Be the Girl

Things between Emmett and me have been weird since last Friday. Tense. Even though he basically told me he wants to be just friends, I’m starting to wonder if that’s really the case? Or is that my delusional, wishful thinking? Am I setting myself up for crushing heartbreak?

McNair used the old “elephant in the room” saying during class today, and now that’s all I can think about. There’s this giant elephant standing between Emmett and me. It’s looking at us with its hooded eyes and it’s waving its long trunk. Emmett sees the elephant. I see the elephant. We’re both pretending that we don’t see the elephant.

The elephant wants peanuts.

Sooner or later, someone’s going to have to feed it. Should I be the one to take that risk? I’m not brave like that, Julia. I wish I was that girl.

If I were, maybe I wouldn’t be sitting here, writing to you.

~AJ





I lift my hand to knock when the door suddenly flies open.

“Aria!” Heather exclaims, startled. She’s wearing a navy wool jacket. “I didn’t know you were coming over tonight. Not that it isn’t great.” She steps back to allow me entry.

“Yeah, Emmett texted to see if I had time to work on our project. I figured I’d better take it.” As usual, the Hartford house smells mouthwatering. This time it’s the lingering scent of roast beef and rosemary.

She shakes her head in a knowing way as she grabs her purse and keys from the hook. “His schedule is impossible to plan around, isn’t it? Cassie, come on! Let’s go!”

A moment later, Cassie rounds the corner, her jacket dangling from her fingers. “Oh, hi, AJ!” She grins. “Are you coming with us?”

“No. She and Emmett are studying. Get your coat on and let’s go. We’re already late for swimming!”

“Okay, okay!” Cassie shoves her arms into her sleeves, scowling with annoyance at her mother, who merely sighs. “Emmett, Aria’s here! We’ll be back in an hour. Dad’s in his office on a call with the Vancouver office.”

“’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.”

“Don’t blame her. So do I.”

“Yeah, I guess. But with Cassie, we think she gets it, but then she goes and does something that makes us think she doesn’t. Like, a few months ago, my mom was scrolling through her contact list on Instagram and there was some dude in there. Cassie accepted him because his profile picture was of a little girl hugging a dog.” Emmett gives me a knowing look. “The guy’s entire feed is of him posing shirtless in front of mirrors in public bathrooms.”

I cringe.

“Yeah. So that’s what she was looking at every time she scrolled through her feed. She agreed that it wasn’t right, but she couldn’t figure out to take the next logical step and block him. So now she has to come to me or my parents every time she gets a follow request. We walk her through deciding whether she should accept it. We’re trying to teach her how to think critically, but that’s one of her challenges. Everything is black or white, absolute yes or absolute no for her. Anything outside of that, she has a hard time grasping.”