How It All Started

Imagine it’s a couple of years ago,the summer between seventh and eighth grade.You’re tan from lying out next to your rock-lined pool, you’ve got on your new Juicy sweats(remember when everybody wore those?), and your mind’s on your crush, the boy who goes to that other prep school whose name we won’t mention and who folds jeans at Abercrombie in the mall. You’re eating your Cocoa Krispies just how you like ’em-doused in skim milk-and you see this girl’s face on the side of the milk carton.MISSING.She’s cute-probably cuter than you-and has a feisty look in her eyes. You think,Hmm, maybe she likes soggy Cocoa Krispies too. And you bet she’d think Abercrombie boy was a hottie as well. You wonder how someone so…well, so much like you went missing. You thought only girls who entered beauty pageants ended up on the sides of milk cartons.

Well, think again.

Aria Montgomery burrowed her face in her best friend Alison Dilaurentis’s lawn.‘Delicious,’ she murmured.

‘Are you smelling the grass?’Emily Fields called from behind her, pushing the door of her mom’s Volvo wagon closed with her long, freckly arm.

‘It smells good.’Aria brushed away her pink-striped hair and breathed in the warm early-evening air.‘Like summer.’

Emily waved ’bye to her mom and pulled up the blah jeans that were hanging on her skinny hips. Emily had been a competitive swimmer since Tadpole League, and even though she looked great in a Speedo, she never wore anything tight or remotely cute like the rest of the girls in her seventh-grade class. That was because Emily’s parents insisted that one built character from the inside out. (Although Emily was pretty certain that being forced to hide her IRISH GIRLS DO IT BETTER baby tee at the back of her underwear drawer wasn’t exactly character enhancing.)

‘You guys!’Alison pirouetted through the front yard. Her hair was bunched up in a messy ponytail, and she was still wearing her rolled-up field hockey kilt from the team’s end-of-the-year party that afternoon. Alison was the only seventh grader to make the JV team and got rides home with the older Rosewood Day School girls, who blasted Jay-Z from their Cherokees and sprayed Alison with perfume before dropping her off so that she wouldn’t smell like the cigarettes they’d all been smoking.

‘What an I missing?’called Spencer Hastings, sliding through a gap in Ali’s hedges to join the others. Spencer lived next door. She flipped her long, sleek dark-blond ponytail over her shoulder and took a swig from her purple Nalgene bottle. Spencer hadn’t made the JV cut with Ali in the fall, and had to play on the seventh-grade team. She’d been on a year-long field hockey binge to perfect her game, and the girls knew she’d been practicing dribbling in the backyard before they arrived.Spencer hated when anyone was better at anything than she was. Especially Alison.