Perfect (Book Two)

How It Really Began.

But somehow Ali did. With her long blond hair, heart-shaped face, and huge blue eyes, she saw the most stunning girl around. After Ali united them in friendship—sometimes it felt like she'd discovered them—the girls were definitely more than just there. Suddenly, they had an all-access pass to do things they'd never dared to before. Like changing into short skirts in the Rosewood Day girls' bathroom after they got off the bus in the morning. Or passing boys ChapStick-kissed notes in class. Or walking down the Rosewood Day hallway in an intimidating line, ignoring all the losers.

Ali grabbed a tube shimmery purple lipstick and smeared it all over her lips. "Who am I?" The others groaned—Ali was imitating Imogen Smith, a girl in their class who was a little bit too in love with her Nars lipstick.

"No, wait." Spencer pursed her bow-shaped lips and handed Ali a pillow. "Put this up your shirt."

"Nice." Ali stuffed it under her pink polo, and everyone giggled some more. The rumor was that Imogen had gone all the way with Jeffrey Klein, tenth grader, and she was having his baby.

"You guys are awful." Emily blushed. She was the most demure of the group, maybe because of her super-strick upbringing—her parents thought anything fun was evil.

"What, Em?" Ali linked her arm through Emily's. "Imogen's looking awfully fat—she should hope she's pregnant."

The girls laughed again, but a little uneasily. Ali had a talent for finding a girl's weakness, and even if she was right about Imogen, the girls all sometimes wondered if Ali was ever ripping on them when they weren't around. Sometimes it was hard to know for sure.

Then settled back into sorting through one another's clothes. Aria fell in love with an ultra-preppy Fred Perry dress of Spencer's. Emily slid a denim miniskirt up her skinny legs and asked everyone if it was too short. Ali declared a pair of Hanna's Joe's jeans too bell-bottomy and slid them off, revealing her candy-pink velour boy shirts. As she walked past the window to the stereo, she froze.

"Oh my God!" she screamed, running behind the blackberry-colored velvet couch.

The girls wheeled around. At the window was Toby Cavanaugh. He was just...standing there. Staring at them.

"Ew, ew, ew!" Aria covered up her chest—she had taken off Spencer's dress and was again in her knitted bra. Spencer, who was clothes, ran up to the window. "Get away from us, perv!" she cried. Toby smirked before he turned and ran away.

When most people saw Toby, they crossed to the other side of the street. He was a year older than the girls, pale, tall, and skinny, and was always wandering around the neighborhood alone, seemingly spying on everyone. They'd heard rumors about him: that's he'd been caught French-kissing his dog. That he was such a good swimmer because he had fish gills instead of lungs. That he slept in a coffin in his backyard tree house every night.

There was only one person Toby spoke to: his step-sister, Jenna, who was in their grade. Jenna was a hopeless dork as well, although far less creepy—at least she spoke in complete sentences. And she was pretty in an irksome way, with her thick, dark hair, huge, earnest green eyes, and pursed red lips.

"I feel, like, violated." Aria wriggled her naturally thin body as if it were covered in E. coli. They'd just learned about it in science class. "How dare he scare us?"

Ali's face blazed red with fury. "We have to get him back."

"How?" Hanna widened her light brown eyes.

Ali thought for a minute. "We should him a taste of his own medicine."

The thing to do, she explained, was to scare Toby. When Toby wasn't skulking around the neighborhood, spying on people, he was guaranteed to be in his tree house. He spent every other waking second there, playing with his Game Boy or, who knows, building a giant robot to nuke Rosewood Day. But since the tree house was, obviously, up in a tree—and because Toby pulled up the rope ladder so no one could follow him—they couldn't just peek in and say boo. "So we need fireworks. Luckily, we know just where they are." Ali grinned.