Experimentally, I take the paper towel away. The bleeding seems to have stopped. “I’m fine. You don’t have to stay.”

“I wouldn’t mind, except I have someone I need to meet. But if you want—”

“It’s okay.”

I’d rather be alone. My hands are shaking, and my knees still feel a little untrustworthy.

“I’ll tell West no harm, no foul, okay?”

“Huh?”

“I’ll say you’re not hurt.”

But I am hurt. Inside me, under my rib cage, hiding somewhere deep beneath my lungs, there’s raw, sliced-open flesh that won’t close up. It hurts all the time. My tender nose and the dull throb in my head have nothing on that pain.

“Tell him whatever you want.”

He still looks awkward, but he says, “Later.” When I say it back, he goes.

The door closes with a quiet thud.

I lean against the paper-towel dispenser, listening to the water run, and take deep breaths.

In. Out.

In. Out.

By the eighth breath, I’ve managed to banish most of the fear and tune out the pain. I’ve had a few weeks to practice. I’m getting good at not feeling things.

The key is to keep busy. To set goals and tick them off the list, one after another. I can’t stand here all day breathing. I have to get to lunch, because I’ve got a buttload of studying to do before my group-project meeting at three. I need to look at my email—I heard my phone vibrating during Latin, and I know I’m going to find a fresh crop of links in my daily Google alert. I have some time set aside to deal with them before the meeting.

This is what my life is like now. Always something to do.

Before, I was a diligent student. I printed out my color-blocked class schedule, with designated study sessions neatly labeled and shaded to match. I three-hole-punched all my syllabi and made special binders, one for each class, with custom dividers.

Now I pour all my diligence into designing spreadsheets to track my progress in wiping out my sex pictures from the Internet. I note the URL for each image, the site host, the date and time posted. I’ve mastered reverse image searching and developed mad skills at tracking down site owners’ contact information and bombarding them with legal-sounding messages until they remove every last photo of me from their servers.

The only way to succeed at this horrible game I don’t even want to be playing is to spend a lot of time online seeing things I wish I didn’t have to. I know more about file-sharing porn sites now than the average frat boy does. I have seen eleven lifetimes’ worth of veiny, erect penises. Whenever I lie down and close my eyes, my brain treats me to a clip show of the Day in Porn, and I hear the men accusing me from their dark, seedy corners of the Internet.

You’re nothing but a cockgobbling whore.

I’ll hold you down and fuck those tits. See how hot you feel then.

I know what they think of me, because they won’t shut up about it. Some nights I can’t sleep, so I sneak out of the dorm room I share with Bridget and drive in circles around Putnam.

I hear those men because I don’t have a choice.

I drive because I don’t know what else to do.

But I don’t have to fall apart. I thought I did at first, when I saw the pictures. That life as I knew it was over, and I just had to deal.

I was wrong. I have choices. Not falling apart is my choice. Every morning, whether I’ve slept or not, whether I’ve made it through the day without crying or given in and sobbed in the shower, where no one can hear me—the sun comes up, and I make my choice.

Today won’t be the day this breaks me.

I throw away the disgusting wad of bloody towel and rinse my face off, drying it on a fresh towel. My sweater is a lost cause. I pull it over my head and toss it in the trash can. It was cheap, anyway, and starting to pill.

I stick the cuff of my shirt under the tap, trying to remember if you’re supposed to use cold water or warm to get blood out. I never get it right. I should look it up on my phone. I should—

—figure out why West just punched Nate.

Yeah. That, too.

Unless I already know why. I hope not, though. God, I hope not.

I have to treat this whole deal as one more thing to cope with. That’s all it is. A problem to be solved. I can solve any problem if I work hard enough.

The men can laugh at me, fill my head with their poison. They can look at me naked, jerk off to me, post comments with photos of their dicks covered in semen, their fists wrapped around, the screens of their computers in the background with my body on them.

I can’t help it, Caroline, they can tell me. It’s your fault for being so fucking hot!

They’ve done all of that already. They’ve made it so I can’t walk around campus in shorts without feeling slutty and stupid and completely at fault.

