Housekeeping: Hello Everyone! My brother just got married and now I am vacationing with family, so I haven't been able to write for The Simple Questions this week, but I will be continuing with the story within the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I am uploading the first part of this story, which I already had written. I hope you like it!
"We should approach this conversation calmly," Spencer warned.
"We should give her a chance to explain herself," Alison agreed as Spencer gently knocked on the door.
Emily was still pouring over the wrinkled manuscript in her hand, rereading it as if the words might change.
Hanna tapped her foot and crossed her arms impatiently.
Alison tried to get her fiancée's attention. "Em?"
"Hm…? Ah, yeah. Calm."
"You bitch!" Hanna screamed as she lunged at Aria, who had only managed to open the door a few inches.
They both toppled to the ground. Hanna straddled her and held her wrists above her head as she screamed.
Aria flinched as saliva sprayed her face.
"What is this?! How could you do this? This is our lives you're hanging out on the line for everyone to see. This is our story, not just yours, our story. What is going on with you? Who are you and what did you do with—"
"I'm not going to publish it!"
"—Aria? She would nev—"
"I didn't publish it." Aria rocked back and forth trying to get free.
"—er do some—what?"
Aria sighed. "I didn't publish it."
They both relaxed and caught their breath. "Oh…," Hanna realized. She stood and brought Aria with her. Once they were standing, Hanna walked behind Aria to brush the dust off of her back and straighten her shirt for her. "Sorry."
"No worries," Aria said out of breath.
"Hanna! What happened to 'calm'?"
She shrugged at Spencer's question. "I was upset."
"Clearly," Alison added.
Emily waved the papers she held in front of Aria. "But in the note you attached with the manuscript, you said that you'd sent a copy to that publisher: Jillian."
"I did. I sent her a copy at the same time I sent you each a copy. Jillian loved it, she offered me a deal."
"For how much?" Spencer asked out of pure curiosity.
Aria's eyes widened at the memory. "A lot….But I turned her down before you probably even opened your copies. I thought I would wait for your feedback, but I realized it would be wrong to publish it either way."
Spencer moved to sit on the couch, and Ali sat next to her on its arm. Emily started pacing and biting her lip. Hanna re-crossed her arms.
Aria took in the silent and tense audience. "I wouldn't do that, I couldn't. I'm sorry I scared you. It started as a journal, I wasn't—I didn't even mean for it to be a book. It was just my way of dealing with things. I wrote the nightmares down."
Alison stood and crossed the room. She placed her hand on Aria's arm to calm her.
"What changed?" Emily asked.
"Did Ezra tell you to submit it?" Spencer wondered.
"No! Not at all. Ezra hates Jillian anyway, he's been working with a different publishing house that's based in Philly."
"And you didn't send it to them because…?"
"Truncheon Books is small, all of five people would have read it."
"Since when do you care?" Hanna asked.
Aria sighed and looked down. "I sent it to Jillian because I wanted as many people to see it as possible….I thought I wanted that."
"What?"
"Why?"
Aria looked at them all directly. "Because I still live with those memories! Don't you? A or AD or whoever may be gone, but the nightmares aren't. Tell me you're over it! Tell me it doesn't still haunt you. Tell me you don't look over your shoulder every second."
Emily hugged herself and stared at her feet; Spencer's eyes were directly on Aria, but she somehow wasn't quite looking at her; Alison and Hanna looked toward one another in their periphery with recognition, admittance, reluctant understanding.
"Tell me," she let out a defeated breath, "that when an alarm goes off you don't still fold up like a pill bug, when you're alone on a road at night, you don't check the backseat. When I step into my closet for an outfit I see the walls of that crate, when I smell smoke from a campfire or hear a Patsy Cline song on the radio I'm right back in the dollhouse and," she took a long breath and looked to Hanna, then Emily, then Alison, "when I see my nieces smile, see them safe and happy, I know that I would kill anyone who threatened that safety or that happiness."
"Aria…," Spencer started.
"So I wrote it down in a journal, I hoped I could leave some of it on the page, but it didn't help. And then I thought, maybe if I share it with the world it will take the power from it, maybe everybody could take a little piece of the weight for me and then it wouldn't be that heavy."
"You could have talked to us," Emily finally spoke.
"When, Em? You and Ali are busy with the girls. Spence, you have to schedule time just to breathe between school and working with your mom. Han, Lucy's barely a year now, not to mention that fact that you and Caleb spend half of your time in Tarrytown working on the new house. Pretty soon you won't be here at all."
"I'm sorry that we doubted you, Aria," Alison said.
"It's not your fault, I barely explained in my letter. It's not your fault that you don't have time, either, that's not what I was trying to say."
"We know."
They all turned at the sound of the door opening. Ezra was focused on a stack of mail in his hand. "Honey, I'm home," he joked.
"Hey."
He smiled and looked up at the sound of Aria's voice. He was shocked at all of the girls staring at him. "I—I mean I will be home in…ten minutes?"
"Five."
"In five minutes." He backed out and closed the door, never having removed his hand from the knob.
"So Jillian is the only one who saw it?"
"Yes. She assured me that no one else's eyes were on it, and she sent the original copy back to me in the mail," she promised Spencer.
"She could have made copies," Emily suggested, though her eyes had softened. The look she gave Aria was her apology.
"I don't know why she would've. Like I said, she's the only one who read it. She offered me the money unilaterally. It's her company so I guess she can do whatever she wants." Aria shrugged.
"We'll just have to trust that that's the truth," Spencer said.
"Why does it matter?" Hanna asked. "She's not publishing it."
"We just wouldn't want it to get into the wrong hands. It's a basically a modern Malleus Maleficarum."
"What?"
She looked at Hanna. "Among other things, it describes methods of torture."
"What are you saying?" Alison asked.
"That if the wrong person read it, they might use it to hurt someone."
"A copycat," Emily concluded.
"Exactly."