“You’re bleeding,” he says.
“You hit me.”
“Let me see.”
He tugs at my wrist, and I let him drag my hand away from my nose, because basically I will let West Leavitt do anything. It’s possible that he’s some kind of magical creature. I mean, he’s not. I know he’s not. He’s a twenty-year-old sophomore at Putnam College, majoring in biology. He shelves books at the library, waits tables on weekends at the Gilded Pear—which is the only fancy restaurant in Putnam—and works the overnight shift at the bakery in town. All that on top of at least a couple of shady, unofficial sources of income, plus classes, makes him busier than just about anyone I know.
He’s tall—around six feet, maybe a little taller—with messy brown hair, light blue-green eyes, and a great tan.
He’s a guy who goes to my college. That’s all.
But that is not all.
His face is … You know how they say human beings are more attracted to symmetrical faces? Well, West’s face is slightly off in every conceivable way. One of his eyebrows tilts up a little bit, and the other one is bisected by a thin white scar. His eyes are a color that isn’t actually a color, with these tiny little flecks that sometimes look shiny, and I don’t understand how that’s possible. His mouth is wider than it ought to be, which makes him look like a smart-ass every time he smiles or almost smiles or thinks, vaguely, about smiling. His nose must have been broken once—or maybe more than once—because it’s not quite where it’s supposed to be. It’s shifted a titch to the left. And honestly? I think his ears are too small.
When he looks right at me, I can barely make words.
That’s why I’m standing here, bleeding, letting him inspect my nose.
“Is it still there?” I ask. Only unfortunately it sounds more like Ib id till dere?
“Yeah. I think I must have elbowed you. It’s not broken, though.”
“How do you know?”
“It’d be bleeding more.”
He traces the bridge with one finger.
It doesn’t hurt anymore.
A groan from the floor draws West’s attention away from my face, at which point my nose resumes throbbing and I remind myself who’s groaning and why.
Nate’s lip is split. The whole front of his shirt is crimson and wet. His teeth are pink when he spits.
Pink teeth. That wakes me up a little.
That’s Nate, I think. West hit Nate. He’s bleeding. You’re bleeding.
My brain keeps offering up these declarations, one after another, as though I might eventually locate a story to string them all together. But whatever part of me is in charge of analyzing and processing data, it’s off-line.
Blood drips from my chin. I follow its path and see that it’s landed on the scuffed toe of West’s black boot.
“I need a paper towel,” I say.
West’s friend Krishna grabs him by the arm. “You have to get out of here.”
Krishna is tall, with dark skin and black hair and a frighteningly beautiful face. He’s also usually so laid-back that he’s right next door to comatose, so his urgency is a whiff of ammonia under my nose.
The students at the fringes of the crowd have all turned to look down the hall, where something is happening. Someone is coming.
West Leavitt punched Nate in the face.
I’m bleeding.
He’s still touching me, and I can’t think.
“Take care of her.” West is speaking to Krishna, but he’s looking right at me when he says it, his expression apologetic.
Krishna gives him a small shove. “Fine, dude, just go.”
West turns, glances at me one more time, and jogs down the hall. Krishna picks up my bag off the floor—I hadn’t even realized I’d dropped it again—and puts an arm around my shoulders. “Come on, we’ll find you that paper towel.”
“Do you think Nate’s okay?”
“I think Nate’s a dick,” Krishna says. “But he’s still breathing. Can you walk any faster?”
I do my best. We end up in a women’s bathroom on the second floor, Krishna standing by the door and propping it open with his body as I press a coarse brown paper towel to my nose and examine myself in the mirror.
I look like something out of a slasher flick. There’s blood all over my face, clumping up the ends of my long brown hair. My hand is covered in gore, and the formerly white edge of my shirt where it sticks out under my sweater has gone crimson and wet.
Got what you deserved, didn’t you? Slut.
My stomach heaves up, a sudden lurch that makes me close my eyes and suck in a deep breath.
I look at Krishna, but of course he isn’t the one who said it.
It was them. The men.
They follow me around. Their voices. Their vile opinions, now an endless stream of negative color commentary on my life.
I’d still fuck her, they say when I turn on the tap. Fuck that bitch until she walks funny. I don’t care about her face.
I stick my fingers under the stream of cold water and wait for it to warm.
“You all right?” Krishna asks.
He looks uncomfortable. We’re friendly, but we’re not really friends. He’s closer with Bridget, my roommate, than he is with me. All four of us were on the same hall last year, Bridget and I rooming across from West and Krishna.
I like Krishna, but he’s not the kind of guy I’d ever choose to lean on. He’s kind of a manwhore, actually, and a slacker. I don’t imagine that standing here watching me bleed is high on his list of things he wanted to do today.
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.