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wanted to talk to me. He said he'd heard you and I were dating and I told him we were. Then he got this look on his face, this disgusting look, and he—he asked me how I liked …” Hunter stopped, clearly unable to repeat Tony's exact words. “I told him to shut up, but he started saying all this stuff about you. Really rude stuff. So I decked him.”
    She fell silent, the poignancy of the scene stamped in her mind. Hunter, like a knight in shining armor rushing to his girl's defense, because that was just who he was—her defender, the protector of her honor.
    “He shouldn't have said those things about you,” Hunter said.
    “Then what happened?”
    “We wrestled. He tore my shirt. I got in a few more hits. His friends grabbed me and held my arms so that he could finish me, but my manager came out. I'd forgotten he was still inside. He yelled at them to let me go and leave or he'd call the police. Tony and his buds split real quick. I told Bill I was all right and I drove straight here.”
    “You're cut,” she said, reaching to touch his cheek.
    He dodged away. “I've got to know if what he said is true. Did he ‘have#x2019; you, Raina? Did he ‘do#x2019; you?”
    Her heart twisted, but she looked himsquarely in the eye. “Yes,” she said. Her lips felt
    like blocks of wood.
    “Did he, you know, attack you?”
    “No.”
    His face looked white and pinched like she'd thrown him a body blow and knocked the wind out of him. “In the
eighth
grade? When you were only
thirteen
?”
    “He said he loved me. I—I thought he loved me.” She blinked back tears. “Back then being popular meant everything to me. Tony was the most popular guy in our school and he—he asked me to go out with him.”
    “And you just gave yourself away to that jerk?”
    She couldn't bear to look Hunter in the face anymore. She stared down at the tiled floor. The normally straight lines looked squiggly and smudged. “He told me he loved me more than anything and when I was thirteen, I believed him. I was stupid.”
    The ticking of the nearby grandfather clock sounded like cannonballs thudding against the walls of a fortress. All the memories of that terrible time came flooding back to her, threatening to sweep her away and drown her. “He didn't love me, of course. In a couple of weeks, he took up with a sixteen-year-old girl from another school. She had a car and she was cool, while I was …” She remembered the words Tony had used as clearly as if he were standing infront of her, slinging them at her again. “I was ‘boring,#x2019; ‘clingy,#x2019; ‘easy#x2019;—‘used goods.#x2019; He didn't want to waste his time on someone who would ‘go down for anyone who asked.#x2019; ” Her gaze flew to Hunter's. “But there were no others. Just him. I felt humiliated and… and dirty.”
    Hunter sagged visibly. He shook his head. “You were a trophy.”
    “You could say that.”
    The silence between them felt as heavy as a lead blanket. Hunter turned and reached for the doorknob. With his back to Raina, he asked, “Were you ever going to tell me? Or were you going to let me go on believing you were…” He stopped.
    “Pure?” she said, with bitterness. “Well, I'm not. Now you know.” She waited for him to say something, anything, but he didn't. “What now?” she asked.
    “I don't know. I need some time to think.”
    Wrong answer,
she thought.
    He opened the door and stepped out into the cold. The wind scattered a few dry, dead leaves across the floor. He shut the door and Raina stood looking at the wooden barrier while the leaves lay like brittle pieces of her heart around her feet.
    Holly was getting a jump on a history paper and was surfing the Web for information about theCrimean War when she heard Hunter come up the stairs and shut the door of his room. On impulse, she got up and knocked.
    “Go away,” he said.
    She opened the door anyway and stuck her head inside. “That's not very sociable. What if I'd been