Exposed Read Online Free PDF Page B

happen.
    Out loud, to Devin, who never quits defending me when the skank-whispers start or the Ellis witch-monster rears its evil blond head, I say, “I’m over it. More or less. It just hits me sometimes, you know?”
    “Yeah.” Devin’s eyes look unfocused. She doesn’t like to think about negative things very much. “We, uh … I guess we should … Do you want to look at some other profiles before we make notes on our paper so you can get that outline done? The outline’s due first, right?”
    I glance at the mailbox again.
    Still nothing.
    “I don’t want to look at any more profiles tonight,” I tell Devin, knowing it’s probably better if we just move on to other things.
    Paul—or whatever his name really is—might have gotten busy, or maybe his parents made him knock it off for the night. Mom would be making me shut down if I was using the computer downstairs, or if Devin weren’t here to work on our assignment.
    I hit REFRESH one more time, but my BlahFest mailbox still doesn’t have a new message. “Okay.” I click over to a search engine page. “Shoot. What should we look up first?”
    For a few seconds, Devin doesn’t say anything.
    I glance toward her as Mom and Lauren break into a typical bedtime why-can’t-I-stay-up-because-you’re-eight argument out in the hallway, near my door.
    Devin rolls her eyes and raises her voice over the chaos. “Before I came over, I did a few searches. Got a lot about Emily’s poetry, but we need more about her life. Ms. Haggerty wants
an exploration of her inner being
. Or some crap. You heard her.”
    My turn for the eye-rolling.
    Woo-hoo.
    We get to write a paper exploring the inner being of a reclusive hermit who never went farther than her garden after she dropped out of college. Emily Dickinson’s poetry wrenches my soul, but her life—a little on the tame side.
    “Do you think Emily was queer with her brother’s wife?” Devin shuffles the stack of note cards she brought—the ones I can’t believe she already made, but Devin is all about A’s. “Sue Gilbert. Yeah. I found some articles that say they were, you know, philandering with each other—but other sites swear Emily was in love with a bunch of different guys but too shy to say anything.”
    I stare at the search engine page and chew my lip, resisting an urge to zip back to BlahFest and check my messages. “Emily and Sue Gilbert Dickinson wrote lots of letters to each other, and they were sort of passionate in that old-fashioned way. But I think it was normal for women to talk like that back then.”
    “Lots of letters?” Devin scoots closer to me, on the very edge of the bed, ripping my brain away from the blank search engine screen for five seconds. “So, you’ve read some?”
    My cheeks warm up a little. “Okay, I’m a total Emily geek. I’ve read a few—some of her poetry came out of those letters.”
    Devin snickers. “How many did she write? I mean, they lived next door to each other for like thirty years. No real need to epistolize on a daily basis.”
    Epistolize.
    Devin and her ten-dollar words.
    She studies vocabulary like a fiend to keep her English grade up—and it usually works, too. Her motto’s simple.
    If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle ’em with bovine excrement.
    “Emily and Sue
epistolized
more than two hundred and fifty times,” I explain, “but I don’t think the letters are all online.” I type in a search to show her, cue it up, and wait a second for her to scan the headers. “Sue Gilbert’s family burned her epistles, so all we have are Emily’s letters. Sue might not have answered her the same way.”
    “What way?” Devin reaches over and flips on my desk lamp, brightening the room and her smooth, perfect face. Her eyes sparkle as she asks, “Are the letters sexy?”
    “Well, sort of. Not really. It’s all 1800s language. Pounding hearts and fainting bosoms and all that.” I pick up my Emily compendium from the corner of