Did Lucy Hale Just Tease a ‘Pretty Little Liars: Summer School’ Cameo?

Lucy Hale may have just teased a possible Aria cameo on the upcoming season of Pretty Little Liars: Summer School, and fans are not OK.

An official poster for season 2 of the teen slasher dropped on Tuesday, April 9, which was shared by the show’s main cast and Max’s official Instagram account. “It’s gonna be 🅰️ killer summer,” the caption read, noting that the upcoming season will hit the streaming service on Thursday, May 9.

Hale, 34, who starred as Aria Montgomery on all seven seasons of the original series, quickly took to the comments section to share her excitement. “Kinda making me want to go back to school?” she wrote alongside a heart eyes and fire emoji.

Her coy response led many fans to question whether Aria may make an appearance in future episodes after the character’s name was mentioned in season 1.

“Not you hinting at a cameo Ms. Hale!!! 👀👀 Mrs. Montgomery-Fitzgerald teaching?” one person wrote, while another added, “Now wait a minute 👀🌚 I’ll expect to see you miss ma’am 🤫🤭.”

A third pleaded, “@lucyhale girl… don’t play with my heart like that!”

Pretty Little Liars aired on ABC Family before moving to Freeform from 2010 to 2017. Hale’s character wrapped up the series by riding off into the sunset with longtime love — and former high school English teacher — Ezra Fitz (Ian Harding). After two spinoffs of the show, Ravenswood and PLL: Perfectionists, were canceled after one season, Max announced Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, which premiered in July 2022.

The new iteration takes place in the fictional town of Millwood, where a series of tragic events almost ripped the blue-collar town apart. Twenty years later, a group of disparate teen girls find themselves tormented by an unknown ‘A’ssailant. Bailee Madison, Chandler Kinney, Faran Bryant, Malia Pyles and Maia Reficco star as the new Liars.

In the last episode of the first season, Madison’s character, Imogen, revealed that she decided to place her baby for adoption after finding a couple who have been trying to have a baby for a long time: Ezra and Aria Fitz. Aria’s infertility was a plot point in the original series, and it was later revealed during the Perfectionists that Ezra and Aria had adopted a daughter and named her Katherine Ella.

Although Hale didn’t make an appearance on Original Sin at the time, she opened up about the possibility of returning to the role during a January 2024 interview with MovieWeb.

“I forget how my character Aria is involved, but I know she’s been mentioned in some way. I mean, I never say ‘never.’ That show was the biggest gift in my life,” she told the outlet. “That was an experience that changed my life in every way, shape and form. And I hold so much gratitude for that experience. I don’t know if I’d ever do a reboot, but who knows? I’m happy they’re letting it live on. I think it’s amazing. I think it’s a great premise. So I’m in full support of that.”

Summer School, a rebranded second season of Original Sin, was announced in September 2022.  Whale showrunner Robert Aguirre-Sacasa hasn’t confirmed if any original Liars will show up in Millwood, he teased that fans can expect a bit of a “bigger, badder and bolder” premise.

“Our villain is a female figure of horror, which is something we really wanted to explore in our female-centered horror show,” he told Cosmopolitan in March 2024. “We also wanted our villain to feel quite apocalyptic and terrifying. And because most of our season is set during summer — besides taking inspiration from our favorite slashers — we wanted it to feel a little more apocalyptic, like something like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or even Midsommar.”

He continued, “There’s a lot of really horrific imagery tied to movies like that and we wanted to tap into those a little bit. And we also knew we had to make a villain scarier than A and it was pretty scary in season 1.”