Pretty little liars

4. SPENCER WALKS THE PLANK

"Honey, you're not supposed to eat mussels with your hands. It's not polite. "

     Spencer Hastings looked across the table at her mother, Veronica, who nervously ran her hands through her perfectly highlighted ash-blond hair. "Sorry," Spencer said, picking up the ridiculously small mussel-eating fork.

     "I really don't think Melissa should be living in the town house with all that dust," Mrs. Hastings said to her husband, ignoring Spencer's apology.

     Peter Hastings rolled his neck around. When he wasn't practicing law, he was furiously cycling all the back roads of Rosewood in tight, colorful spandex shirts and bike pants, shaking his fist at speeding cars. All that cycling gave him chronically sore shoulders.

     "All that hammering! I don't know how she'll get any studying done," Mrs. Hastings went on.

     Spencer and her parents were sitting at Moshulu, a restaurant aboard a clipper ship in the Philadelphia harbor, waiting for Spencer's sister, Melissa, to meet them for dinner. It was a big celebratory dinner because Melissa had graduated from U Penn undergrad a year early and had gotten into Penn's Wharton School of Business. The downtown Philly town house was being renovated as a gift from their parents to Melissa.

     In just two days, Spencer was starting her junior year at Rosewood and would have to surrender herself to this year's jam-packed schedule: five APs, leadership training, charity drive organizing, yearbook editing, drama tryouts, hockey practice, and sending in summer program applications ASAP, since everyone knew that the best way to get into an Ivy was to get into one of their pre-college summer camps. But there was one thing Spencer had to look forward to this year: moving into the converted barn that sat at the back of her family's property. According to her parents, it was the perfect way to prepare for college-just look how well it had worked for Melissa! Barf. But Spencer was happy to follow in her sister's footsteps in this case, since they led out to the tranquil, light-flooded guesthouse where Spencer could escape her parents and their constantly barking labradoodles.

     The sisters had a quiet yet long-standing rivalry and Spencer was always losing: Spencer had won the Presidential Physical Fitness Award four times in elementary school; Melissa had won it five. Spencer got second place in the seventh-grade geography bee; Melissa got first. Spencer was on the yearbook staff, in all of the school plays, and was taking five AP classes this year; Melissa did all those things her junior year plus worked at their mother's horse farm and trained for the Philadelphia marathon for Leukemia research. No matter how high Spencer's GPA was or how many extracurriculars she smashed into her schedule, she never quite reached Melissa's level of perfection.

     Spencer picked up another mussel with her fingers and popped it into her mouth. Her dad loved this restaurant, with its dark wood paneling, thick oriental rugs, and the heady smells of butter, red wine, and salty air. Sitting among the masts and sails, it felt like you could jump right overboard into the harbor. Spencer gazed out across the Delaware River to the big bubbly aquarium in Camden, New Jersey. A giant party boat decorated with Christmas lights floated past them. Someone shot a yellow firework off the front deck. That boat was having way more fun than this one was having.

     "What's Melissa's friend's name again?" her mother murmured.

     "I think it's wren," Spencer said. In her head she added, As in scrawny bird.

     "She told me he's studying to be a doctor," her mother swooned. "At U Penn."

     "Of course he is," Spencer quietly singsonged. She bit down hard on a piece of mussel shell and winced. Melissa was bringing her boyfriend of two months to dinner. The family hadn't met him yet-he'd been away visiting family or something-but Melissa's boyfriend's were all the same: textbook handsome, well mannered, played golf. Melissa didn't have an ounce of creativity in her body and clearly looked for the same predictability in her boyfriends.