another lie instead of allowing the truth to come out, and my anger is renewed. Those four girls would play us for fools, if I allowed them, and their former ringleader is no better. She will sell out almost anyone to save herself, she lies to those she calls friends and still expects them to fall into line. I was pleased to see that they didn’t.

Alison in particular makes it so easy for me to stay true to my plans, because she is the mistress of deceit.

(this is hypocritical of me, because my foundation is built on lies and deceit, but I am not the one deceiving my friends. I am the one seeking justice, and I hate deceit)

They’re clever, but not clever enough to outsmart me. They don’t do any of the things they should, have forgotten the cautionary tales learned in high school

(but I have ruined this for them, because even without help I have been able to instill in them a scepticism of the police system, a lack of trust in authority figures)

and so they allow themselves to remain lambs ready for the slaughter they don’t know is comng.

I don’t quite know when, but at some point this crusade stopped being about revenge and punishment for their various misdeeds. It’s still about punishment, though the revenge has faded: instead, I’m punishing them for their idiocy. I’m punishing them for not being able to tell the truth, for continuing to lie and never learning their lessons the first time.

Now, I wield my intelligence before them, boasting about how the four of them still cannot combine their brainpower and work it out – once, I did think that they could do it, but I have my doubts now. They’re too concerned with self-preservation, but that doesn’t extend to figuring out and unmasking me.

Besides, they continue to provide me with new material for entertainment: new lies to unravel and secrets to reveal, new dreams to crush down just because I can. I don’t think they even realize we’re in a battle of wits; they stay a few steps behind, still thinking it’s a battle of secrets and revenge and this is what keeps me five steps ahead.

While they try to keep up with me, I’m mapping out new predictions and prophecies and plans, preparing strategies and getting to know my enemy just a bit better.

(every new secret and lie and idea they have is another piece of my armour, allowing me to keep my identity well-hidden and send them off chasing some innocuous ‘lead’)

I think this is my new revenge: constantly outsmarting them, and yet being right under their noses. It’s perfect, really: I will eventually reveal myself, if only for the pleasure of showing them just how wrong they were about me, and while they are still scrabbling with how and why and coming to grips with it all, I can leave them behind.

After all, there will come a time when I don’t need them. Perhaps this is the better path of my plans: pare them down to people who need me for normalcy in their lives, because by now they’ve become so used to my presence that they don’t remember life before me, and then I will leave. Just as they don’t remember life before me, they won’t know life after I’ve left.

I think I’ll leave one day soon, maybe for Europe, and I’ll know that every humid summer day, every snowy evening, they’re struggling to readapt.

I pride myself on it. Being able to adapt and readapt is one of my favourite talents, one that gets a lot of use. I’m a performer, and I always have to be able to become what someone wants or expects me to be at a moment’s notice. I have the routine down perfectly now, and in the blink of an eye I can be anyone, anything. Soon, there won’t be much left to keep me here – I’ve been careful to burn the bridges that need burning – and it’ll be a clear road out.

The best part is that no-one, least of my favourite targets, notice. They might blink, dazed, at me once or twice, but they think nothing of it, and proceed about their day.

As long as they remain this stupid, I shall continue my work.

Chapter Text

Chapter 7: Grotesque
Character: CeCe
Quote: The real world is where the monsters are. (Rick Riordan)

She’s used to getting by pretty easily.

In high school she’s the pretty one, the smart one and all the other girls want to be her. She doesn’t appear to make much effort with schoolwork, and she laughs behind a coffee when they proudly announce how much homework they’ve ignored, hoping to win her over.

(she can see right through them. The heavy bags of books give it away, the stressed answer on the other end of a phone line – these girls aren’t what they would like to be.)

Ruling the school gets tedious though because this is a small town and there’s no chance for something really great to happen, so she makes do with trips into town, selling them as something bigger to her friends and smaller to her parents.

For a while, it works. She’s happy enough maxing out credit cards, playing with the limits to see how much she can get away with on one day.

Then one day, she meets Alison DiLaurentis through Jason.

