let her in on your secret heart
Title: Let Her In On Your Secret Heart
Fandom: Pretty Little Liars
Word Court: 4 drabbles
Rating: PG-13, trigger warning for eating disorders
Characters: Aria, Emily, Spencer, Hanna, Alison
Spoilers: Set Pre-series. Through Season 1, to be safe.
The summer Aria turns twelve, she starts working on the classics shelf in the library. They are all lined up alphabetically, pretty new red paperbacks of old stories. She spends her days reading and at dinner, her parents quiz her, in their own way. They emphatically argue over the Brownings’ respective treatment of women and the sociopolitical agenda of Henry James’ narrative. “If you liked Marquez, you should give Balzac a try. Don’t limit yourself to the Brits and Americans, you’ll get that in high school,” her mother says. Her father beams; Mike rolls his eyes and picks at his spaghetti.
Ali comes over unannounced one August morning as she pours through Christopher Morley, sprawled across her bed with the fan blowing her face full-blast, ruffling the page corners. Ali strikes a pose against the doorframe and bounces onto the bed next to her. Straw-colored strands fall across Aria’s shoulder as she leans over her, squinting at the text.
“Ugh, reading is for school, not summer! Come on, let’s go to the pool. Noel Kahn was there yesterday…” Ali singsongs. Aria tilts her head in brief contemplation, grins and snaps her book shut. “Good! Now, blue bikini, where are you? Oh and that white cover-up. So cute.” She never does get to Nabokov.
&&
Swimming makes sense to Emily. One, two, three, four strokes and a breath. Twenty-five meters and one hard pull of the hand and tuck your chin to your chest and follow through. It’s simple, easy, even if she’s always pushing herself to go farther, faster, fewer breaths. Nothing else is that simple. Her dad’s gone nine months a year in a war zone and her mother hovers all twelve. Ben pecks her good morning and it’s nice, his sweatshirt soft against her neck. Ali teases with her eyes, presses a messy lipgloss kiss to the corner of her lips and it burns, they burn. When her arms slice through the water and her lungs are burning with the effort of keeping everything she has inside, she feels like maybe she can breathe again.
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Spencer has always measured her successes against Melissa’s. It’s not that she wants to compete with her own sister, it’s just been that way for as long as she can remember. Melissa wins the regional extemporaneous speaking contest; Spencer joins Debate Team and serves as justice in Mock Trial. Melissa gets three over par in the teen golf competition at the club, so Spencer spends long hours perfecting her tennis serve. She finds something pleasing in the way her muscles ache and in the thwack of the ball on the court after a great hit. More importantly, her mind goes blank against everything but those contained movements. But that, too, soon becomes tainted by the Hastings genetic coding. Melissa is brilliant, and will be brilliant. It’s a given. And Spencer knows that she will be too, if only because she must.
With Ali and the girls, she feels a little more like herself. Here, she is the smart one, the clever one, if not the most desirable. It’s a trait she doesn’t really mind giving up to Alison.
The sticky summer night Spencer lets Ian Thomas take her virginity in the barn, she kisses him hard so he'll see her as a woman and not a girl. She gasps into his ear, presses her lips together against the pain and knows that she is someone’s first choice.
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Ali gives her little red pills to suppress her appetite. They taste like sugar and she idly wonders if the calories still count. They take a few after school and skip the snack her mother had made her, carefully hiding unopened non-fat yogurt containers (127 calories) at the bottom of the garbage. Her mom asks questions like, “How would you feel about going to visit your father?” and “Why don't you invite Sean over to study this weekend?”, but not “Do you need to play Britney Spears so loudly to cover up the fact that you are throwing up the lasagna I made from scratch (approximately 550 calories, depending on if she used low-fat ricotta or not)?” so she doesn't feel all that bad about lying to her, not really. Alison hums along to Toxic, leaning over the bathroom sink to apply eyeliner. She finishes, flutters her eyelashes and smacks a kiss at the mirror, then turns and smiles that saccharine smile as Hanna glares from her place bent over the toilet. Hanna didn't even know what saccharine was until Spencer informed them that aspartame was the new leading replacement in sugar-free gum (5 calories). But she's definitely heard that phrase before, and it totally applies, especially when Ali's wiggling her tiny hips to the beat as if to specifically remind her that she has tiny hips and that Hanna very definitely does not. Hanna brushes her teeth back to minty-fresh status and blows kisses in the mirror with Ali. She wonders if Dr. Pepper lipgloss has calories.