But I won’t let them beat me.

I pull my arms far enough into my sleeves that I can wring out the wet, then shove my hands back through the holes. I’ll have to change my shirt later. For now, this is the best I can do. Lip balm. Hairbrush.

One step after another, hour after hour, day after day, until it gets better.

If I keep going, eventually it has to get better.


I cross campus with my arms wrapped around my torso, scanning the blue sky, the cheerful red flowers, the students heading off in all directions, alone and in groups, purposeful as ants.

Before, I was so excited to be back at Putnam again. I love the campus, with its red-brick buildings and the arched open-air walkway that connects the dorms marching alongside an expanse of green lawn. I love my classes and the challenge of being at a college where I’m not the smartest. Unlike kids in high school, no one here gives me a hard time for caring too much about my classes or nerding out about Rachel Maddow. Pretty much everybody at this school is at least a little bit of a nerd.

But in the past few weeks, Putnam’s been spoiled for me. Maybe forever.

The thing is, Nate didn’t just post the pictures. He used the website where they went up to forward an anonymous link to a bunch of our friends. It got emailed around, and when I forced Bridget to tell me if anyone had sent it to her, she admitted that she’d gotten it in her college email seven times. Seven. There are only fourteen hundred students at Putnam—three hundred fifty in our class. I can’t imagine how many times the message circulated among the ones who aren’t my best friend.

The original post Nate put up is gone, but the photos keep popping up on different sites, and some of the posts still name my college, my hometown, me.

When I walk around Putnam now, I look at every guy I pass, and I think, What about you? Did you see me naked? Did you save my picture onto your phone? Do you whip it out and wank to it?

Do you hate me, too?

It makes it difficult to get excited about dancing with them at parties or cheering them on at a football game.

My phone vibrates in my back pocket. Bridget is texting to ask if I’m heading to lunch.

I type, Yes. You?


Yep! Gardiner?

I’m 5 min out.

Cool. Did u hear abt West?

I’m not sure how to answer that, so I type, Sort of.

She replies with *Swoon*.

Bridget likes to pretend West and I have a silent, simmering affair going on.

I like to pretend he and I are complete strangers.

The truth is somewhere in the middle.

When I met West, it was move-in day for first-year students, and it was hot. Iowa hot, which means in the mid-nineties with 98 percent humidity. The best thing to do under those conditions is to lie on a couch in someone’s cold basement and watch TV while eating Cadbury eggs. Or, if you must be outside, to seek shade and ice cream. Not necessarily in that order.

Instead, I was carrying all my earthly possessions from my dad’s car up four flights of stairs to the room I would share with Bridget. I have a lot of possessions, it turns out. I’d gotten a little dizzy on the last trip up, and my dad had insisted I plant my butt on the step by the dorm entrance and sit this one out.

So at that particular moment he was on his way up to the room, Bridget hadn’t arrived yet, and Nate was off moving into his own room on the east side of campus. I was alone—sweaty and grimy and red-faced and hot. It’s possible that I was mentally griping a bit about my tired hamstrings and the lack of trained helper monkeys to do the moving work for me when the ugliest car I have ever seen rolled up.

The car was the color of sewage, dented and rusty, with a passenger-side door that had been duct-taped on. As I watched, it cut across an open parking space and slow-motion-bounced right up over the curb onto the manicured college lawn, rolling to a stop in front of my sneaker-clad feet.

I glanced around for the RA, good-girl radar pinging like mad. There were tire tracks in the grass! The car was farting out oily-looking clouds of noxious exhaust! This could not possibly be allowed!

No RA in sight.

The driver’s-side door opened, and a guy got out.

I forgot my own name.

Now, probably that was because I stood up too quickly. It was hot, and I’d only had a Pop-Tart for breakfast, too excited to eat the eggs and bacon my dad tried to push on me. I definitely didn’t get woozy because of how this guy looked.

I mean, yes, I’ll admit, the way he looked might have contributed. The lizard part of my brain greedily took in all the details of his height and build and that mouth and his face oh my God, and then the rational part of me filed them carefully away in the appropriate mental binder.