Be the Girl: a Novel

by Tucker, K. A.

  My heart stutters. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” He peers at me from behind a fringe of long, dark lashes, the look unreadable. “So, I heard it’s your birthday this Sunday.”

  “Yeah.” I feel my face reddening. Why am I embarrassed? “Whatever. It’s no big deal.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “Eat turkey at your house?”

  He rolls his eyes. “A food coma for your sixteenth birthday, with your neighbors. That’s awesome.” The sarcasm in his voice tells me it’s not.

  “Well, I don’t know.” I hesitate. “Do you have something in mind?” I reach for my backpack to chuck it into my locker. But he doesn’t let go immediately, and my fingers linger against his, amping up my adrenaline.

  “Maybe. Do you trust me?”

  “Yes,” I quickly add, “as long as there aren’t clowns or face-lickers involved.”

  He smirks. “I’ll promise no clowns.”

  Oh my God. What is that supposed to mean?

  A streak of blonde catches the corner of my eye and I glance toward it.

  To meet Holly’s blue eyes, flaring with rage and accusation as she sizes us up.

  I know what this must look like.

  I wish it was what it looked like.

  “Wow. Didn’t waste time, did you?”

  Is she talking to me or Emmett?

  She sneers at me, at my jeans and faux baseball shirt. “And with a major downgrade, too.”

  Definitely Emmett.

  “This isn’t what it—” Emmett begins to say, but Holly spins on her heels and marches into class, past McNair, who mutters something about teenage hormones under her breath and then taps her watch in silent warning.

  He shakes his head. “Just ignore her.”

  I’d love to. I really would.

  I trail him into class and settle at our usual desk just as the second bell goes. It’s ironic that given the freedom to sit anywhere, everyone subconsciously falls into a routine.

  “Good morning! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend and are ready to learn,” Mr. Keen says over the PA system, his voice crackling with static.

  I did have a wonderful weekend. Now, though, Holly’s harsh slight is going to hang over my head. Maybe I should start making more effort with what I wear to school. I’ve always liked this shirt, though.

  I feel Emmett’s eyes fixed on my profile and I turn to offer him a reassuring smile—to pretend that I don’t care what Holly thinks—before returning my attention to the front of the classroom where McNair is jotting down notes on the blackboard.

  “At last Friday’s cross-country mini-meet at Baylor Oaks, three of our team members placed …”

  Mr. Keen’s voice disappears as Emmett leans over to whisper in my ear, so close that his bottom lip grazes my earlobe. “By the way, you are definitely not a downgrade, in any meaning of the word.”

  My heart pounds in my chest.

  I walk out of class an hour later, having missed every word that McNair said.

  I didn’t even take notes.

  * * *

  Dear Julia,

  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.”

  “Does she get a lot of requests from creepers?”

  “No, thank God. She’ll get invites from kids she’s chatted up at school every once in a while. I make sure they’re not the kind who would drop mean comments on there, or be coming around to find things to mock her for behind her back.” He snorts. “Didn’t do the greatest job there, did I?”

  He’s referring to Holly.

  Does he know that she deleted him from her feed?

  Does he care?

  “So, how come your profile’s not protected?”

  “I’m not worried about attracting predators.” He scrolls through the bullying website, searching for more nuggets of information.

  “No. Just adoring female fans,” I mutter under my breath.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing.”

  His dimples divot his cheeks with his grin. He heard me, all right. “So, tell me something about Aria Jones from Calgary, since you’re basically a ghost online.”

  I study my socks. “Am I?” I know as much, but is he confessing to sitting here in his room, perhaps lying in his bed, looking me up?

  Out of mere curiosity?

  Or interest? The more-than-friend kind?

  My thrilled heart is at odds with the wariness creeping into my spine, of what he could probably find out about me if he knew where to dig.

  I take a calming breath. “There’s not much to tell. I like running, and reading. And apparently, zucchini bread.”

  He laughs and I laugh along with him, my chest warming. “What else do you want to know?”

  “Have you ever had a boyfriend?” He asks it so casually. “Are you allowed?”

  “Of course I’m allowed!” I sound indignant. Truthfully, my mom never knew about my two short-lived relationships. She was never present enough to notice the days where I was floating on a cloud, or the nights where I drowned my sorrows in tubs of mint chocolate ice cream.

