AN: If you notice any flaws in the timeline, please let me know? This chapter is… late March 2011, if I've got it right.
Chapter 5
She picks a random day in April and spends it cutting her hair. By now the freshness of the colour is almost totally faded out, black hair going grey from countless washes and her blonde hair is growing back in. One part of her is pleased to see how seamless it is, how good her natural colour looks underneath, but the other part misses the blonde.
Even so she shears off a good two inches' of black grow-out with nail scissors and hopes it's not uneven.
The days are growing longer now, getting just a bit warmer, and there's definitely more time in the day to get things done. It's still the same routine of motels and cafes for day-watching, of movies when she feels the need to really hide out, and she toys with the idea of setting up some kind of online dating profile, help her cover ground every time she reaches a new city by finding someone to meet up with to buy her dinner or lunch.
(decides promptly against it, because there's too much risk in posting a photo online. she watches enough crime shows on motel TV to know that a photo can be analysed to within an inch of its life and then some)
Instead, she returns to her old habits of haunting movie theatres, this time going in for the night showings. It means she might have to walk back in the dark, but that's okay. There's pepper spray in her bag, and she skimmed just a few dollars off the fund in the event that someone's going to demand money.
For the one night, she goes to the theatre with a couple of girls she meets and leaves off the dark wig. It's a gamble to think that no-one is going to recognize her, but the truth is that under all the changes of the past six months, they probably aren't.
She doesn't recognize herself in the mirror when she's linking a necklace around her neck, but she'd wager they don't either, and the realization is this: not many people care about her. These girls give no indication of recognizing her, and it occurs to her that she might just be a headline to them; a quick mention of a still-missing, maybe-dead teen girl.
They'd have no reason to believe that they're hanging out with a dead girl, and so they whisper through the movie and she takes it in like it's her first movie experience.
0o0o0o0
It's been seven months now and she buys a new journal for the beginning of summer. Normally, the new journal is a tradition set aside for the beginning of a new school year, but nothing about the situation is normal, and anyway, the one she has is falling apart, too full of notes and poems. The journal is a bit expensive and she tries not to cringe at the price.
Later, it occurs to her that she spent that much and more on a great notebook in her old life.
The only difference is that she no longer has the support of her parents' bank accounts.
0o0o0o0
The travel continues and she tries to be grateful, fully aware that this is kind of the trip of a lifetime for some.
At any rate, it's the trip of her lifetime.
Every city she encounters is a reminder that she's still alive, still made it to another day.
The travel all takes its toll by stealing the sheen of her hair and the softness of her skin, so she repays it by reading more thrift-store bought books and making herself smart. If her looks are going to fade, then she'll just have to keep her brain sharp, make it so good that others have trouble keeping up.
Except Spencer, of course, she doesn't mind if Spencer is able to keep up. If she allowed that to happen, then at least her friends would know everything Spencer knew.
The rest of the world – well, it's better that they stay a few paces behind.
0o0o0o0
There's a new source of entertainment.
It's a college city, the kind where there's one big-name college plus at least one smaller school nearby. If she plays it right and gets a motel near the schools, she can sneak into the classes and take notes on random topics.
This is how she learns art and history, pretends to learn complicated maths and even more complicated science, laws and topics she never knew existed. She looks the part, in jeans and a t-shirt, with her little backpack on one shoulder. At the end of the class she sneaks out like a ghost, debates finding another one to attend but doesn't.
(there's always a risk of being recognized and raising questions with it)
And on the fourth day of doing this, she looks at the computer monitor indicating what classes are coming up in the hall. There's a class finishing at seven, and then the place will be deserted. She's familiar enough with the place to know that the library is open until late. Even more familiar with the fact that there are no cleaners at that time of night.
The place won't be locked until about midnight, so she gets up her nerve to linger and then doubles back after the class finishes, curls into a little alcove and tries to sleep.
This is the worst of the lot.
Her shoulders stiffen and her back gets a crick in it, so she sets her watch for a 5am wakeup and closes her eyes.
(by now she's found that even closing her eyes will trick herself into sleep)
It's by no means a good night's sleep, but it's sheltered and warm enough, so she swaps out her t-shirt and finishes getting changed in her makeshift room.
Luxury, this is not.
She leaves the room with minutes to spare; it seems that people here do maintenance early, and she doesn't have the time to hang around and be discovered.
It seems that she still gets what she wants, so when she wants to be gone, she's gone.
If she hikes over to the other side of campus, she might be able to find another lecture for the morning and someone to buy breakfast, then it's time to leave the city entirely. Her records now include class notes that mean nothing to anyone who isn't legitimately in the class, but that doesn't matter much. It's something more to read if she gets bored.
0o0o0o0
By the end of the month, she cracks and searches up her friends online; she tells herself it's just out of curiosity for summer plans, but she gets sucked back into the news. Emily is first, and her profile is a bit bare, as it always was. Spencer is the same, but there's more to her feed; homework and extracurricular questions, problems with some new activity she's setting up. Aria is in Iceland, and she's never felt quite so out of the loop when she sees this.
