The thought had crossed all of their minds at one point or another. It wasn't unlike a teenaged girl to think of such things, but for some reason, when it came to Ali, not one of them was brave enough to say it out loud. They knew the truth, anyway, or so they'd convinced themselves that they did. Alison was murdered, and no one had ever seen it coming; it was just one of those unfortunate things that couldn't have been stopped.
But then why was Alison acting so strange—even stranger than usual—those past couple of months before her disappearance? At the time, the girls just thought she was being typical Ali, sneaking around one moment, and then holding something over the others' heads the next. She did it because she could, and she was probably the only person in the world who could get away with never telling the truth. She had all of Rosewood at her feet, and as long as she was able to give them what they wanted, no one bothered to ask her where she was going, or what she wanted to do. Asking Ali questions was practically forbidden, after all.
The summer of Alison's disappearance, Aria moved to Iceland with the rest of her family. It was a good way to bond with her parents and her little brother, and to forget about everything that happened in Rosewood for a little while. Hanna quickly found comfort in her new friend Mona Vanderwaal, the geek down the street who turned out not to be so geeky, and the two began their reign as the new Dazzling Duo of Rosewood High. Spencer and Hanna still kept in touch every once in a while, but Emily mostly kept to herself. She wasn't unhappy, and neither were any of the other girls, but it just wasn't the same without Alison. She'd neglected them, and they'd neglected each other, though neither of them were ever really sure why.
It wasn't until Aria returned to Rosewood on the anniversary of their best friend's disappearance that the girls started asking questions. What have you all been up to? Why don't we talk? When is Alison coming back? Emily was the first to say that Ali was dead, but they'd all been thinking the same thought for over a year. When the St. Germains found the body in the backyard of Ali's old house, only then did they start to believe their worst nightmares had come true. Alison was dead, but it didn't stop her from taking over their lives. Every waking moment of every day, thoughts and memories filled the girls' minds, and they fought to remember anything that would bring them closure with Ali's death. And as they began to put the pieces back together, suddenly every word and every action of their beautiful, blonde leader in the months before her disappearance seemed much more careful, more urgent, and more specific than ever before.
Her death was tragic, but maybe so was her life. No one knew what went on in the DiLaurentis home behind closed doors, and no one ever tried to figure it out, but in that last year leading up to Ali's disappearance, Spencer began to notice that her friend spent more time with her than with her own family. When the girls pressed her about her living arrangements, she used to shrug it off, blame it on her annoying, older brother, or change the subject to remind the girls that she was the one in control. They tried not to think about it, but it didn't stop them from wondering.
She was also constantly buying things for the girls, and giving stuff away. She'd insisted that the bracelets with each of their names on it was so that they'd never let anything like "The Jenna Thing" get between them, but maybe it was just so they'd always have something to remember her by. They shared clothes and secrets, because it was what "kept them close", but Alison always seemed to be the one hiding the truth, and sometimes the girls feared, but never acknowledged, that they were really drifting apart. And she was always good at hiding things, not just her secrets. After her death, the girls were constantly finding more of Ali's knickknacks and personal items that she'd left behind. She'd even had an alter ego, Vivian Darkbloom, whom Hanna had discovered early on in their friendship. There were so many things that Ali hid from the girls, and it made them wonder if they really knew their best friend at all.
What was weirdest of all, though, was how she'd gone all that summer before she disappeared romanticizing about death, and obsessing over her youth. Even at fifteen years old, Alison had a kind of wisdom and dark sense of humor that only most adults could portray. She'd turn a harmless comment about wanting to stay young forever into a conversation about "beautiful corpses" and "deliciously tragic deaths", almost as if she was just waiting for the hammer to drop. She'd say things about "killing for food" or killing out of boredom, and though the girls knew she was only trying to make a joke, it didn't stop them from worrying about her.
None of that seemed relevant until Ali's body turned up. For a while, the girls just focused on Ali's murderer, and who would've wanted her dead. They'd become so obsessed with the who that they'd almost forgotten about the why, and until more of Ali's past began to unfold in their search for answers, not a single one of them would allow herself to think about the possibility that maybe Ali knew she was going to die. That maybe, not only had she known she was going to die, but that she was fully prepared to take on whatever devastating fate was ahead of her. All of the signs were there that summer, but neither Aria, Hanna, Spencer, nor Emily had opened their eyes soon enough to help. And the thought still bore a hole deep into the backs of their minds, neither of them speaking it out loud, but all of them wondering the same thing: If they had paid a little more attention to Alison's words, would they have been able to recognize her pleas before it was too late?
Not Alison. Not our fearless Alison DiLaurentis.