  Emmett sets his laptop aside and settles back against the rail of his bed. He swallows hard, the sound carrying through his bedroom. “Can we talk about it then?”

  The elephant.

  The air in his bedroom has turned thick with anticipation. “About what?” I hesitate, gathering my courage before I turn to meet his beautiful brown eyes, so open and earnest as they skate over my features, stilling on my mouth.

  “About this.” He leans in, until the tips of our noses touch, his lips an inch away. He holds there a moment.

  Long enough to give me the chance to stop this from happening, I’m guessing.

  Long enough to make my blood rush to my head and my heart thump wildly and my breathing just … stop.

  And then he presses his lips against mine.

  Kissing Emmett is an out-of-body experience; it doesn’t feel real. His lips are somehow both warm and cool, both soft and firm. When the tip of his tongue touches mine for the first time, I realize I’m still holding my breath. I exhale and with it escapes the softest sigh.

  Emmett leans further in, pushing me back to rest against the frame of his bed, the slight stubble on his face scratching deliciously across my chin and my cheeks as he kisses me deeply, with an expertise I can’t possibly match.

  I’m dizzy when he finally pulls away.

  “Is that going to be okay, with your mom? You know, because you’re fifteen.”

  “Almost sixteen,” I manage in a harsh whisper. And Emmett will be turning eighteen in less than three months. We’re not even two years apart. “That was unexpected.”

  He grins, still leaning into me, his fingertips grazing my cheek. “Really? I thought you had figured it out.”

  “What? No!” I giggle with disbelief, my head swimming in shock. “You said you wanted to stay single. You know, because you’re leaving next year?”

  “Yeah. Next year. Plus, you never let me finish what I was going to say.”

  I pull my bottom lip into my teeth to hide the stupid grin that threatens to surface. “What were you going to say?”

  His brown eyes settle on mine. “Just that the first night I came to your room with the boxes, I thought you were adorable.”

  “Yeah. Right.” I roll my eyes. “Aria with a green face.”

  He laughs. “You were. And I liked running with you, and hanging out with you. And I didn’t expect to be breaking up with Holly, so I couldn’t see myself with anyone else at first. But, I don’t know … Zach kept asking me if I’d mentioned him to you at all, and then he said he wanted to ask you out to a movie. I got jealous.”

  “Really?” I thought I was the only one.

  “I told hi
m to stay the hell away from you. That’s when I realized that it was because I wanted to be with you.”

  “Really?” I sound like a doe-eyed dimwit.

  He weaves his fingers through my hand, stroking my palm with the tip of his thumb, and I can’t describe the way my heart surges with happiness. I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited about anything in my life. “Yeah. I mean, you’re funny and sweet and cute—”

  I groan.

  “In a hot way, trust me.” His mouth is on mine again, this time more urgently, the palm that was cupping my face earlier now settled gently against my neck. It’d be an easy slide down. What it would feel like to have Emmett’s hands on me like that?

  The very thought sends heat through my core.

  Gingerly at first, I let my fingers wander as our mouths and tongues tangle, smoothing over his strong arms, marveling at his hard muscle. Not long ago I was fantasizing about touching this body and here I am, free to do so. The question now becomes, how fast is too fast?

  I’m not sure which order it happens in—if his mouth shifts to my neck first or his hand slides up my shirt, but soon my body is being inundated by Emmett, who may be a decent guy but is not a shy one. I let my head fall back against his bed, close my eyes, and sigh my pleasure as his tongue leaves a trail across my throat and his palm smooths over my abdomen, slowly moving upward, until cool air skates across my skin. His palm settles over one of my bra cups, and I silently thank my choice of pink lace today.

  I vaguely hear a door creaking open somewhere in the house, but I’m too far gone, my hand now having found its way through Emmett’s thick mane of chestnut-brown hair, my body a live wire.

  “Hello, Emmett and AJ! We’re home!” Cassie’s voice carries from the bottom of the stairs.

  Emmett pulls away with a heavy exhale, his hair tousled, his eyes wild, his breath ragged. A soft curse slips from his lips as he settles back into his prior position—hauling the laptop back to rest on his lap.

  The stairs creak with Cassie’s slow and steady approach. She appears in the doorway a few moments later, her hair damp from the pool. The subtle smell of chlorine drifts in along with her. “What are you guys doing?”