Unbelievable (Book Four)

How To Save A Life.

Ever wish you could go back in time and undo your mistakes? If only you hadn't drawn that clown face on the Bratz doll your best friend got her eighth birthday, she wouldn't have dropped you for the new girl from Boston. And back in ninth grade, you would never have skipped soccer practice to hit the beach if you'd known Coach would bench you for the rest of the season. If only you hadn't made those bad choices, maybe your ex-BFF would have given you that extra front-row ticket Marc Jacobs's fashion show. Or maybe you'd be playing goalie or the women's national soccer team by now, with a Nike modeling contract and a beach house in Nice. You could be jet-setting around the Mediterranean instead of sitting in geography class, trying to find it on a map.

In Rosewood, fantasies about reversing fate are as common as girls receiving Tiffany heart pendants for their thirteenth birthdays. And four former best friends would do anything to travel back in time and make things right. But what if they really could go back? Would they be able to keep their fifth best friend alive...or is her tragedy part of their destiny?

Sometimes the past holds more questions than answers. And in Rosewood, nothing is ever what it seems.

"She's going to be so psyched when I tell her," Spencer Hastings said to her best friends Hanna Marin, Emily Fields, and Aria Montgomery. She straightened her green eyelet T-shirt and pressed Alison DiLaurentis's doorbell.

"Why do you get to tell her?" Hanna asked as she hopped from the porch step to the sidewalk and back again. Ever since Alison, their fifth best friend, had told Hanna that only fidgety girls stayed then, Hanna had been making a lot of extra movements.

"Maybe we should all tell her at the same time," Aria suggested, scratching the temporary dragonfly tattoo she'd pasted on her collarbone.

"That would be fun." Emily pushed her blunt-cut reddish-blond hair behind her ears. "We could do a choreographed dance and say, 'Ta-da!' at the end."

"No way." Spencer squared her shoulders. "It's my barn—I get to tell her." She rang the DiLaurentis's doorbell again.

As they waited, the girls listened to the buzz of the landscapers pruning Spencer's hedges next door and the thwock-thwock of the Fairfield twins playing tennis on their backyard court two houses down. The air smelled like lilacs, mown grass, and Neutrogena sunscreen. It was typical idyllic Rosewood moment—everything about the town was pretty, and that included its sounds, smells, and inhabitants. The girls had lived in Rosewood nearly all their lives, and they felt lucky to be part of such a special place.

They loved Rosewood summers best of all. Tomorrow morning, after they completed their last seventh-grade final at Rosewood Day, the school they all attended, they would take part in the school's annual graduation-pin ceremony. One by one Principal Appleton would call each students name, from kindergarten through eleventh grade, and each student would receive a twenty-four-karat gold pin—the girls' was in the shape of a gardenia, the boys' a horseshoe. After that, they would be released for ten glorious weeks of tanning, cookouts, boating trips, and shopping excursions to Philly and New York. They couldn't wait.

But the graduation ceremony wasn't the true rite of passage for Ali, Aria, Spencer, Emily, and Hanna. Summer wouldn't really start for them until tomorrow night, at their end-of-seventh-grade slumber party. And the girls had a surprise for Ali that was going to make this summer's kickoff extra special.

When the DiLaurentis's front door was finally flung open, Mrs. DiLaurentis stood before them, wearing a short pale pink dress that showed off her long, muscular, tanned calves. "Hello, girls," she said coolly.

"Is Ali here?" Spencer asked.

"She's upstairs, I think." Mrs. DiLaurentis stepped out of the way. "Go on up."