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The thing that most people forget about Ali is this: she’s smart. She’s brilliant, vicious, all strategies and military tactics and it’s breath taking, sometimes, it really is.
Terrifying, too, when all she needs is to look at you to see the secrets crawling across your skin.
She’d done that to Emily. She’d taken a quick look, a glance out of the corner of her eye, and she’d noticed all the things Emily had kept clamped down inside her, anxious and afraid.
It hadn’t taken long until Ali had acted on it. Alison is beautiful, admittedly, and when she comes up behind Emily to reach for innocuous things (maple syrup, a math textbook, a dress off a hanger) and her nose brushes Emily’s hair away and her mouth paints across her neck in the lightest, quickest breath—well. It makes Emily’s hands tighten around the sharp edges of counters and tables until her knuckles bleed white.
(“What’s wrong, Emily?” Ali laughs. “Do you want something?”)
It’s not—Emily isn’t, she doesn’t – it’s not that it’s all girls that make her feel this way. Sure, sometimes she’s distracted by soft curves and sweet perfume, but she’s not some kind of lesbian. She’s not like that.
She likes to look, though. She likes to look at Spencer, severe and competent, and Aria with her steadfast loyalty. Hanna, with lush curves. But her favorite, by far, is Alison. It isn’t just her hair, or her wicked eyes or the swell of her hips. It’s the way that everything about her is captivating and impossibly complex, like honesty and lies and secrets are written in indelible ink underneath the protection of her skirts and dresses.
It’s the unknown, and the security of knowing that Ali is safe, that she’ll never return her feelings, she’ll never--- and really, it’s that, even though Alison is the most dangerous person Emily will ever meet.
(Alison unzips her dress and steps out of it and then stops, laughing, as Emily looks away. “What? We’re all girls here,”)
It’s when Alison trips into Emily and lands in her lap, that’s when things become clear. Ali never trips. She’s graceful, like gravity is something that happens to other people when they don’t work hard enough.
It clicks in Emily’s mind, like the last tumbler in a lock, and she tightens her fingers where they’ve landed on Alison’s waist.
Alison tosses her hair back, laughing, and she’s maybe a little drunk. But maybe she’s just pretending, because she’s done that before, pretended to be drunk just to turn around and throw accusations the next day. But she leans against Emily, sweet in a way she rarely is, and sighs out a soft breath against Emily’s face.
“You’re so pretty,” she says, and Emily flushes hotly, her brow furrowing, and then Alison says, “Em, we should—”
“Practice more?” Emily says, with a rare bite of backbone, and Alison just laughs and leans in, closer, until Emily can smell the sweetness of cherry lip balm and soda on Ali’s breath.
She closes her eyes, inhales, and then Hanna and Aria laugh loudly from the next room and Alison slips from her lap and laughs again. “Next time,” she says softly.
(Alison blows her a kiss on her way out, and Emily closes her eyes against the sight and against the phantom memory of Ali pressed closely against her.)
There’s a reason she likes swimming. She likes the anonymity of it, the simplicity of it, how it clears her mind. She likes the competitiveness of it, too. She likes it because it’s a distraction.
They all go to watch her swim, like it’s a particularly exciting spectator sport. Alison, Hanna, Aria and Spencer sit back against the metal seats and whenever Emily looks over, Aria and Hanna wave and Spencer nods at her understandingly. Alison never looks at Emily, not once, her back turned to the pool to speak to some boys sitting just above them.
Emily lets her vision blur as she snaps her goggles down and when the whistle blows, she dives in cleanly and doesn’t think as the water parts around her.
(When the meet’s over, Alison intercepts her before she goes into the locker room, clutching at the towel draped loosely around her. “I see why you like this sport,” Alison says, looking over as Paige and her friends walk past, wet hair pulled back from their faces.)
A week after Ali goes missing, a tight, tense week of silence and then forced joviality, Emily starts crying in her English class.
She doesn’t see it coming, a wave of—of grief, and worry, and the weight of knowledge and inevitability and she lets her hair swing down across her face when she raises her hand and asks for a hall pass.
The lock of the stall door behind her in the ladies’ bathroom is comforting, and she puts the lid down on the toilet and sits down, presses her hands to her eyes and just cries silently, pressing thin toilet paper to her cheeks.
She stays there until the bell rings, and she rubs her hands fiercely across her face and stands up, trembling just slightly. She washes her hands by reflex and splashes cold water into her face, wetting the soft strands of her hair familiarly, and thinks, I loved you. I was in love with you, and doesn’t even wonder at the tense change.
(At Alison’s funeral, Emily stands next to the coffin and closes her eyes. She furtively presses her fingers to her lips and then to the smooth wood and exhales.)