❝ we all eat lies, when our hearts are hungry ❞
Halle Brewster made a promise she would never tell the secrets of the summer Alison DiLaurentis went missing. Only now, someone else was doing the telling - something Alison never got the chance to do...
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"It's insane."
Halle looked up, rolling her eyes as she took in Hanna's exclamation. All of them were supposed to be studying for their SAT exams tomorrow, but Emily hasn't shown yet. It was probably because of the storm. To Halle, it seemed as though it hasn't stopped thundering since the memorial, since Jason left. It made Halle feel pathetic; she was sulking over a boy that wasn't even hers, that she never meant to be hers.
But there she was. Miserable, because she was mean to Jason. Halle couldn't do it; her one chance to apologise to Jason for what said that night, to be nice, and she ended up making it worse. He hated her truly now. Halle made sure of it.
"How many words do they expect you to learn in one night?" Hanna ranted.
"They expect you to already know them, Han, not learn them the night before," Halle told her. "This should just be a last minute reminder."
Hanna wore a smirk. "Is it for you?"
"No. This is a 'cram it in my head all at once'," Halle responded.
"'Stringent'," Aria read aloud from the deck of cue-cards Spencer had made for her SATs revision — forever a Hastings.
"Uh, tough. Inflexible," Spencer answered, and Aria nodded, correct.
"It's not like you're actually gonna use them," commented Hanna, still on the topic of words the exam wanted them to learn.
"'Mere..." Aria stared down at the word on the card, struggling on how she would pronounce it, "tric-ious'."
"Meretricious," Halle stated, eyes fixed on what she was writing in a notepad. She began to feel hot, flustering. She had been writing, but now she was losing concentration; she was too warm.
"It's not like you go to college and then you start speaking a completely different language," chuckled Hanna.
"It's about getting into college," Spencer told the blonde. "Meretricious — um... phoney, flashy."
"Mm-hm," hummed Aria, placing the card down on the table. From the corner of her eye, she caught Hanna pick up a cold piece of pasta and eat it. Aria's nose turned upwards. "Uh, Han, why are you still eating that?"
"Because it's here," Hanna said, plain and simple.
Spencer said, "put it in the garbage."
"Well, then I'd have to stand over the garbage and eat it," Hanna shot back, and they — all except Halle, her too focused on fanning her face with the collar of her shirt — laughed.
Aria looked at the next cue-card. "'Besotted'."
Halle answered first. "Infatuated, enamoured, in love with." Her tone was drained, lacked any sort to emotion — dull. And she kept on fanning herself; Halle felt she was dripping with sweat. She saw her friends were looking at her strangely and stopped, "what?"
