Toxic

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Have you ever played chess with someone really good? Perhaps with your cousin on a rainy afternoon? Or with that cute guy at camp after lights-out? The game seems easy, but chess experts formulate their strategy dozens of moves in advance. That way, they can hit you with sneak attacks, leaving you thinking, What just happened? You might feel manipulated when the game is done. Blindsided. Like you’re the biggest idiot ever.

A certain someone does that to four pretty girls in Rosewood—again and again.

Once upon a time, there was a girl whose mind was like a never-ending 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.

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