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The pictures are everywhere, of course, freshly posted at all the meat-market sites along with my name, my school—yeah, yeah. I’ve long since lost the ability to find them shocking.
What’s shocking is all the other stuff.
Hateful posts on my Facebook wall. Personal notes to my school email from strangers who want to rape me, fuck me, punch me in the cunt. My Twitter account is sending out spam messages with links to my vulva. And somehow, God, my professors all must have been contacted, because I’ve gotten concerned-sounding email from three of them and a phone message from the Student Affairs office requesting that I set up an interview as soon as possible.
In six hours, I’ve cycled through hurt and anger, disgust
and fear, resignation and fury. I’m a hundred-pound bag of flailing feelings. I’m sad. I’m mad. I’m a wreck.
But West is with me.
More than West: After her eight o’clock, Bridget showed up with Quinn. They called Krishna, who pulled his laptop, mine, and Quinn’s into a temporary network on the living-room coffee table. Within an hour, he was directing a search-and-record-keeping operation with Quinn and Bridget. They’re doing screenshots of everything, calling in favors with a MathLab geek friend of Krishna’s who has crazy computer skills, combing through the student handbook to figure out what kind of rules Nate’s breaking and what can be done about it.
I’m a wreck, but they’re all on my side, and that helps. So much.
Krishna’s friend is the one who figured out what started it all. Tucked away on one of those unmoderated sites where bros like to hang out and be dickheads together, there’s a thread about me. A link to the pictures, a standard complaint about what a frigid, evil whore I am, and then a call to arms: What can we do to teach this bitch a lesson?
Dozens of them took up their weapons. While I was at the bakery with West, sleeping in his arms, having sex with him—all that time, I was being attacked. By strangers. For no reason at all.
If this had happened to me seven months ago, I think I would have crumpled under the weight. Knowing my professors have been sent those links, that my sister and my aunts and maybe even my grandparents have been Facebook-spammed with naked pictures of me—it sucks. It hurts. It makes me want to cry if I dwell on it, if I think too hard about what it means for my future, what it says about the shape of the rest of my life.
But it also makes me so, so mad.
I’m ready to fight. I have a stack of printouts in my arms, a bag with my laptop in it weighing down my shoulder. I have West at the end of the driveway.
In front of me, my father sits in the maroon leather recliner by the window, his own laptop open on his thigh, his glasses pushed up into his thick gray hair, ruffling his otherwise dignified appearance. I study his familiar face—thick eyebrows, that dumpling nose Janelle inherited but I didn’t, his jawline jowlier than I remembered. He’s putting on weight. Too many drive-through cheeseburgers.
He called me home, and I came.
My palms are sweaty when I sit down in the other chair in his corner. It’s deep and tall, and my feet just barely reach the floor. All of my memories of being punished as a girl begin here, with the helpless weight of my swinging feet. I know the number of brass studs anchoring the upholstery onto the end of his chair’s arms. Nine around the arch. Twelve more down each side. I’ve studied each pucker in the leather and memorized the geometrical arches and whorls in his abstract office carpet in order to avoid having to look him in the eye.
Today, I sit with my spine straight, damp palms clasped in my lap. I pulled up my hair into a ponytail and wore jeans and the sweater he paid for at Christmas, pale-blue-green cashmere the color of West’s eyes. My armor.
I sit quietly and wait, because Janelle is the one who sucks up to him, and Alison is the one who cries. I am the daughter who comes to him armed with counterarguments, clever defenses, tricky maneuvers.
I am the daughter who fights.
For months now, I’ve been too scared to fight. I’ve been trying to live in a bubble that Nate popped way back in August. I didn’t want to believe it. I told myself I could fix it. Throw some patches on there, paint over the cracks, avert my eyes, and pretend everything was fine.
Everything’s not fine.
The bubble is well and truly fucked.
But outside the bubble, I’ve found rugby parties and new friends who don’t care about my stupid sex pictures. Outside the bubble, there are nights at the bakery, phone sex, and long naps in the middle of the afternoon with my arms wrapped around a boy who smells like fresh bread and soap, and who makes me feel like I matter, no matter what I look like, what I’ve done, what’s been done to me.
The world hasn’t changed. It’s full of men who hate women. It’s stuffed to the gills with assholes who will mount an attack on a stranger just because she’s female and they’re small-minded monkey-boys with an inferiority complex.
Author: Robin York
The world hasn’t changed, but I have.
Outside the bubble is life. West.
I like it out here. I’m staying.
Dad clicks on something, closes the lid of his laptop, and looks at me. “Caroline,” he says.
Just my name, for a moment.
