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I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t really believe it.
The page had four hundred sixty-two comments.
Four. Hundred. Sixty. Two.
If someone had asked me ten minutes earlier how I felt about Nate, I would have told them, “Oh, there are no hard feelings. ” Three years together, and we’d just grown apart. I guess it was college that did it. By the end of our freshman year, I’d started to feel like maybe Nate and I didn’t have all that much in common. In high school, I’d been dateless until he asked me out—a late bloomer, my dad said. Nate was cute, popular, smart. Flattering to be noticed by a boy like that. But at Putnam, I had started to think maybe there was something missing between him and me. Better chemistry. A deeper connection.
I’d broken up with him before we came back to school. We shared a pizza and drank soda, and I tried to explain my reasoning without hurting his feelings. I thought I had pulled it off pretty well. By the end of dinner, he’d been smiling and agreeable again.
I would have said he was a nice guy. That we were still friends.
So even though I wasn’t exactly surprised, I was, too. I’d followed the rules, worked hard to get good grades, dated a nice boy, and made him wait a long time for sex. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I hadn’t expected my prom date, my first boyfriend, my first, to use the Internet to call me a cum-loving slut who loves jizz in her face or to list the name of my college and my high school right there beneath the blow-job picture.
Because who expects that?
I sank down into the desk chair and thumbed through the first few screens of comments. Then the next few. Screen after screen.
She has nice tits.
I’d hit that.
*fap fap fap fap thx Carolina, you hoor!*
What an ugly slut. I want more vag!
Every word I read—every filthy thing some basement-dwelling Internet creep said about me—I thought, This is my fault.
My fault, my fault, my fault.
I never should have let Nate take the pictures. I knew it. I knew it when he took them, I knew it after, I knew it when we broke up and I had this fleeting, urgent impulse to beg him to let me delete every single photo of me off his phone. An impulse I shrugged off because I didn’t want to offend him.
I didn’t want to be rude.
I sat there for a long time, scrolling and reading, wiping tears from my eyes with the back of my free hand. I was panting more than breathing, panicking more than thinking, too disoriented to have anything like a coherent plan.
I think I was mourning the end of something without even knowing it had ended. My youth, maybe. The sunny, perfect part of my life.
It wasn’t until Bridget messaged me again—R u ok?—that I really understood. I thought about how she would come back to the room and she would have seen. She would know, and I would have to face her.
I thought about how it wouldn’t be just Bridget. It would be everybody.
That’s when it hit me that I would never be okay again.
SEPTEMBER
Caroline
Two and a half weeks after the photos appear online, I have everything under control. Right up until I walk out of Latin and into West Leavitt’s elbow.
I’m walking with my head down, my mind on the upcoming student-senate election. I thought I would run this year to represent my dorm, but now I don’t see how I can. The girl who is running is … Well, I’m trying not to be uncha
ritable. She’s not my top choice.
I’m my top choice.
My feet are moving out the door and steering me to the right, away from most of the other students. I used to go to the left, but Nate has Macroeconomics in the classroom next to mine, and I don’t want to run into him. I’ve started going right instead and then walking around the outside of the building to head toward the dining hall for lunch.