It’s kind of a revelation because this girl is a lot younger than her and a whole lot more ambitious. This is a girl who can lie as fluently as if it’s her first language, smiles prettily to hide the ugliness, and so CeCe sort of adopts her.

Neither of them have sisters, so they fill the gaps neatly and pretend.

She teaches Alison to lie more, to deceive and pretend and play games with others, is happy to drive her from one place to the next for their collective amusement. There are no issues here, even when she knows she’s becoming the bad friend parents hate, even when Jason tells her to stay away from his little sister.

(she laughs in his face, brushes off his concern and sweeps out to meet Alison, a queen and her princess plotting)

They play cruel pranks and defy parental edicts that they can’t see each other again. They set traps and she’s proud when she sees the lack of negative feeling in Alison, pleased to see her coaching pay off. All this means Alison is a perfect ruler, ideal for politics first of the school and second for life.

(only one day it all goes wrong because Alison is being stalked and is distancing herself from everyone, wary and mistrustful and throwing threats around,

she is still a child but she’s getting tangled up in this adult’s game for which she isn’t prepared

and then things with the town’s stalker are going from bad to worse and Alison is reported dead a few months later)

She watches from afar as Alison’s friends fall apart time and time again.

She watches over them sometimes, when she comes back to town, and visits Alison’s grave with news. These days, she tries to tell herself that she is honouring her best friend and honorary little sister, but she’s pretty sure she’s kidding herself. So she watches Emily’s girlfriend go from weak to strong and then stronger still, and she feels her first pang of remorse.

It’s easily pushed away though, because she has to survive and be strong and she can’t do that if she’s wallowing in the time she taunted a girl over something small. If she did wallow in everything she did, she’d be immobilized.

She still has to protect the girls who remind her a bit of ducklings, lost without a leader.

Things keep going wrong, she kills a cop and then things are really bad because she has to go on the run and can’t fill in her role as a protector. Every time she ventures outdoors she feels horribly exposed and is sure that even five states over people must be recognizing her, but if they do no-one ever does anything about it and she’s too paranoid to stop and ask.

One night she moves to a different apartment, dyes her hair and feels a heavy relief.

She already looks less like herself, and then the news breaks that Alison is alive and back in Rosewood, so she returns.

The girls are still there, and it occurs to her this town is a place that you can’t really leave. She’s proof of this, she checked out months ago and declared that she’d never return, but she’s back again.

When she sees Alison, it’s almost a relief but then she realizes the lies Alison is spinning to keep the town in her hands, and if the girls are anything to go by it isn’t working. She still has to sneak around while Alison gets to move in the open and she feels like some night creature, relying on the shadows for protection.

She’s resentful now even as she masks herself and boards a plane bound for France, and grimaces when she looks in the mirror. The wig makes her skin a dull grey, her lipstick is so red as to be cartoonish and she feels ridiculous. Even in disguise she feels exposed, keeps expecting someone to yank at the wig or sunglasses and arrest her.

High school made her casually cruel, but paranoia has made her a monster.

Upon touching down in France she dredges up her rusty French, imagines that her accent is too rough and that people are amused by it. In the security of the bolthole apartment she’s renting (lucky to have a landlord who cares more for money and less for the people) she scrubs at her lipstick and finds her mouth stained red.

When drunk, it looks like blood and she’s reminded of the cop she killed.

(she doesn’t sleep that night)

And so she continues to lie and pretend and she goes between France and America probably more than she really should, but the charges aren’t on her credit card so she doesn’t care.

She brings Alison custom-made perfume and hates that it’s well-received because they’re still deceiving each other, still deceiving everyone else and she misses when life didn’t involve being wanted for the murder of a police officer.

All that she’s done in the name of loyalty and friendship and family seem tarnished now. They’re less like the actions of someone trying to do the right thing and more like the actions of someone who is working under a spell.

(and oh, she hates that she taught the younger girl these spells, because she has lost the ability herself and been replaced by a newer model)

She doesn’t like what she’s become, a warped version of herself, but she’s in too deep to escape now. Her eyes look too dull, her hair stringy and dry, and her skin doesn’t look healthy: in other words, she’s all the girls she used to mock. Her personality has warped, heightening the bad and leaving the good behind, and she can’t fathom what she once was.

