A/N This part--PART IV--takes place in the past. 

Emily Daniels didn't believe herself to be anything special. She was small for her age, had always been, and she had a baby face she wished would grow more into itself. Whenever she looked in the mirror and saw the image of a third-grader staring back, she'd turn away in disgust. That the others seemed to be growing into older bodies while she remained unchanged was intensely frustrating, and yet she'd never let on, even to her mother or sister, how much her lack of development depressed her. Skin and bones—she was skin and bones. All leg on one end and stick figure on the other. Her eyes were too big for her head, her head was too big for her body, and her body was too small for the styles she wanted to wear and the impressions she wanted to make. "Cute" and "charming" and "sweet" and other similar words the others used to describe her served only to humiliate her further, to solidify her self-image as a baby, a child—a little girl who'd never grow up, never be anything but adorable.

It wasn't how she wanted to be, at fourteen. The girls in the music videos and magazines and television shows were hot. Sexy, even. That's what she wanted to be, but she was too embarrassed to admit it. Her mother would never buy her the sort of clothing she wanted to wear, and she wouldn't have had any sort of figure to fit into it anyway; it was a good thing she had a school uniform and all the girls were to some degree equalized. At least that way, no one would realize how many kitten and unicorn sweatshirts her mother kept trying to dress her in. She was growing up, for God's sake! and yet, her physical attributes fooled everyone. Put her in one of those sweatshirts and any stranger would surely think her in grade school, not almost high school.

As if nature wished to add insult to injury, Emily's younger sister, Kate, was changing faster than she was. Why, Kate had started her period that fall, and she was developing breasts! At twelve—twelve! If Kate applied some makeup, she'd pass for sixteen.

Oh, the unfairness of it.

Her friends didn't know. Danielle and Joanna and Helen and anyone else at school—no, none of them thought of her as anything other than what she'd always been to them: the class baby, the class sweetheart.

She was so tired of that persona, and yet she didn't know how to escape it. Emily couldn't turn around overnight. There were well-established roles already. Danielle was the queen bee, the one everyone listened to; Joanna was the beauty and the brains; Helen was the good girl, the one all the teachers loved. And Anjulie? The new girl? God, she was so cool. So different, so interesting with her shimmering black hair and her painted nails, the studs she wore up her ears until the principal had made her take them out. Even in the obligatory uniform, Anjulie exuded a certain rebellion. Emily had wanted to attach herself to Anjulie right away. Maybe the new girl could help her find a few ways to look a little more mature, some subtle ways no one would tease her for.

The way things were now, Emily did have a sort of immunity against teasing, unlike the poor kids everyone had been crucifying for their unfortunate aspects since around third grade, when differences became too noticeable to ignore. She wasn't even like the few girls who'd recently listened to the wrong music or liked the wrong person and earned themselves a ticket to no-friends-land. Nobody ever laughed unkindly at Emily. Everyone, even the cute boys, were comfortable talking with her. She was loved by all, friend of all—and she hated it. She knew the congeniality stemmed from everyone's impression of her as some steadfast little sister, someone to remain always a pal while they all went on growing into bodies ripe for exploration and engaging in experimental activities. Who'd want to explore or experiment with her? No, no . . . they'd exclude her, not out of any unkindness but out of some false sense of obligation, of protection. It was already happening. Why, the only person who wanted to do anything with her was Danielle, and Danielle was . . . was something close to sad. Emily had begun to grow increasingly depressed around her.

Oh, what was it her mother always told her? "What matters is on the inside of a person. The outside is merely a shell." But nothing was happening to Emily's shell, and people her age judged by shells, not the pearls they weren't ready to see. She was fairly sure she was awesome inside—cool and stylish, totally kissable, maybe even a little flirty. She wanted to be those girls in the Delia's catalogs, so effortlessly fashionable! And the women in Danielle's mother's women's magazines, sexy and confident. That was the real her; she was sure of it.

If only everyone could see her inside.

And yet, instead, everyone seemed to love her outside, the person she didn't want to be anymore. Oh, it made sense in her wandering thoughts, but she never had anyone to talk to about it. One of the few certainties in Emily's life was her knowledge that in spite of all her apparent friendships, she actually had zero friends, no one that knew her to her very core, that could really understand what she felt or cared deeply about. She was all alone. No one could comprehend what it was like to be her, what it was like to go about her days as if she were happy when really, half the time, she wanted to curl up into a ball and hide away for the rest of her life.

Still, for someone who didn't believe she had any friends, Emily was often the center of others' attention. It'd been Tuesday night when they'd planned the thing. "We want to stay at your house this Friday," Danielle had told her via phone call. "Your mom makes the best waffles. Anjulie's never had them. And she and I were talking about some new music videos—oh my God, Em! Luke told me he thinks Anjulie's pretty. That's what he said, literally. That's how you know he's crushing. Guys say hot if they just want to make out, but they say pretty when they want to go out. I am totally going to get them alone together soon. I was telling her all about him, how, like, every single girl in school has liked him at one point, but she's probably got French boyfriends or something. She never wants to say."

Emily had let Danielle ramble through her stream-of-consciousness, had begun to spiral her own thoughts far away. Hadn't Danielle ever noticed her purported best friend liked Luke? Emily had implied it eight thousand times, but Danielle apparently never considered that Emily might have attractions of her own. No, Danielle liked to think Emily was her happy little toy, that the pair of them were interested and disinterested in the same things, that Emily existed only to help her navigate life's weird avenues while neglecting to pave her own.

And of course Danielle was trying to commandeer Anjulie, just as she took everything new and shiny for herself.

