My Life in Rosewood

Chapter Twenty-Four

The next day when I'm done with basketball practice I go home and find Aria fuming in our room, pacing back and forth. When I see her state of mind I don't want to go in right away, giving her that time to do what she needs to. So I wait in the doorway for a good ten minutes before she notices I'm standing here and then pulls me into the room. I don't even have time to ask if I can shower first before she's telling her side of the story. She starts from the beginning, saying that they were trying to catch Ian in the act by pretending to be an anonymous person on a prepaid phone to get him to show up at a park to be able to prove that he was the one behind the videos. Apparently Ian didn't show up and he sent someone else in his place and their cop friend Garret Renolds had even been there as backup just in case. I'm honestly surprised they trusted any Rosewood cop enough to tell him something like this, but I let her continue. From there it was a deadend and they wound up heading home, until they got a call from Spencer and heard on the other end that Ian was threatening to kill her and confessed to killing Alison. When they figured out where Spencer was they went straight there and found her in the bell tower gripping onto one of the railings of the balcony in fear. Spencer told them that someone pushed Ian off the belltower, someone in a black hoodie. Who they now suspect is their stalker, A. That's when they saw Ian's dead body hanging down below in the ropes by his neck. To me that seemed to be clear as day that he was in fact dead and someone did take the body.

After all that explaining and trying my best to calm her down she goes into another rampage, about her parents. She tells me that this morning they came to Spencer's with all the parents there and somehow Veronica and Peter Hastings convinced her parents, Emily's mom and Hanna's mom that they must be going through a breakdown because they didn't cope with Alison's death completely and should go to therapy for it. Leave it to the Hastings to cover up a murder with something like this, because that's such a them thing to do. But what made it worse is that Aunt Ella and Uncle Byron agreed, and so did the other parents.

Now trying to calm her down from that one was a lot harder to do, but eventually I am able to. I tell her to relax on her bed and that I'd be back to talk because I smell bad and sticky from sweating up a storm at practice. So I go to take a shower and then come back to the room. By now I see that she's actually knocked out on her bed, seeming that her lack of sleep from the night before overpowered her.

I half smile at her sleeping form, tossing my dirty clothes into the hamper and then sit on my bed. I have homework to do but I'm so concerned for Aria that I just watch her sleep, in case she wakes up and needs me. Needless to say that I layed down and accidentally fell asleep too.

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Waking up hours later I hear voices, hushed ones. I hate being woken up, but I have homework so I know regardless I have to eventually get up. I'm dead tired, not sure how I'm going to function as I roll onto my back. Saturday evening now I see the sun is starting to go down, not realizing I slept that long. I take a deep breath as the voices get a little more noticeable, rubbing my eyes now I take a breath and then look towards the voices, noticing that it's Uncle Byron and Aunt Ella standing in the doorway. I blink at them when they see me looking, my aunt pressing her finger to her lip to shush me, pointing to Aria's bed. I turn my head and see that she's still sleeping, so I slowly get to my feet, stretch and then walk over to them.

I yawn and rub my eyes again, placing my glasses onto my face. "What are you doing?"

They both give me a sad look. The fact that Aunt Ella is here concerns me. But they keep their composers as they usher me down the hallway instead. "Did she say anything more about what happened last night?" Uncle Byron asks, fear in his eyes.

I yawn a bit because I'm still groggy, "No more than what she told you guys last night on how she ended up at the church and what happened to Ian."

"Does she seem okay?" Aunt Ella asks now, her eyes back to the door of our room.