(it’s been too long)

High school yearbooks, with all their little photos and Most Likely categories, never prepared her for this.

She’s begun to feel like the monster behind the person, the one who made Alison a queen and then left her to her own devices. Or maybe she’s the person behind the monster, and some days she can’t quite differentiate. Other days she’s certain that this is who she is, because she raised a monster in her own image and enjoyed it too much to stop.

This is what makes her certain she’s the person behind the monster: people never remember the person, only the monster.

Chapter Text

Chapter 8: Hope
Character: Spencer
Quote: Hope is a waking dream (Aristotle)

It’s not wrong to say she hopes for a lot.

She starts small, though others wouldn’t think so – hoping for an apartment converted from a barn or for the ability to negotiate with lawyer parents the car she wants.

These things pale into comparison though because soon she’s hoping for her privacy to be regained, but her nemesis is a genius hacker who knows things even she doesn’t (computer hacking isn’t something she’s ever needed, ever thought about doing) and she hates that she might have to respect her opponent.

Soon enough she’s wandering around in a haze of daydreams and her sleep is littered with other dreams. Privacy and peace and night terrors of a masked figure dance before her eyelids, so she downs another coffee before bed and sleeps progressively less. This way, at least she has the illusion that she’s in charge of her subconscious, and she chases this with heavy reading, trying to focus her mind elsewhere.

For a while it works, but eventually she builds up some kind of immunity to her mind tricks and soon there’s the other tricks: a number on a page looks like an A, but returns to a number when she blinks. The word talk blurs into stalk, and she’s sure she can apply every character analysis, every twisted plot, to herself and her life.

She picks up non-fiction.

The problem here is that she tries the driest material she can find, hoping her mind will be drawn into problem solving of calculus and physics, but instead it puts her to sleep, where the nightmares return. It feels like A has worked their way into her subconscious, threaded a path through her brain cells and drawn a pattern into her cranium, and now she knows better than to think something will distract her.

(because it won’t, the distractions and diversions she fixes up are temporary at best and they never hold for more than a few weeks before the magic wears off and she’s back at square one)

So she goes around creating her own fictional worlds, imagining what if what if what if, and twists them around to suit her needs. The fiction is nothing original – magic worlds, real worlds, alternate-universe versions of herself and everyone she knows, spins secret tales to herself and imagines putting them into a book for posterity. Even this does nothing to soothe her long-term because she can imagine the cloaked figure and their dark amusement at her small attempts at escaping.

And finally, she learns to erase hope.

She bites it back, weaves a cloak of determination over her body and begins trying to solve the mysteries.

(she feels she has been stupid to sit back as long as she has because now the mysteries and lies and stories have piled up, it’s like Jenga and all the oldest are at the bottom of the stack but she can’t pull because then everything else will scatter into a mess of confusion and dismay)

The attempts begin weak, and even her infiltration of a team did nothing but leave marks on her conscience. No confession will absolve her, even if she imagines the scene where she tells the story to someone official, but if she gives it enough time it’ll be like it never happened.

So she pretends, tells a different story

(she’s bringing her fiction to life)

and somewhere along the way it is like it never happened, because she still gets to be with her friends. She’s with them as a friend, not an enemy or pretending to be a friend for information, so maybe she’s been partially absolved.

It’s the story she tells herself when she taps at her computer, trying to trace IP addresses or figure out a username, and she continues the story thus: her current actions are against the enemy, so at least she’s on the good side.

She decides to consider it as some sort of warped credit/debt analogy.

Somewhere, the hope manages to creep back in, maybe it’s a by-product of always trying to fight, but it’s there and she allows it to stay because now she knows what she’s up against, sort of, and she’s pretty sure this game can’t last forever.

This time she allows herself to hope for the distant future, not the present, and doesn’t dwell on how depressing that might be. She pictures a new set of buildings to eclipse the old, new nameless people in the background and imagines the fake stories of high school she’ll have to tell if she ever wants to fit in.

