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BEFORE

Soirl I was back then It’s like hohen you see a horror oes for a walk in the woods after ht How can she be so stupid? Doesn’t she know she’s about to get gruesomely hacked to death?

She should know That’s why it’s so hard to watch Because you want her to know You want her to defend herself, and you look down on her for not knowing, even though obviously it’s the guy who hacks her up who’s at fault

The thing is, the movie makes hiin co the forecast to see if it calls for serial ht

These days, if so but OMG, I wouldn’t wonder if whatever I was about to find out was going to be bad I’d only wonder how bad and how long it was going to take me to crawl out of whatever pit I was about to fall in But in August of ht otten distracted before she could finish her train of thought

I towel-dried my hair and stood up to lob the damp towel into my laundry basket in the closet Missed By the tied, another e had popped up on my phone, this time with a link

You need to see this, it said

And then, immediately after, I’m so sorry

I clicked the link

I think part of irl is, you spend your whole life developing a finely honed radar for detecting anything that could potentially cause people to love you less

Girls like ust--we eat approval We live for it So e do so really monumentally idiotic--we know

The screen filled up with a picture of me, topless, with Nate’s dick in my mouth

I looked, and I took a deep breath I closed round ofopen

It sounds too drama llama when I put it like that, I know, but I can’t think of another way to describe it One --a nineteen-year-old overachieving politics geek, on track to go to law school and take the world by storged against the desk I couldn’t get enough air

The shock of it didn’t take any ti some kind of shortcut path from my eyes to the area of my brain that had made a quiet, private list of the consequences of those photos the second Nate took theet into law school

You’ll never get a Rhodes

You’ll never be a judge or get elected to office

This changes everything

Seeing those pictures--I was devastated Ione down on Nate and he’d lifted his iPhone in the air and ai fine Bad idea, the radar told me Such a bad idea But I overrode it, because Nate was in ahim out of it

You trust him, I told myself Nate would never

But he did He must have The website identified me as Caroline Piasecki from Putnam, Iowa, and Nate was the only one who had those pictures Either he put theave them to so One duckface from my car that I’d sent him just to be an ass One of me in my favorite animal-print bra and panties, which I’d taken in theinout my chest because I’d wanted to look sexy I’d wanted so much to be sexy for him

And the other, even dirtier pictures The ones I almost couldn’t look at

Three of theain, with a cartoon bubble that said, I’et FUCKED!!!

I couldn’t cry

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 theether, 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 h school, I’d been dateless until he asked me out--a late bloo to be noticed by a boy like that But at Putna 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 ht I had pulled it off pretty well By the end of dinner, he’d been sain

I would have said he was a nice guy That ere 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, andtime for sex This wasn’t supposed to happen I hadn’t expected my prom date, my first boyfriend,slut who loves jizz in her face or to list the naht there beneath the blow-job picture

Because who expects that?