Hanna's is the most changed, full of updates and photos of her with Mona. It's all very cool-girl, and she feels like she's looking at Ali 2.0.
In a way, she supposes, she is. Hanna will do well at being popular, she thinks, all sweet and light and genuinely meaning it. That girl doesn't have an agenda, but she suspects Mona will bring the snark and deviousness. Certainly there's the intelligence for it.
They're like opposite twins, one light and one dark. Good and bad.
She exits the browser, eyes bleary with tears that she won't allow herself to cry because if she does then it slows her down. Physical activity is the best release for this, so she pulls on sneakers and goes for a run.
(somewhere along the way, physical fitness became another tool in her arsenal of survival weapons, not a luxury, but she takes comfort in building up strength and speed just a little bit more)
By the time she's done two laps, her leg is protesting and it's just another thing to be frustrated about.
Her disappearance hasn't garnered as much interest over the last months as she had thought it would. People have been trying to find her still, but the urgency behind it is waning, she can tell this from how the reports have toned down. There used to be a few reports per week, people chasing down missing ends or new ideas that came up.
Mona still hasn't come forth, she knows this much, and she concedes that Mona no longer knows what state she is in. All Mona knows is that she helped fake a death, and that Ali is gone.
She drums her fingers absently, thinking of all the ways she could get a message to her friends. The only problem is that she doesn't trust anything, can't create an email account for fear of it being hacked. Not using a phone in so long means that she no longer remembers numbers, and writing on paper is out because of all the ways that could go bad. Just thinking about it makes her stomach turn and her shoulders tense up, so she puts it out of her mind.
There's nothing to be done for it, then, but to keep tabs on the girls from afar.
0o0o0o0
In the end, she picks one girl per city. Scrutinizes social media and the news.
This is how she learns that in her absence, Emily is throwing herself into swim. She learns Spencer is chasing after guys that should be off-limits, and that Hanna is in fact the kinder, sweeter model of herself, and that Aria's apparently thriving in Iceland.
She learns of the distance between them now their leader is no longer there, binding them together. It goes beyond the obvious, of one of them being in another country altogether. She watches them drift, thinks they'd never stand a chance against A if A ever resurfaced.
They have plans for the summer, she learns, and it's all about the same. Spencer is continuing with academic projects, Emily is swimming, Hanna is chasing down popularity and Aria is drifting through an Icelandic way of life.
Her absence is the only difference.
Other than that, it's life as usual in Rosewood.
0o0o0o0
Summer arrives hot and sticky in New York, but she hasn't been here in months. No-one in their right mind would come here when it's so hot – at least that's her logic, so she slips on sunglasses that mask her face and eyes securely and disappears into the crowd.
Theatres with their air-con are a blessing right now, so she sees as many movies as she can talk her way into, and calls herself a film major.
(she's sixteen pretending to be nineteen still and this time she's grateful to be aging)
Anyway. It keeps her alive, keeps her from being detected too thoroughly. She picks the older arthouses over the big cinema complexes – less likely to have security footage – and spends her days there, pays a cover charge for the day and brings her own lunch crammed into a smaller bag.
After so many months in smaller towns and cities, New York is overwhelming to her. The smell of gasoline hangs heavy in the air, not quite choking her, and on the hottest days she thinks she can see it shimmer in the air. There's too many people around, always hustling through the streets as if on fast-forward and the sun is too bright after so many hours spent in the dark.
In the end she tries to keep her outdoors exposure to a minimum, visiting the theatre in the earliest hours of the morning and leaving when the employees start looking pointedly at the doors.
Still, she prides herself on being clever and learns how to hide out in the bathroom until she's certain no alarms will go off and no-one will be there to catch her out, then sneaks off to sleep in the comfiest chair she can find.
0o0o0o0
The days meld together into sultry heat and cold movie screenings, and she remembers the Fitzgerald Theatre, remembers the vastness of that theatre compared to the small charm of these ones.
She returns there, uses what Ezra had taught her to sneak in – luckily, it's closed at this time of night – and finds her way to the concession.
There's candy there, not at all what she'd pick for any kind of meal but she's hungry and thirsty. The stage is vast, she drags up lines from plays she vaguely remembers reading and performs them on the stage, over-delivering the lines and throwing her body into her performance. Recites poetry that she read, lines that stand out to her or reads from her journal just to hear herself speak.
(if she does this, she can pretend she's another human voice to listen to, pretends she has company, and adds to the illusion by giving herself an accent)
She twirls, pirouetting the way she learned in ballet classes, and curtsies to an invisible audience, flinging her arms out to accept applause.
Silence is the stern reply, and she sinks back to sit down, defeated.
Finds herself a place to sleep – there's a comfortable prop chair that's more like a recliner – so she lies down, sets her alarm and drifts off.
0o0o0o0
The theatre has its deserted spots, so she hides out during the day in the dead spots that the security cameras don't pick up, waits until night and ventures out for something to eat. In a way, it's almost like being at home.
As always, she stays just long enough to get comfortable, then disappears into the summer.