❝ 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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There was more than one video. The memory-drive was full of them. Alison had them organised neatly in rows ready to be clicked on — ready to be used. One of them was — not by Alison but by A, in the exact way Alison had intended to use it. Alison had the videos and armed herself with them, ready for a war on her best friend. If Alison was alive, it would have been her who leaked the video of Halle.
The girls moved. Aria, Emily and Hanna all sat around the laptop, in a makeshift semi-circle on the bed. They were gripped by the videos and were determined to see each one, which meant watching Alison over and over again. It was like some twisted reality where even after death, Alison was still very much alive. She lived in video-form and was young for eternity.
That's immortality, my darlings.
Halle had her own videos, too. She was in a few. Sometimes there was just a glimpse of her, hardly a person of interest for the camera-lens. In others, the camera zoomed-in on her while she was in a party or she was hanging out with Alison in the DiLaurentis backyard that last summer. The video leaked on the school computers on there — in full, with no cuts. Halle begged them to turn it off.
"But if we watch it, we might be able to figure out who took it," Aria suggested.
"And have you watch me make a idiot of myself again? No, turn it off," Halle said. She turned her head from where she sat on the end of her bed and saw none of them moved to exit the video. Enraged suddenly, Halle snapped. "I said turn it off! I don't want you watching that!"
Hanna began, "But if we—"
"No, Hanna — it's not fair!" Halle exclaimed, cutting in as she stood abruptly. She was glaring at her friends with a fierce storm brewing behind her dark eyes. "How would you feel if your best friends watched the worst moment of your life on repeat — for a clue? You guys don't get it, it was bad enough the school saw that, I don't want you seeing it again. Now turn it off!"
Seeing her point, Hanna pressed her lips together and sent a small, sad smile towards Halle. "Turn it off," she said, and Aria closed down the window tab on Halle's laptop.
Halle sighed and said quietly, "Thank you."
They clicked on another. Instantly, Halle recognised Jason's voice among a bunch of chatter. She looked up when she heard it, towards the laptop. No one else picked up on it. Then again, no one else knew him intimately — the way she did. Music played in the background and there was a lot of fuzzy, drunken clatter; Jason's voice wasn't on their radar.
