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YOUR MOVE, ALI

Have you ever played chess with soood? Perhaps with your cousin on a rainy afternoon? Or with that cute guy at caay dozens of moves in advance That way, they can hit you with sneak attacks, leaving you thinking, What just happened? You aest idiot ever

A certain soain

Once upon a ti chess game Even when she seemed beaten, she always had a plan Everyone was her adversary—especially the people who adored her most All she wanted was her pieces to be the only ones left on the board at the end of the game

And she wouldn’t stop until she’d won

One week after the fire in the Poconos that almost killed her, Alison DiLaurentis sat with her boyfriend, Nicholas Maxwell, on the floor of an empty town house in Rosewood, Pennsylvania, a suburban Philadelphia town in which she’d spent several years of her life The room was dark, and the only items in it were a mattress, ratty flannel blankets, an old TV someone had abandoned, and food Nick had shoplifted from the nearby Wawa mini-mart The air smelled dusty and sour, which reminded Ali of The Preserve at Addison-Stevens, the mental hospital in which she’d been trapped for years Still, it would do for a while It just felt good to be free

“Turn it up,” she said, gesturing toward the television

Nick adjusted the dial They were stealing electricity and cable from the reat at ripping off The Man The screen showed a live feed of police officers searching through a pile of rubble at Ali’s family’s vacation home in the Pocono Mountains Ali knew full hat they were looking for: her Or, more specifically, her bones

“We’re still searching,” the chief of police said to an interviewer “There was no way Ms DiLaurentis survived that blast”

Ali snickered Idiots

Nick looked at her worriedly “Are you okay?” He took her hand “We can watch so else if you want”