Chapter 15: Spencer

Another week passed, and Aria was still locked away somewhere the girls hadn't seen. But their lives didn't stop. With Hanna improving, Spencer chided her that she should be catching up in school so that she didn't fall behind. That's what they were doing right then: studying in Spencer's room, like normal high school students (if normal was a bedroom with bars over the window).

But Spencer was distracted. It was—finally—the day Toby was coming around and they were going to sneak into the record room and find Mona's folder. If she could piece this puzzle together, Aria could rest in piece that Mona would be moved to another, stronger-holding institution far away from here. And maybe Aria would be able to heal without Mona distracting her, and Spencer wouldn't have to leave her behind.

"Spence, are you gonna help us catch up with our schoolwork or not?" Hanna laughed along with Emily as they munched on cheesy puffs. "I've missed these," she said to Emily, but purposefully forgot to mention that the burning energy inside her to spit it out struggled with her.

"Sorry, guys, but I'm so close to really helping Aria get out of this place," Spencer vaguely explained while unfolding the notes she'd taken of Mona possibly hurting Alison for Aria's sake. A week ago, Toby made a quick visit to update her on Alison's case. There was still nothing except the evidence that someone snuck out of Radley that night, the main suspect returning to Aria after her dream-like breakout. "But what about Mona?" Spencer had whined, and Toby had shrugged his shoulders and explained he was suddenly kicked off the case. For today, Toby told her to meet him in the room he'd interrogated her in at three o'clock. It was 2:50.

"How?" Hanna scoffed insensitively, and Emily slapped her shoulder. "Hanna!" she hissed.

"I'm sorry!" Hanna exclaimed, putting her hands up in defense. "But I'm being honest with myself now, and my honesty is telling me that I'm concerned Aria won't be able to make it out of here. I mean, I've accepted, for the most part, that I need to follow the advice I'm given, Spencer hasn't taken a pill in a couple weeks despite her wacky withdrawal symptoms, and if you keep playing against the therapist's cards, Em, you're out of here, too. But Aria? Things just seem to be getting…worse."

As soon as Hanna trailed off in expressing her worry, a shadow, obstructed by the light of the hallway, stood in front of the door. It stepped forward revealing a familiar face with unrecognizable stitches going up her arms. "Aria!" the three friends cried, and Emily was the first to press into Aria's shoulder as the others squeezed in.

"I've missed you guys!" Aria said, choking back the relief relishing in the back of her eye sockets. Spencer was the first to bring up her sustained injuries. "What happened?" she gasped, her finger trailing along the stitches that were almost healed.

Once she was freed from her friends' circling (and crushing) embrace, Aria gestured for them to settle down because she had a lot of important stuff to tell. "If you didn't already know, I went through a crazy experience a couple weeks ago where I snuck out of Radley in what I thought was a dream… And my other identity did this to me—" She pointed to the stitches. "—but now, after some intensive care where I was watched twenty-four hours a day, I might not hurt myself anymore. They wanted to keep me until I was ready to explain how I got out, too. I told them about my dream that must not have been a dream, but then I remembered something… Mona was there. She showed me out of Radley."

"You deserve it, Aria, for being the model patient." Winking, Mona sauntered away, leaving Aria with the nurse's uniform in her arms. "See? I'm not so bad. I'm still your friend."

"Somehow she got a nurse's uniform and ID. That's how she's been sneaking out for years."

"Aren't you worried that you'll hurt yourself again?" Spencer inquired, apprehensive.

"Of course. But I can't live every day of my life in fear, Spence. I just can't anymore."

The girls nodded their heads in expression of understanding, but Aria could see past Hanna biting her lip, Emily twirling her hair, Spencer chewing at her cuticle. "Or maybe I'm crazy…"

In less than a second, Spencer was sputtering, "Don't say that! None of us are crazy, this place is. Society is for making us feel like we're untreatable dangers to it. In fact, most of the people here are amazing! Like this guy Bill, in my therapy group, he trained his dog to balance anything on its nose. And Sarah painted the most mesmerizing painting that depicted how my addiction felt. We're broken people, sure. But we're healing inside just as much as anyone with a broken bone."

Hanna placed her palm on Emily's knee. Continuing off of Spencer's speech, she added, "Except for you, Em. You never belonged here."

Aria sat next to Spencer and leaned on her shoulder. "You always know what to say, Spence."

By the time Spencer was able to squirm her way out of a much-needed comfort session, she was almost thirty minutes late to meet Toby. "I'm sorry I'm late!" she panted as she shut the door behind her. "Aria came back, and I—"

"You can tell me on the way, Spence." Toby intervened and opened the door Spencer had just so carefully closed with a click. As they nonchalantly strolled down the hallways, Spencer's heart began to pound. Soon they'd be in a room with file cabinets stuffed to the max with decades of secrets. Who knew what they were going to find?

The record room happened to be in the basement. Rather than take the obvious elevator, they found a back stairwell and tiptoed down it. It was fortunate that they weren't being caught. For an asylum, Radley didn't seem like such a secure place now.

Once the metal stairwell converged into un-swept concrete floors, Spencer had to pause and inhale for four seconds, exhale for four seconds. What if this room Aria was kept in was like the one in movies, with the pure white walls and squishy padding, and Aria didn't bother sharing that fact with them? How was Spencer going to feel when she saw something like that, unable to help those in it?

But Toby pushed open the door, and there were no rooms that drove already unstable people insane. Instead it was like the normal ones upstairs. The heart beating in Spencer's neck slid back down to where it belonged.

