Spencer was getting ready for bed. Hanna and Aria were sacked out on the couch downstairs, and Emily was so drunk she passed out on the floor. Spencer shuddered at the thought of Emily getting sick during the night, throwing up all over the designer rug. Maybe she should take a wastebasket downstairs, put it next to Emily just in case.
And maybe Aria would wake up, would want to follow Spencer upstairs and share the bed. Just as a friendly gesture. Hanna snores, after all. Aria has Ezra and Spencer has Toby, so it’s not like that. Except when it is. She walks over to her desk to grab the trash can, and a flash of lightning illuminates the yard outside. There’s someone out there, staring up at Alison’s old window. Someone in a flannel shirt and jeans, with a fuzzy sad expression on her face. Emily.
Spencer rushes down the stairs and heads outside as quietly as she can, careful not to wake up Hanna and Aria. Emily is still out there, staring up at the darkened window like it’s a face, like the curtains will open like a mouth and start giving her answers.
Spencer puts a gentle hand on Emily’s shoulders, and Emily doesn’t startle. She doesn’t even move.
“Emily,” Spencer says, “Come back inside.”
Emily looks at her, her eyes bleary with a combination of pain and tears and 80 proof liquor. “Help me,” she says, grabbing Spencer’s arm.
“I’m trying to help you,” Spencer tells her. “Come on, it’s going to storm in a minute.”
But Emily has no interest in going back inside. She’s dragging Spencer over towards the DiLaurentis house, grabbing a flower pot off the porch and hefting it like she’s going to break the back kitchen window.
Spencer wrestles the geraniums away in the nick of time. “Emily!” she says, trying as hard as she can to sound like her mother, like Melissa, to capture that tone that allows no opposition. “What are you doing?”
“Breaking in,” Emily tells her, calmly. Sober Emily is probably the least criminal of their group. Drunk Emily, apparently, likes to walk on the wild side. Part of Spencer finds this dynamic interesting, but her rational side - the side that spends a lot of time thinking about ways to keep them all out of jail - is busy trying to prevent Emily from wrapping a hand in her sleeve and punching out the glass of the window pane.
“Stop it,” Spencer hisses. “Jason could be in there!”
“He’s not,” Emily counters. “His car’s not here.”
“Well he could be back any second!”
“Then stop wasting time and help,” Emily suggests, even though her stop is more than a little slurred. “Besides, you’re his sister. It’s practically your house. And you can totally like, pick the lock with a hair pin or a stick with gum on it or something.”
“You know your logic is not like regular logic right now, right?” Spencer asks. But she does reluctantly pick up an ugly ceramic garden gnome, finding the spare key in his hollow leg. If they’re going to do this, they might as well try to avoid getting caught.
“This is why I love you,” Emily says, with a lopsided smile. Or maybe the smile is steady, but the rest of her body is lopsided, leaning like a flopsy rag doll against the porch rail. The girl can barely stand, she’s really in no condition to break and enter on her own.
Once they’re in the house, Emily marches directly upstairs to Alison’s old room. She’s not even trying to be quiet, tottering into walls and banging an elbow on the railing as she goes. She turns on the light, against Spencer’s horrified protests, and gazes around. It’s mostly boxes, and a bed frame, but someone has hung a few of Ali’s old posters in their old quarters on the wall. It’s as she thinks about the posters that Spencer remembers. Of course. This was Maya’s room, too.
“Em,” she says softly, putting a hand on Emily’s elbow. She doesn’t have anything to follow that up with, so she just stands there watching Emily look around, as if there’s going to be a message written in the dust.
“I loved her,” Emily says, and Spencer isn’t sure whether she means Maya or Alison, but she nods and rubs small circles on Emily’s back.
“I know,” Spencer replies. “And she knew that. She loved you, too.” These are simple platitudes, true enough for either. It’s easy to love dead people, Spencer thinks. They can’t disappoint you anymore.
“I’ve kissed two dead girls in this room,” Emily announces, slumping against a tower of boxes that shifts ominously. Maya being dead has made death more concrete for her, Spencer realizes. Emily used to talk about Ali being dead as if death were not all that different from Georgia or Cape May - a place Ali might go to for awhile, but could still come back from. A little later than expected, maybe, but with a whirl of motion and a flimsy excuse for her absence. Now that Maya’s gone, too, it’s more like an impenetrable underground fortress with a fire and brimstone moat. Forbidding and final.
