This chapter is solely for my bestest friend, who has recently left. I miss you so much, B.

Again, sorry to my readers (which are not producing very many reviews, cough cough!) that I haven't written in a little while. Everything has been especially hard this month for me. I hope that I still have some readers! : P love you guys!

10

Ali DiLaurentis sat in the corner of an empty classroom, her legs getting pins and needles. She couldn't feel her legs, seriously. The chair was making her butt numb. Her hair was sticking to her now sweaty neck.

The video was loading.

The air conditioning was on.

She couldn't feel her legs.

Finally, the video started. Her phone was shaking from her hands shaking, and her hands were shaking from her body shaking. Her body was shaking on account of the fact that she felt like she couldn't get enough hair and her chest was holding in a lot of stuffy black wind.

The first thing that came to mind in the video was the fact that the person recording it had been in a very stupid spot to record a video. In a bush, maybe. Or in a tree. It was dark, and the sun was either very close to coming up or very close to going down. It was too blurry to figure out which.

The second thing that came to mind was the black hoodie. Yes, someone was in a familiar van in the driveway of a familiar house. That person was clearly doing something in the back of the vehicle, and you could just barely make out the shadow through the tinted glass of the van. Someone was in the back of Tiffy Trinket's car, and that someone could have been doing anything in the backseat. Such as, maybe, suffocating someone. Such as tying two seatbelts around their chest and neck.

Ali shook. She couldn't believe that there was someone out there who had been actually filming a girl being murdered and hadn't helped her. Unless the person was the murderer's accomplice, but it still didn't make sense to have that much evidence sniffing around in cyberspace.

There was a scream that also could've come from anywhere, and then the person emerged from the van. Ali could barely see the girl's blonde hair, and all of that horror from thinking that she had been watching a murder tape dropped to her stomach.

It wasn't Sophie.

It was Ali.

This clearly meant that this was not the tape that Ali had thought it was. This was a recording of the morning that she had gone to investigate Tiffy's van. This wasn't the night that she had been murdered; this was the morning after. The scream hadn't been Tiffy's, either; it had been Stella's.

But there were people that might not think the same thing. People that would immediately come to the conclusion that Ali had murdered Tiffy. That scream could've come from anywhere; inside the van, or a few houses down. And it had definitely been auto-tuned so that it sounded a little bit deeper and less Stella-like.

But the viewers of this video would most definitely jump to the finish that the scream was from inside the van.

Ali struggled with the video. She searched for any image of the clear orange CAUTION tape, but the recorder had definitely done the smart job of filming it at just the right angle so that the bright orange tape was cut out. Ali was frantic. If someone saw this video...

As the video closed, though, Ali noticed something that might just save her. She saw the corner of the bright red YARD SALE sign.

Ali exhaled stared at the blank screen for a minute, her eyes blotchy. She wanted to scratch all of the burning little bugs that she could feel crawling under her skin, irritating her veins. She clenched her cell phone and looked around, unsure of the next step to take. The sender was unknown, but she could still send a reply to the creepy video. After all, the Pretty Little Liars had done it, although nothing came of it.

YOU CAN'T MESS WITH ME, BITCH. I'M ALI DILAURENTIS, DON'T YOU KNOW? NOW WHY DON'T YOU GO STICK YOUR FACE IN SOME OTHER LOCATION THAT IT ISN'T SUPPOSED TO BE. LIKE, SAY, YOUR ASS. EFF OFF, OR I'LL MAKE YOU PAY... –ALI

Ali pretended that it would actually do something. She pretended that it was, quite simply, just a bored teenager that had accidentally stumbled across her and taped it, and they wouldn't dare mess with her after her threat. She knew that it wasn't true, though, no matter how much she wished it were. Because, after only a minute, there was another reply.

I KNOW WHO YOU ARE, ALI. AND I KNOW THAT YOU DESERVE TO ROT IN A HOLE. BUT I ALSO KNOW THAT WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND, SO THAT WISH SHOULD BECOME A REALITY SOON ENOUGH. AW, YOU'LL MAKE SUCH A CUTE DEAD BODY! XOXO

Ali took a stooping breath through her nose, remaining calm. She gazed around the classroom, her eyes feeling shaky, and was startled when she heard a mello, easy-going tune coming from her phone. And then the lyrics from "And When I'm Gone" by Blood, Sweat, & Tears sang from the message. "And if dying time is here, Just bundle up my coffin, 'Cause it's way cold down there."