The hope dies out again, a roaring fire reduced to a pile of red embers and a burnt chunk of wood and she presses her lips together to muffle the scream working its way up her throat.

Now she sees what this is: a trap, keeping her and her friends dishonest because the truth is too ugly to stand, too distinct to let her have her life back and too damning to indict her in a number of things. Things that were once possible have been closed off to her, keeping her pinned in place. Any last semblance of hope melts away replaced by wistful sighs and careless wishes, wishes thrown into the atmosphere by the handful because she’s pretty sure they’re all she can do.

(keep fighting and wish for something that fits the situation, that’s the best she can offer these days)

Sometimes she hears others around her expressing their hopes – for an A on an essay, for a free period, and she chokes back the hysteria bubbling in her throat. They have it so easy, such smooth sailing, and she can’t even bring herself to envy that because she’s sure she has brought this – punishment, if that’s what it is – upon herself. Their hopes are small and she’s not sure how that goes, because aren’t you supposed to hope for big things?

Still, she listens and observes, and people continue hoping for small things despite themselves. Even the solemn process of university applications feels smaller than it should be, and she wonders if this is another by-product of A’s brand of chaos. Maybe she’s gone through so much that even milestones shrink in comparison.

Maybe surviving everything she’s encountered so far is the true milestone, the one that overshadows every other tiny thing she might’ve hoped for.

(after all, she got the car, didn’t get the barn, went through hell and came out the other side still fighting on so who knows, maybe that is her biggest achievement to date)

Wishing turns to wanting and it feels more solid, as if she’s really allowing herself to acknowledge what she wants and the fact that she can still want something. Then again, she’s free to want things. It’s just that A will do their best to prevent her from getting it.

She continues to want things, and sometimes she even gets them. There’s the rare occasion that she gets a step or two ahead of A, and sometimes she gives in to material desires just for the sake of going shopping and pretending that she’s getting everything she wants.

Later still, she realizes that you’re supposed to dream big.

Chapter Text

Chapter 9: Immortality.
Characters: Alison, Mona.
Quote: Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality. (Emily Dickinson)

She’s always dreamed of immortality, of reaching some state beyond that of human and being worshipped for it.

Somewhere along the way she gets it into her head that true immortality, the physical kind that would freeze her face and body, is the kind that she wants. The problem is, she doesn’t live in a world that happens to be occupied by vampires, there’s no witch waiting to make an elixir for the right price, and so she continues to get older.

She lounges around, tells her friends in a lofty tone that immortality is dying young and beautiful and she almost believes it. Underneath, she’s desperate for forever, and research does nothing to quench the thirst – it only worsens it. She never wants to die, never wants to grow old or grey, never wants to get ill. Her mortality is something of a trouble to her, but she doesn’t want to be a monster either – just eternal.

And one day she reads a line or two in a poem, that immortality can be achieved by either creating art or passing on the genes to a child. The poem is shortly forgotten, but for those lines, and she resents the author for not telling her some greater secret. There’s no inclination for children, maybe never will be, and she’s not the artistic one.

So after everything with A happens, or rather doesn’t happen, she’s grateful to Mona for bringing her away, giving her a sanctuary, and suggesting how she can outsmart A.

She drives away in a cheap car the next morning and it doesn’t take long before her face is on posters, missing, with captions that plead for information about her.

Beneath the guilt for making everyone worry, she loves the attention. It’s a good photo, and her only problem is that she can’t tell people that it’s her in this beautiful photo. One day, in a café, she plans her next move and watches someone stare at her image, smiles coyly to herself and slinks back into her hood.

(can’t take the risk of being recognized, after all)

No, that’s not quite right. Her bigger problem is that every day she is outgrowing the photo, her hair imperceptibly longer or her body changed ever-so-slightly. Every day there’s some new detail about her that the photo-girl didn’t have, and she hates it. She tries her best to lessen the changes, but the truth is she’s still on the run, still stressed out about where she’s going to sleep, and so some days she greets the world haggard and tired. Right now she doesn’t have the luxury of endless cosmetics and clothes, just a few jars and bottles that fit into her bag.

