A Pretty Little Parody [PLL]

5. He's Not My Bitch, Bitch

“They’re WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!”

On-screen, Sasha looked like she was ready to murder someone.

Wait.

Let me rephrase that.

On-screen, Eli looked like he was ready to murder someone.

Sasha no longer looked like her former self. Sitting there in front of the computer in my old dorm room at Radley Heights Academy was my twin, with a short, preppy haircut, black horn-rimmed glasses, and a light blue button-down. She just looked like...an Eli. So I was going to call her that from now on (we’d already discussed this at the beginning of the conversation, before I’d broken it to him that Mom and Dad wanted to bring him back home).

“Eli--I mean Sasha--what the eff?Are you serious?”

I nodded glumly. “A hundred percent.”

Even behind the horn-rimmed glasses, his blue eyes were intense. “What exactly did they say they were going to do?”

I thought for a minute. My brain was always cluttered and I always had to sort through the extra stuff before finding what I needed to find. “Um, we were all sitting down at Fa King Su Pah, this new Chinese restaurant in the mall, and Mom said something about discussing the ‘next course of action as a family,’ and then they started talking about bringing you back home cause your behavior got a lot more agreeable this year.”

“Which means I started acting more like a guy,” he said flatly.

I nodded.

“That was pretty much my only option. It was either become a guy or stay friends with those kooky girls in the year, which was not what I was about to do, I’m telling you.”

“What’s wrong with them?” I asked, a little offended. “They were my friends.”

“They were cray-zy,” Eli said, drawing out the syllables to emphasize his point. “This one girl--what’s her name again? Oh, yeah, Courtney DiLaurentis. Man, she was absolutely psychotic. She and this other girl Alison would get into huge fights all the time because they looked exactly alike, only Alison was slightly prettier. At the beginning of the year she started pretending that she actually was Alison but she got found out every time. Finally, she got so fed up that she went into Alison’s room at night and tried to strangle her to death.” He shivered. “Isn’t that a creepy story?”

“Mmhmm,” I said absently. I had gotten distracted with some of the clutter in my mind and was now in the process of sorting them into mental files.

“Sasha?” Eli asked, sounding annoyed. “Are you even listening?”

I snapped back to attention. “What? Oh yeah. Courtney and Alison. Kooky girls. Yeah. I got that.”

He seemed satisfied. “Doesn’t that seem a little like our story, only much more effed up? A lot of times I wanted to sympathize with Court but she was just too insane.”

“Actually, I think it was Alison that was insane,” I said. “She would, like, make Court do stuff she didn’t want to do. Cause, you know, Alison was popular and stuff.”

“Maybe while you were here. She may as well be pond scum now.” Eli snickered. “I made sure of that.”

In my mind, I’d always thought that Eli was the kinder twin during the switch; while I’d been the princess of Rosebush Day (well, dictator of Rosebush Day really, but princess sounded nicer), I’d always imagined him being the kind and benevolent king of Radley Heights. But that wasn’t the case at all. Eli was a dictator too.