Free Pretty Wanted by Elisa Ludwig

Titans . And there were a few of us showing up, like a Latin club. But then I noticed that I was the only one she was inviting. And she started sending me these emails and texts, flirting.”
    “Flirting how?” I countered. “Did you flirt back?”
    He looked down at his shoelaces, pressed his lips together. “I guess . . . I guess I thought it was sort of cool in the beginning that this teacher was paying all this attention to me.” He glanced up quickly, gauging my reaction. “I didn’t think she actually liked me in that way—just that she was extra friendly.”
    Ew. I don’t know what I’d been expecting but this story was creeping me out. Sure, I knew he was a player. Everyone had told me about him back when I started school. I’d imagined him messing around with some typical VP girls. But with an older woman? A teacher? It was the kind of thing you read about in tabloids. And here he was, my boyfriend. . . . Everything I thought I knew about me and Aidan floated above us in a little balloon, about to be punctured.
    “So then?”
    “So then, one day she actually kind of put the moves on me. She tried to give me a massage and then she tried to kiss me. It was so weird. I didn’t know what to do.”
    “Jesus, Aidan. Did you kiss her back?” I asked, my heart dragging painfully in my chest. Was he really that stupid? Or that much of a horndog?
    “No!” he exclaimed, practically yelling in my face. “This is why I didn’t want to tell you. You’re freaking out. And you have no need to freak out. It’s not what it sounds like.”
    “Then what is it?” My voice croaked. I felt like I could barely talk over the sob that was mounting. His telling me I was overreacting was only bringing it closer to the surface. How could this not be freak-out-worthy information?
    “I actually pulled away and told her she was overstepping. And that’s when it got really strange. She grabbed my wrists and started to threaten me. She said if I didn’t kiss her she was going to tell the school officials that I’d forced myself on her. She got straight-up psycho.”
    “Oh my God,” I said, covering my mouth with my hand. Teachers were supposed to teach things. Set a good example. Remind you that the adult world was kind of boring. They were not supposed to act like slutty Cylons from Battlestar Galactica .
    “Then she started to send me messages, asking for money. Like if I sent her fifty thousand bucks, she’d keep quiet.” He looked up, his mouth half open, eyes wounded. “I think that’s what she was after all along. Isn’t that effed up?”
    “Um, yeah. ” It was one of the most effed-up things I’d ever heard, and lately I’d been hitting the jackpot on effed-up things.
    “I tried to go to the school administration and explain what was going on but she’d gotten there first and had already filed charges. Assault charges. She had a whole story worked out. They had a disciplinary hearing and they expelled me.”
    “Is that why you got kicked out?” That was the other great mystery, the other big secret Aidan had been keeping from me. Well, now we were putting everything on the table.
    “The crazy thing was that I had been trying to get expelled for so long—I’d done so many things that Mr. Page had overlooked because my dad was on the board of trustees—that this was kind of the last straw.”
    I remembered that the very first day I’d met Aidan, in fact, he’d set off a fire alarm in the school and told me he was hoping they’d catch him. All along he was trying to prove some point, make his dad angry. Which, the more I thought about it, was lame. No matter how bad his relationship was with his parents, acting out in this way seemed completely juvenile and unproductive. I felt the family-envy rising up inside me again like a toxic gas. He didn’t even know how good he had it, did he?
    “But no one would believe me. She had this way of making everything I said seem like a lie. I mean, it was