The problem with faking her death is this: she has to come home older, still mortal – in fact she doesn’t think she’s ever felt so mortal, not even when she had to staunch the blood flow from a wound because she couldn’t go to hospital. She has been stripped of her immortality, the endless photos living forever on computers and not comparing to the real thing. People no longer dance around her in conversation, but speak openly and bravely.

Seems they don’t quite love her anymore.

---

She’s never wanted forever, just a lifetime.

Under the monstrosities, she’s still just a girl, and she thinks she wants all the usual things. She’s not always quite sure what those are though, forgets sometimes that she’s been a monster and is now a girl, gets mixed up between this and that.

People don’t love her anymore, so she focuses on redeeming herself, making herself someone that can be loved, someone who can be forgiven her sins and given a new slate.

The opportunity comes when she suspects Alison of being the newest stalker in town, calls Alison a sociopath and offers to help. This time it’s almost like having friends, but she knows that friends don’t stop by simply because they want help, and this stings.

(mortal, she’s mortal)

 Survival, that’s her mode now. It’s a familiar one, not unlike pulling on a comfortable old jumper, and she tries her best to go undetected. Thing is, her mother is monitoring her purchases and bank accounts, watching for unusual activity and ready to step in at the first sign that something is wrong. Instead, she makes do with what she has got and tries not to inventory all the ways in which A might have her outclassed, listens in on conversations she isn’t supposed to hear and tries to calculate how she can help the girls.

She has to protect them because she does have a hunch about how things might turn out for her and if that’s the case she needs to leave some kind of legacy, prove that she wasn’t always just a loser.

And hell, when her door swings open and her assailant is there, she’s not going to go down quietly.

She kicks and punches and scratches, slashes with fingernails deliberately left long, tries not to scream at the pain because that would be weakness and there’s no time for that –

but no, her wounds are becoming fatal.

There’s less consciousness now, she can feel herself growing so tired. She’s lost too much blood, there’s no hope of medical attention.

She wanted to leave a legacy – well, here it is, in her bloodstained house and a few items hidden where they’ll go undetected until it’s time for Hanna to receive them. She decides that she may as well make her peace, she isn’t going to survive and her mother loves her, maybe even the girls could have come to love her, and so she knows they’ll remember. Knows there will be a memorial and tributes, knows that they will know how she died. She knows that the town won’t forget anytime soon, especially not if her estimations about the eventual police report are correct.

She thinks they’ll try to avenge her, maybe interact with her mother the way she watched them interact with Jessica DiLaurentis.

Her eyes water and the tears spill over just a bit, it doesn’t matter now if she’s weak because what’s weaker than dying?, quickly drying up in the cold air and soon enough she feels nothing more.

She trades one immortality for another.

---

She lounges on her bed. Her father is away and so is her brother, and she isn’t welcome into the homes of her former clique.

Maybe she’ll call her new pseudo-clique, but truth is, they’re not her friends – just a jumble of girls who represent the others she has lost: one for the art, one for the athletics, one for the academics, and one for the admiration. All of it feels hollow, dull, but the admiration is the worst of it, because it’s all a smokescreen for her new unloved status.

So much for immortality.

Chapter Text

Chapter 10: Justice
Character: Emily
Quote: At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

She feels feral now.

It’s all under the surface, of course, but under the neat layer of sports-casual and sweet smiles she’s raging out of control. Anger boils her veins, she watches others go about their lives and silently curses them all.

(cursing is bitter, but it feels better than the sharp tang that is envy)

Her own life is becoming a thin veneer of neatness that conceals breaking and broken and all the future breaks that are yet to happen. Paranoia is the closest to the surface and it’s all she can do not to snap-react to something, to leap up and run when she hears a shriek

(just her classmates, but really, you can’t blame a girl for being poised to defend after everything that’s happened)

so instead she bunches up her muscles and stays where she is.

And now she feels like a metaphor brought to life, feels like she can apply her physical body’s reactions to those of her mind and the way time is freezing around her. She can’t do anything about all the threats for fear of her secrets being exposed, doesn’t want to risk the grand unveiling of all her crimes and so she continues to be threatened.

