Always Emily. Mary Sullivan

guts. You have to feel the time and the boy are right before taking that big step. You’ll get over him.”

      “I already have, as soon as I realized what a jerk he is. That’s not the problem. Look!” She jumped up from the bed. Anger vibrated in her slim frame. Good. Anger was a hell of a lot better than despair. Aiyana hit a few keys and her Twitter account came up. “Look what he did.”

      Emily joined her, pressing her hand onto Aiyana’s shoulder. Oh, she had a bad feeling about this.

      There, on the computer screen, tweets bounced around from the boy and his friends, and girls too, stating that she’d gone all the way with him last night...and that it hadn’t been the first time, and he hadn’t been the first boy, tweets like a hail of bullets cutting Aiyana down, too similar to Jean-Marc’s assault, but much, much worse.

      Aiyana was too young, her defenses too undeveloped, to repel an attack like this. No wonder she needed help.

      Damn the internet for making bullying so painfully public.

      “It’s all lies,” Aiyana wailed. “I’m still a virgin.”

      In Aiyana’s pain, Emily heard echoes of her own.

      She fell back to sit on the bed, her past rushing toward her from a long dark tunnel, whooshing full speed ahead, the memories she’d worked so hard to submerge surfacing here where she had thought she would be safe.

      She could handle Jean-Marc and his ugly innuendo miles and miles away, because she knew she could find a way to repair the damage, somehow, but this was here at home in Accord, and it was happening to a girl she loved, and it was happening in Emily’s old school. And that easily, the woman Emily had matured into was gone, and she was back to the lost and lonely girl she used to be.