“I’m gonna check my email, Mom.”
Kaylee slipped into her room and gently closed her door, revealing an Owl City poster tacked to its face. She pressed her ear up to the crack between the door and its frame.
Faintly, she could hear her parents working in the kitchen.
Click. She locked the door and stepped over a pile of discarded clothes on the way to her desk.
She usually did not have to worry about her family respecting her privacy. They weren’t like a some of the uptight parents of her friends from school. But she wanted to make sure she would not be disturbed tonight. 
She was supposed to talk with Rick.
She powered on her laptop and waited for the internet to connect.
Rick was 17, funny and from a neighboring town. She’d never met him before, but it thrilled her to talk with someone three years older than she. Despite their slight age gap they shared a lot of interests.
Still, her family would never understand.
“Hi!” An instant message popped up on her screen.
Her fingers fluttered from key to key, tapping out a conversation with her digital beau.
He asked her to meet him.
“When?” She was a little scared when she typed. Half of her did it only to see how he would reply.
“Tonight.”
But that was impossible and unsafe, she responded. Her parents would kill her.
“They don’t have to know.” And then came a string of messages describing exactly what they would know – them and all her peers. Dark secrets she had confided to him. Dirty things she had said.
Kaylee was sweating, terrified, but felt compelled to assent.
She spent the next few hours worrying. Her thoughts raced while she waited until her father’s snoring could be heard drifting down the hallway. She tip-toed out the front door and walked with excruciating reserve to the gas station she and Rick had agreed upon as a meeting place.
“Hi, Kaylee.” She swung around in the direction of a deep voice behind her, but it wasn’t Rick.
This man must have been almost forty.
He grabbed her, stifling a scream, and pushed her into a van occupied by two other middle-aged men.
She was raped, handcuffed, and driven to a big city hours away.
After two years of forced prostitution, drug addiction, and sexual and psychological abuse, Kaylee killed herself by an intentional drug overdose.
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