After he was done collapsing on top of me like a giant slug-man, he took a shower, so now he smells like soap, wet hair, West. I’m still all snuggly and sex-relaxed, and he’s whistling, rubbing my bare leg, scrolling through a bunch of texts.
“Who wrote to you?”
“Franks.”
“What’s she up to?”
“She got on Mom’s phone and sent me a whole bunch of selfies.”
“Let me see.”
I crawl half onto his lap, and he shows me. “She’s so cute.”
She looks a lot like him—West with round cheeks and a sharp chin, eye makeup, and a sparkly shirt. She’s in love with taking selfies, too. I’ve seen probably thirty of them in the past three weeks, because West has been as open as he promised to be. He told me all about Frankie, about his mom and Bo, about his dad.
There are some things he’s holding back, I think. Something about sex, about that money I dropped in his lap. But I know enough. I don’t need to know absolutely everything to understand what makes West tick.
Sometimes I think about what life gave me compared to what it’s given him, how hard he works, and I get so angry. He doesn’t like to talk about fairness and unfairness, though, or to dwell on the gap between how we grew up.
“It is what it is,” he said last time I brought it up. “You hungry?”
He says now, “She’s got all that crap on her eyes.”
“It’s called eye makeup.” I peer at the phone. “Actually, that’s a good nighttime eye. I can never get my eyeliner to look that awesome.”
“You don’t wear that stuff.”
“Not for everyday, but sometimes if there’s a party or whatever.”
He frowns at the pictures. “She’s too young.”
“She’s just trying it out. I was the same at her age. In a big hurry for bras and lipstick, all that stuff.”
“Yeah, but I doubt you had anybody sniffing after you in Ankeny. It’s different with Franks. She’s got to be smart, or some useless jag-off will get her knocked up before she’s even old enough to know what she wants yet.”
I watch him type out a text. Wash that shit off your eyes. You’re pretty enough without it.
“Heartwarming.”
“I’m her brother, not her boyfriend.”
He’s more like her father, though, I think. The closest thing she has to one.
Standing up, West stretches and drops his phone on the desk. “Can you hand me mine?” I ask. “I need to see if Bridge is going to breakfast before class.”
He does, then pulls on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I watch his bare chest and stomach disappear from view, sad as always to see them go.
West is smiling when I glance at his face. “What?”
“You. You look like you’re ready to go another round.”
I swipe my finger over the screen of the phone. “I was barely awake for round one.”
“Oh, I don’t know. You woke up pretty good by the end. I thought I was gonna have to shove a pillow over your head, keep you from waking up Krish.”
“You’d probably accidentally suffocate me, you were so busy back there doing your business.”
“Doing my business?” He sounds offended. I love offending him.
“You know.” I stare at my phone, flapping a hand at him. “That man-business. Thrust thrust, pant pant. I swear, sometimes I’m not sure why I put up with it.”
I barely see him coming before he’s grabbing my ankle and yanking me down the bed. I’m all tangled up in the covers, thrashing and laughing, when he crawls on top of me and braces his arms on either side of my head. “Thrust thrust, pant pant? I should spank your ass for that.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
His eyes are blazing. “So would I. But I’m gonna be late for class.” He dips his head and kisses me. “You coming to the library later?”
“Yeah, but I have a group-project thing after lunch, so I’ll be downstairs.”
“Come up after.”
He means the fourth floor. Our floor.
I swear, we’re going to get caught, and then he’ll get fired.
He says it’ll be worth it.
“Sure.”
One more kiss, with tongue, a bump against my hip that’s a hint and a promise, and then he’s moving away. He shoulders his bag as I navigate from texts to missed calls.
I’ve got a bunch. I had the ringer off last night, my phone deep in my bag, and I didn’t realize.
They’re all from my dad.
“See you later, babe.”
One at nine o’clock last night. One at nine-thirty. One at ten. Ten-fifteen. Eleven-thirty. Six o’clock this morning.
My stomach sinks like a rock.
“What’s a guy have to do to get his woman to say goodbye around here?”
I look up. West is leaning in the doorway, hand braced against the jamb.
“My dad called six times last night.”
“That’s—that sounds excessive.”
“Yeah.”
Bad news, cunt, the Internet Asshats whisper.
I’d almost forgotten about them. I’d let myself forget. Let myself pretend.
Not ready to listen to Dad’s voice mail, I switch to email. Fifty new messages. I scroll through the list, seeing strange email addresses and threatening subject lines.
Seeing my dad’s name. Call Me. Urgent Matter.
An email from my sister Janelle. I NEED TO TALK TO YOU.
I don’t click on any of them.
I open the web browser and type in my name.
Caroline Piasecki. Advanced search. Limit to last twenty-four hours.
So many hits. All the worst sites. All the same pictures, all over again.
This isn’t supposed to be happening, but it is.
West is behind me, hands on my shoulders. The phone’s hidden from view by the fall of my hair, and I wish I had something better to hide behind. Some place, some world where I could take him, where everything wasn’t already being ruined.
“It’s bad,” he says.
It’s not a question. He can feel it. He knows.
“Yeah. It’s bad.”
But after that, it only gets worse.
I walk in to my dad’s office armed to the teeth.
West stays in the car, parked all the way down at the end of the driveway. I feel shitty about that, but he said I can only fight one battle at a time, and he’s got a point. Probably the day to reintroduce West to my dad and fess up to his being my boyfriend is not Sex-Picture Day.
Still. Just knowing West is out there, waiting. Knowing he’s on my side. It helps.
We both skipped class this morning. He called in sick to the library. I don’t think he’s skipped class all year, and he’s definitely never missed work, so I appreciate the gesture. Plus, I need him. He’s not much good with computers, but he’s good with me. He sat next to me for hours while I pulled up my spreadsheets, Google-searched until my eyes itched, ranted and raved as I uncovered layer after layer of Nate’s assault.
It’s worse this time. Way worse than before.
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.