"This is going to sound really weird," Spencer whispered as she picked the lock of the record room and Toby kept watch. "But solving this mystery, focusing on Aria's wellbeing and helping her study and stuff, it's distracted me. I'm getting better. I haven't told anyone this yet, but the doctors think I'll be able to leave in a week."

It was the truth, of course. Why would Spencer lie about such a thing as her wellbeing by this point? She was, most likely, going to be out next week. It only took her two weeks in Radley of dying over her need for Adderall, then the symptoms diminished.

She could have been out of Radley weeks ago, but she wouldn't tell her friends that.

It wasn't that hard to lie to the doctors here. All Spencer had to answer were "yes or no" questions on how she was feeling, and they'd nod their heads and advise her on how to get better—and it didn't take her long to suck up her pride and listen. She didn't even need to be here, if it wasn't for the relationships she'd made—the kind she couldn't leave behind without leaving a part of herself, and she preferred to come out whole.

And it wasn't like she was going to be alone out of Radley that long. Emily should be out soon. Hanna had a few more weeks. And Aria, well… They covered that earlier. But Spencer wasn't going to give up on her. (She'd say "never," but who was she to make promises she wasn't sure she could keep once the taste of freedom drove her through school, family, and life?)

"That's great, Spencer," Toby said, and a part of him was happy to see Spencer out and revived. But he couldn't help thinking about his mother, and how she wasn't as fortunate. However, that tragedy in his short nineteen years was the driving force into much of what he was doing now: like breaking into confidential records to help a patient he knew from high school whose friend had multiple personalities.

"I'm not leaving before we solve this, though," Spencer added on to her expression of freedom. "So don't get too excited just yet."

The most complex question they were facing in that moment was where to begin their search. File cabinet after file cabinet lined the walls up to the ceiling. "Is there even a ladder?" Spencer mumbled to herself, but Toby happened to catch it.

"Over here," he called back, hoping they wouldn't need to use it; it looked untrustworthy.

Scanning the tags on the drawers with Toby's extra flashlight, Spencer pursed her lips in concentration. "Are these sorted by year or last name?" The labels were too smudged to decipher a number from a letter.

Toby pulling open a creaky drawer. "Last name."

Nodding her head, Spencer retraced her steps so she was closer to the beginning. "You look for Mona, I'll look for Alison."

DiLaurentis, DiLaurentis, DiLaurentis… For such an uncommon name, it was certainly difficult to uncover. But after a few minutes of vigorous scavenging that got Spencer's skull pounding, Spencer discovered the fresh manila folder that could hold the answers to all the mystery Spencer had thrown herself into since the second Aria stepped a foot into her life.

Skimming through it, it didn't appear to hold much. Age, weight, eye color… Eighteen, one-hundred-twenty, blue… Birthdate, legal name, parental guardians… December fifteenth, Alison Lauren DiLaurentis, Kenneth and Jessica DiLaurentis… Any past treatments… No, this would be the first… Reasons for institutionalization…

Nothing was written down.

"Spencer?" Toby cried out, and Spencer placed the folder in its original spot, delicately like it was as weathered and fragile as the ones surrounding it.

"What?" She hopped down off the ladder and followed the echo of his voice.

He stood at the end of the vast hall, his hand buried in a drawer. "Thomas, Thompson, Underling, Vincent…" To prove his point, he pointed out each folder in succession, no gaps in between.

The blood that had rushed to Spencer's head in her rigid determination to uncover Alison's secrets froze in her veins. "W-what does that mean?" she stammered, but Spencer knew as much as Toby that she was smarter than that.

She watched as the clang of the drawer holding nothing but dusty history echoed in the chamber. It didn't take much to break her fragile state, as her heart broke when Toby shrugged his shoulders and confessed, "There's nothing here."

…

Returning from the Underworld wasn't the victory Spencer had anticipated it to be. Instead, she was a zombie and not a hero.

The worst part of the scenario that she kept playing in her head—the double, triple, quadruple checking of the files—was that Spencer utterly doubted Aria's mental state.

But why would Aria lie?

When Spencer padded into the room with stiff feet, Aria was propped on her bed with a sketchbook in her lap. Spencer had noticed Aria reattempting to draw, though Spencer could see the painful twitches in Aria's eyes as she strained her wrist to bend it like it once did. "Do you think Ezra's cute?" was the question she queried now, and Spencer wondered if she was doodling his name with hearts over it like Spencer had when she had a crush on Andrew Campbell in the fifth grade.

In Aria's time in captivity in the basement of Radley, she had a dream that she kissed Ezra—not that she thought too deep into that. He did seem to care about her, though. He listened to why she didn't want to go to a hospital to get her stitches done, that she just wanted to go back and see her friends because she needed them. Not that you're not a friend, she had confessed, but we have a different friendship, you know? A brother-sister one. Maybe it's because I remind you of your brother, and I see that. But right now, I need you to trust me and take me back to Radley. Why she was having romantic dreams of him when she described him as a brother, well, she wasn't mastered in the field of psychology. But she was able to admit, "I think he's cute."

But Spencer didn't want to talk about whether she thought Ezra was attractive or not. There were much more significant things at stake that didn't include Spencer's word with or against Aria's.

"Tell me, Aria." The warmness in the air that had fluttered around Aria dissipated into a vacuum. "Why is there no record of a Mona Vanderwaal ever being a patient here?"