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Preview from chapter one
THE STRANGE BOY
The strange boy stood outside, again....
Emily imagined that he waited for her...
In truth, however, he just waited for the bus.
She watched him from her bedroom window, twirling a strand of her dark hair, as she did so.
Again, Emily was struck by how strange he was.
Not strange in a physical way, though. Physically, he looked kind of cute.
No, it was more like he didn’t fit in, and usually just kept to himself.
They had a class together, but he always just sort of faded into the background.
Most of the time, he had his face buried in some book, or like now, stared off into the distance, lost in thought.
Emily wondered if he even liked girls, and by girls she meant herself.
She had spent the better part of the summer finding reasons to bump into him. Usually he hung out at the library or at the store, and for that summer so did she. She’d even gone so far as to wear skimpy outfits (well as skimpy as her dad would allow anyway, which meant T-Shirt and shorts) hoping he’d notice.
He hadn’t.
Now, they were both two weeks into their senior year, and still nothing.
She had tried to “accidentally” bump into him at school, hoping that would start a conversation, but met only with a wall of silence.
Any sane girl would probably have given up on him by now, but she felt some strange connection to him—maybe because he seemed so lost.
Emily sighed, and now stared at herself in the mirror.
The scars were still there, they hadn’t magically disappeared over night.
Back in her freshman year she had developed a bad case of acne, which hadn’t exactly made her very popular.
The bad acne had continued to plague her throughout her sophomore year, finally clearing up when she became a junior.
But, when the acne had cleared up, it had left deep, red scars on both sides of her face. And like an infection, the scars had spread, reached down towards her chest and upper back.
Nothing seemed to get rid of the scars.
Moisturizers, cold creams, acne pads she had tried them all, and nothing had worked.
Not even makeup helped.
She had pretty much given up and accepted her fate.
That is until the strange boy showed up, and made her heart ache, and made her worry that she would never be pretty enough for a man to want her.