There is no justice right now for her, or her friends, and it’s beginning to look like there won’t be.

She bundles up her secrets inside herself, watches as her friends do the same.

It’s a stalemate, a battle that’s deeply uneven and all that’s left is to wait it out, hope their tormentor eventually decides on other plans beyond creating chaos and misery.

(Killed a man in self-defence and still she’s allowed in society, permitted to walk freely among her peers because the story was buried, the truth warped and only a handful of people remain knowing what she’s aware of)

They become darker as the time goes on, dark queens who deal in lies because it’s all going to be buried, all going to be used as bait and leverage and maybe one day a newsbomb, but right now they can’t worry.

It’s easy, after all, to keep lying, to be a deceit and a trickster. Here is the truth: now you see it, now you don’t. Brutality comes easy, lightning-reflexes making actions fatal, and if any of the others need advice on coping with the aftermath of killing someone then she’s the one they will go to.

(and she’s proven right about that when one quick action taken in self-defence becomes fatal in a theatre, the audience mercifully empty because this has the potential for being what puts them under the spotlight. two rivals dead in self-defence: one was bad, but two is exponentially worse)

Easier still to flee a crime scene, to leave ghastly things behind and it’s scary how easy it is to put something from her mind because if she didn’t she’d go mad. It’d be the heartbeat, the blood, the monsters under her bed all coming to life.

She swims a lot more, a lot longer, because underwater there’s so much quiet. All that’s there is the pure blue of the water, the chill that becomes warmth as blood circulates and the hush of water swishing back-and-forth. It’s clean and quiet and familiar. A has left this untainted and she’s not stupid enough to make this observation. She can’t speak underwater, keeps her breath steady and slips through the water.

The pool keeps her secrets.

Some days it does drive her a little mad, knowing that there’s no true justice for her victim, or that of Aria’s victim. Self-defence, it was, but it’s still the same: they both ended a life, both took someone away from friends and family.

(these are the days where she pushes herself in the pool, tapping the wall and gasping for breath a little bit because she went so long without stopping. Exiting the pool feels a bit cleansing, her muscles sore as if the laps were a punishment.)

Other days, she’s in fear. She reads about justice and wonders if his family would be justified in coming after her, an eye for an eye – but no, that wouldn’t be just, and she grits her teeth over the various websites that tell her all the different types of justice, the different ways in which it might be obtained and the definition of just.

Nothing comes – at least, not in direct retaliation – and she begins a wary kind of relaxing.

A’s messages still come though, faithful to the bitter end, and she wonders if this is the justice she is being served. After all, A has taken it upon themselves to make her and her friends suffer; it’s primarily in the name of revenge, but maybe there’s a bit of justice thrown in to rationalize it better. Justice sounds better.

It weighs on her and for a time she’s bitterly glad to receive A notes, reminding herself that they are deserved. It is her deeds that have brought her to this, and each note is a punishment, a reminder that for the immediate future there’s going to be someone around watching her misdeeds and reminding her of them.

She can’t forget.

All she can do is put things from her mind for a while, let herself uncoil from the expectation of an attack and pay her penance.

After the window of hateful gratitude has passed, she returns to plain hate. It’s there and it’s warming her, the promise of justice in the future like a lighthouse to someone out at sea. She feels like she is always at her worst now, always expecting an attack, always trying to plan and strategize. Staying one step ahead proves difficult if not impossible and so her best option is to focus on surviving. It’s the same for all of them, who just need to be able to stay alive and get out, put the whole town behind them.

Confessing is out of the story: the story has become too tangled, and so she pays her penances with psychotic stalker notes. Maybe she’ll study psychology, or counselling at college – prepare for a career that isn’t swimming to help others. It wouldn’t be justice, but it would be another form of penance. Helping people might ease the darkness that’s settled over her, might balance out all the black marks that are undoubtedly being tallied up by an anonymous person.

Here is the secret: there’s no justice for her and her friends, for Alison whose death still hasn’t been resolved, but there’s also no justice for all those who were victims of them.