Be the Girl(53)

“’Kay!” comes the deep voice, stirring my nerves.

Heather smiles warmly at me. “See you in a bit.”

I kick off my shoes and climb the stairs, acutely aware that Mark’s office is in the basement—two floors below us. For the next hour, Emmett and I are basically alone.

I’m going to be in his bedroom.

And Heather doesn’t seem at all fazed by that.

Of course she’s not. It’s me, Aria from next door. The fact that I’m majorly crushing on her gorgeous, popular, athletic son isn’t a concern for her, because she figures he’d never go for me.

Would he?

“By the way, you are definitely not a downgrade, in any meaning of the word.”

I’ve been replaying his words from social studies for days in my head, searching for meaning between the words. Was he just being nice? That would be like Emmett, to be aware of how cutting Holly’s words were, to try to placate my ego.

Taking a deep breath, I bang my knuckle on the ajar door once before pushing it open. “Hey—” The simple greeting comes out as a croak, caught in my throat as I watch Emmett slide his T-shirt over his head, giving me a glimpse of the web of muscle in his back. His bedroom smells of his potent, masculine body wash.

“Hey. Sorry. Had to shower after practice.” He reaches for a pair of socks on the bed. “The arena showers aren’t the same.”

“That’s fine.” I exhale slowly, trying to refocus on the task at hand. I hold up a notepad covered in my scribbles. “So, I pulled a bunch of data from the province’s website that I think we can use?”

“Cool.” He nods toward the small pile of books and his laptop, haphazardly set up on the floor. A few feet over is a pile of pamphlets from University of Minnesota. How excited is he to be going away to college next year? To be on his own, living in a dorm or wherever hockey-scholarship guys live, no one to worry about but himself.

Emmett groans and stretches his arms high over his head, the move lifting his shirt to hint at the V-cut of his pelvis.

I can’t help but stare.

He catches me—his return smile is playful. “Let’s get to it. We have an hour of peace before Cassie gets home.”





“Direct and indirect bullying. That’s important.” Emmett types those two words into the squares of the flowchart. “We should list them, too, with stats.”

“I couldn’t find any for Canada. Only the US.”

“Yeah. Me neither. But we can keep those in our back pocket, for impact. Like this one.” He taps the screen with his pen’s end. “An estimated 160,000 students miss school every day in the US. So, if we assume ten percent of that for the Canadian population, that’d be 16,000 students. That’s like, what, ten times our entire school population, staying home every day.”

I punch numbers into my phone’s calculator. “Nine point six zero four times, to be precise.”

Emmett’s eyebrow rises in question.

“Apparently, I’m student number 1666, according to Keen.”

He chuckles softly, jotting down notes in blue pen. “I think we should focus on cyberbullying. It’s changed the whole dynamic. Made it that much easier for people to hide behind screens and be assholes to each other.”

My stomach turns. “Sounds good.”

“And we should do a couple slides about suicide, seeing as that’s the most drastic outcome of bullying.”

The room sways, even though I’m sitting. “We only have seven to twelve minutes, remember?” Can we please move on from this topic?

“Yeah, you’re right. That’s not a lot of time. Okay, so let’s dedicate one slide to suicide. The basics. The increasing rates, the top three methods, which are”—he glances at his notes— “hanging, gunshot, and poisoning.” He frowns. “What does that mean, exactly? Poisoning?”

My throat feels thick. “Pills.”

He shakes his head. “Man, I can’t imagine how bad it has to get for someone to do that to themselves.”

My heart hammers in my chest as a swirl of emotion—pain, mortification, and so much regret—swells. “They’re usually already depressed. And then being attacked and ridiculed …” A lump forms in my throat. “It’s the perfect storm.”

“Yeah, for sure.” Emmett’s fingers fly over the keyboard as he types bullet points for that slide. “Hey, you don’t have any pictures on Instagram.”

“Uh … what?”

“Your Instagram. You have no pictures on it.”

“Oh. Yeah.” My relief for the sudden change in topic threatens to bowl me over. “I just started the account.”

“Yeah, figured as much. I was just surprised, is all. Even Cassie has had an account since she was in, like, grade eight.”

“Yeah, well …” I pick at a loose thread on my shirt sleeve. “You know how my mom is.”

“Fair enough. There are a lot of crazies out there. We have to keep an eye on Cassie’s account to make sure she’s not talking to anyone she’s not supposed to.”

“Do you really think she would?”

He snorts. “We’ve had the stranger-danger talk with her a million times, enough that she gets pissed off when we bring it up—she hates being lectured, if you haven’t noticed.”