Emily runs a hand through her hair, which is already a messy tangle. In her mind, Spencer imagines finding a hairbrush and soothing Emily with a hundred strokes until it’s all neat and tidy, shiny and back in place. She thinks of buttoning the flannel over Emily’s white undershirt, tucking it into Emily’s jeans. She wants to help Emily pull herself together, just as Emily seems to want to pull herself completely apart.
Spencer starts by prying Emily off the boxes, righting the stack so that it hasn’t been too obviously disturbed. Spencer leans against the doorframe as Emily leans heavily on her shoulder, tears streaking down her face.
“It’s okay,” Spencer tells her automatically. Because maybe it is, or maybe it will be, someday. Now that Mona’s out of the picture. They’ll find whoever did this to Maya, and then it’ll be back to regular life again. She wants to believe it, at least for as long as it will take to convince Emily.
“It’s not,” Emily says, sounding agonized. “Nothing is okay.”
“Alright,” Spencer concedes. “Everything sucks. I just didn’t think that would make you feel any better.”
Emily makes a sound that’s halfway between a snort of laughter and a sob. Spencer runs a hand gently through Emily’s hair, hoping she’s not going to be sick up here.
“Spencer,” Emily whispers in a small voice that reminds Spencer of the shy eleven year old she used to be. “What if it’s me?”
“What?” Spencer says, caught totally off guard. Is Emily confessing to a murder? Murders? “What do you mean? What if what is you?”
“What if I’m the reason they’re dead? I loved Ali and I loved Maya and they’re both dead! What if I’m cursed?”
“You’re not cursed,” Spencer assures her, firmly. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“Well,” Emily says, staring at the floor and looking miserable. “What if I’m being punished?”
“For what?” Spencer asks, mystified.
“For being - like I am.”
And Spencer can actually feel her heart crack inside her chest at Emily’s words, at the idea of Emily being so lost she might actually believe them.
“No,” Spencer tells her, like they’re kids again, and she’s the playground authority on whether the spider that just bit Emily was poisonous or not. She softens her voice. “No,” she repeats. “Don’t even think that, okay?”
“But what if it’s true?” Emily presses. Spencer thinks of how long Emily was in Haiti, how many nights she probably laid awake worrying about this, working herself up into a fever of remorse and self-recrimination.
“It’s not,” Spencer says, pulling her into a hard hug. “I promise. What happened to Alison was awful. And what happened to Maya was, too. But it wasn’t because of you, Em. If they were here, they’d tell you the same thing.”
Emily is so freaked out, she’s beyond reason. “I’m not going to do it again,” she says, wildly. “I’m going to stop. Just in case.”
Spencer thinks about what Alison would do, and the answer comes to her in a flash, as if she can see Alison herself smirking in the corner, in the shadows of her old life. Spencer kisses Emily, firmly and insistently. Making her point in a way that it’s impossible for Emily to ignore. She moves her lips against Emily’s and tastes cheap booze and salt and something metallic, as if Emily’s been biting her lip so hard it’s bleeding on the inside. She runs her tongue over it carefully, trying to make it better instead of worse, and Emily gets over her surprise enough to start kissing Spencer back.
Lightning flashes outside, and for a split second, Spencer lets herself think about the Northern Lights, lets a small tremor of romance work its way through her nervous system, and she kisses Emily with all the certainty she can muster, all the reassurance that love is always good, even when it’s ripping your heart out.
There’s a clap of thunder so loud it’s almost deafening, and they startle apart.
“Why did you do that?” Emily asks, a hand clamped against her mouth.
Spencer frowns. “Because I’m not afraid of you.”
Emily stares at her for a moment, and Spencer almost thinks she’s won, she’s done the right thing, she’s convinced Emily it’s all okay. But then Emily bolts, knocking over two stacks of boxes on her way through the hall and down the stairs. By the time Spencer is done covering their tracks, Emily is nowhere to be found.
The next time she sees her, it’s hours later, and Emily is standing in the middle of a graveyard, windswept and traumatized. She has a shovel in her hand, and no memory of anything since she passed out on the floor. Spencer bites her own lip, tastes the echo of blood.