Regardless of her disgruntlement, Emily had called Helen and Joanna on threeway that night after hanging up with Danielle. "Sleepover my house, this Friday?"

"Why not mine?" Helen had queried. Emily had never had the courage to tell Helen that all of them were weirded out by her obnoxious brothers and the strict rules of her parents (lights out by ten! no snacking! no MTV or CW!).

"Fine," had been Joanna's response, blunt as she always was.

And so now here they were, with the night progressing as such nights always did, although Anjulie had brought that fun bit with her spirit séance or whatever it was. After the to-do at the back door, the boys obviously pranking them, they'd snuggled up into their sleeping bags and blankets. Danielle had done an uncharacteristically nice thing and made all of them hot cocoa in the microwave after she'd let the chill January air invade the first floor by standing with the door open too long, and there they'd sat in the dark, sipping and gossiping. When their empty mugs were plopped in a ring around the center of the coffee table, they turned to just gossiping, and at last, with the lights out, they pretended to go to sleep. Emily lay against her pillow, staring at the stripe of the outside world between the floor-length curtains at the nearby window. The other girls were murmuring around her, but Anjulie, nearest on the couch, had fallen quiet.

Emily reached out and gently pinched Anjulie's arm. "Hey, don't fall asleep," she warned her.

"Oh yeah, thanks," Anjulie muttered.

On the very rare occasion Danielle fell asleep first or they all drifted off at relatively the same time, the night morphed predictably into day without any event. But if it were any other sort of night, she who slept first would regret drifting off, because Danielle had a penchant for torment. It was almost always Joanna or Helen who bore the brunt of her mischief. Once, Helen had woken around three in the morning with her face and pillow coated in toothpaste; she'd had to take a shower to wash it all out of her hair, and even then, she smelled minty for a few days afterward. Joanna—poor Joanna, who never seemed able to keep her eyes open—had endured multiple markered mustaches and curse words and terrible lipstick jobs. Once Danielle had even cut off a chunk of Joanna's hair at an awkward angle, and Joanna, in tears the next morning, had gone home at once and spent nearly a week not speaking to the others.

Anjulie had yet to suffer such treatment, and if Emily could save her from it, she meant to do so, more out of a desire to become Anjulie's real friend than to save her from mistreatment (for in fact, there was a devious part of Emily that might've been gratified to see Anjulie at Danielle's mercy). She herself had always managed to avoid falling asleep first; Emily was, fortunately, something of a night owl.

"Do you like that she does that stuff?" Anjulie whispered down to Emily on the floor.

"No, I hate it," Emily returned in an equally hushed tone.

"Then why do you let her do it?"

Neither of them had to name whom they discussed. Emily thought. It wasn't as if she'd never been appalled by Danielle's behavior. In fact, Emily found herself often wishing someone else would come along and make Danielle feel smaller; maybe that person could be Anjulie. But the truth, if there was truth to any of it, was that Emily spent far too much time feeling sorry for herself to feel sorry for the victims of Danielle's persecution. Emily was essentially in the safe zone when it came to Danielle, who had a peculiar trust in her, a trust that was largely undeserved. In some strange way, Emily held something over Danielle, and though she wasn't quite sure what that thing was, Emily was ever more beginning to feel that the tightrope between them was thinning, their tenuous friendship becoming even more so. At least soon they'd be expanding their horizons. Danielle could find new people to abuse.

"I don't know," Emily at last offered in response. "But I like what you did," she deflected, "with the Kitty thing."

Anjulie laughed quietly. "I just made it up."

"Do you believe in that kind of stuff?"

"No. I don't believe in ghosts or anything."

"Me neither." Emily shifted beneath her large faux fur blanket, rolled onto her side. "But you said it took five souls. Did you think of us? There's five of us."

"You know what, I didn't even do that on purpose. It was from a nursery rhyme about a cat."

"The rhyme from the party?"

"Yes! Exactly." Anjulie leaned off the couch toward Emily. "You want to know a secret?"

Emily felt her arms tingle. "Yes!"

"I can't really speak much French at all. Just some stuff my mom taught me and my sister as kids."

A brief silence hovered between the two of them, and then they both began to giggle a little louder than intended.

"What are you two talking about?" snapped an expected voice from an unidentifiable lump a ways off. "Go to sleep!"

The two scolded girls slipped deeper under their own covers, waited for a moment before Danielle hypocritically resumed her own whispering with Helen or Joanna, whoever was still lucky enough to be awake. Then Emily, suddenly grave, whispered, "You want to know one of my secrets?"

Anjulie leaned closer, again, hung so far down that she had to put a hand on the floor to keep from falling off the couch. "Sure."

"Sometimes . . ." Emily hesitantly began, "sometimes I hate myself." She was surprised she'd said it, felt stupid the moment she had, worried Anjulie would laugh at her.

Instead, Anjulie said only, "I do, too."

A sort of warmth began to overcome Emily, starting somewhere within her chest and working its way down through her stomach, her thighs. "I hope your Kitty thing is real," she said.

"Why?"

"It'd be funny to see Danielle scared."

Anjulie laughed so faintly Emily almost didn't hear it.

"And it'd be something interesting, anyway," Emily sleepily added. The warmth was moving down to her feet, now, through her arms, up into her shoulders and head. "Will you wake me up?" she heard herself asking as if from far away.

"In the morning?" came Anjulie's soft voice.

"No, if I fall asleep first. Wake me up?"

"Ok, and me too, all right?"

"I will," she replied. Anjulie might just turn out to be a real friend, Emily thought last, allowing herself to sink into the gentle arms of slumber.