Deeper

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 uncharitable. 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.

Today, though, my path isn’t empty—the hallway is crowded, heaving and alive. But since I’ve got my head down, I don’t notice until I walk directly into some random person’s back. The bag I’m carrying gets knocked out of my arms and onto the floor. I go to pick it up, saying sorry, noticing just how many legs are in this hall, starting to wonder what’s going on. I’m still trying to figure it out when I stand back up and get nailed in the nose.

I’m not aware, in the moment, that it’s a body part that strikes me, or who it belongs to. I only know that there’s a lot of flailing movement happening right in front of me and that the bridge of my nose has connected with something that’s in motion and deeply unforgiving.

It hurts.

Oh, holy mother of God, it hurts.

Cupping my nose protectively, I crumple, ducking my head and folding my body over the pain. My eyes fill with tears. Warm liquid slips over my lip. My tongue pokes out to lick it before I understand that—ugh, blood—I’m bleeding. Then it’s coating my mouth, warm all over my chin, and I don’t even care because my nose won’t stop exploding.

I’ve never been hit in the face before.

It is distressingly AWFUL.

I know there’s something I should be doing other than bleeding on my own fingers, which I’ve pushed firmly up beneath my nose as though they have the power to do … anything at all. Which they don’t. Blinking, confused, I look around for what I’ve collided with and why it hates me. Considering the state of my nose, I’m expecting a brick wall, or perhaps a monster with cinder blocks for hands.

Instead, I see big male bodies shoving and grunting. There’s space all around them, but I’ve breached it, which is probably why I got nailed in the face, and which also puts me in a perfect position to see the punch coming.

I don’t see it land. The man who gets hit is standing with his back to me, directly between me and the fist. But the taut smack of skin against bone sours my stomach.

The guy goes down, right in front of me. The other guy straddles his waist, chest heaving, leaning over so I only see the top of his head. He looks like he’s ready to take another swing, and I really don’t want him to, because this is all so primitive and brutal that I’m not sure I can stand it.

Then there’s this terrible noise—this high-pitched, reedy gasping noise—and the guy on top looks right at me.

Oh, God. I made the noise. That was me, that wheezy scream, and now I can’t breathe at all, because the guy on top is West, and the face he punched so hard belongs to Nate.

West’s eyes go wide. “Jesus, Caroline, did I hit you?”

He stands, stepping close, reaching out. It’s as if he completely forgets he’s beating the shit out of Nate, and he just comes after me. The look in his eyes, the outstretched hand—it’s so much like the first time West reached for me, more than a year ago, that I have a moment of déjà vu. My knees buckle, which annoys me. My body is the enemy right now—my incompetent knees, that noise my throat decided to make, my leaking nose, and the pounding pain in my face.

Not to mention my heart, which is trying to escape my chest by flinging itself violently against my ribs.

West’s hand lands on my waist, steady and firm, and it’s stupid. My body is stupid. Because his hand feels kind of awesome.

Obviously I’m concussed. West is the one who hit me, probably, and he’s definitely the one who hit Nate, who—

Fuck.

Nate is sprawled out on the floor, bleeding from the mouth.

Worse, I can’t really bring myself to focus on Nate, because West’s other hand landed on my shoulder briefly, and now he’s lifting my chin. The blood makes his fingers slippery. I’m bleeding on him. And I like it.

This happens with West. He’s only touched me once before, but it isn’t the kind of thing a girl forgets.

God, there are so many, many reasons this is not good, though. Most of them aren’t even health-related. For starters, I’m not into guys who punch people. I’m not into guys at the moment, period. And if I were, I wouldn’t be into West, because West is trouble, and I’m allergic.

“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.

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.

That would be the binder neatly labeled If You Weren’t with Nate.

But it wasn’t the way the guy looked that got me. It was the way he moved.

I want to say that he swaggered out of the car, except that makes it sound like he was trying too hard, and he just obviously wasn’t. He was naturally that graceful and loose-hipped and, God, I don’t even know. You’ll have to take my word for it.

He glanced all around. His gaze settled on me. “You the welcome wagon?”

“Sure,” I said.

He stepped closer and stuck out his hand. “I’m West Leavitt.”

“Caroline Piasecki.”

“Nice to meet you.”

His hand was warm and dry. It made me conscious of my clammy, gritty grip and of the sweat under my arms. My deodorant had failed hours ago, and I could smell myself. Awesome.

“Did you drive here?” I asked.

The corner of his mouth quirked up, but he sounded very serious when he said, “Yes.”

“From where?”

“Oregon.”

“Wow.”

That made his mouth hitch up a little more, almost into a smile.

“How far is that?”

“About two thousand miles.”

I looked at his car. I looked in his car.

Okay, so the truth is, I stepped closer to his car, away from him, and leaned over and peered inside. The backseat was crammed with camping gear and an aquarium full of lightbulbs and tangled electrical wire, plus a giant clear trash bag that was moist with condensation and contained what appeared to be dirt. There was also a huge box full of cans of Dinty Moore beef stew and a few randomly flung shirts.

The car looked like a hobo lived in it. I was fascinated.

I was also kind of afraid to keep looking at him. I could see from his reflection in the car window that he was stretching his arms behind his back, which had the effect of tightening his T-shirt and putting things on display that I was probably better off not looking at.

“You drove by yourself?” I asked.

“Sure.”

He lifted his arms up into the air to stretch his shoulders. His shirt rode up, and I glanced away from his reflection, embarrassed. “With the windows down?”

I was just making words with my mouth at that point. All sense had abandoned me.

“Yeeeeeah,” he said slowly. When I snuck a look at him, his eyes were full of mischief. “Sometimes I even got crazy and stuck an arm out.”

I felt my throat flush hot. Returning to being unforgivably nosy about his car seemed the wisest course of action.

I noticed a sleeping bag on the front seat and wondered if he’d been using it right there where it lay. Did he just pull over on the side of the road, lower the passenger seat, and sleep? Did he eat cold stew out of cans? Because that was definitely a can opener in the cup holder.

And that was definitely a slightly crushed, open box of condoms on the passenger-bay floor.

“Don’t you worry about botulism?”

Now, in my defense, I actually did have a reason for the question. I saw the cans, noticed that a number of them were dented and dinged up, and then remembered this high school bio class where we learned about anaerobic bacteria and how they grow in airless places. Sometimes cans get dented and there’s a teensy tiny hole that you can’t even see, but bacteria get in and they go crazy replicating themselves. When you open the can, the food just looks normal, so you eat it, but then you die.

It all made sense in my head. It wasn’t until I straightened and turned around—which made me dizzy again, I guess because I’d been bent over too far, peering into his car like some kind of peep-show freak—that I realized it hadn’t made any sense to him. His eyebrows were all knit together.

“From the cans. With the dents,” I said.

No change in the eyebrows.

“Anaerobic bacteria? Gruesome, painful death?”

He shook his head slowly back and forth, and then he did the worst thing.

He grinned.

It was like a nuclear attack.

“You’re a weird one, aren’t you?” he asked.

I’m not the guy with condoms and beef stew in my car.

I didn’t say it, though. I was too busy smiling like a complete idiot.

West’s grin has that effect on me. He doesn’t deploy it often, but when he does, I go brain dead.

Also, the world had gotten kind of fuzzy and sideways at the edges. My hip hit something hard, which upon further investigation turned out to be his car door, and then I was sinking down, resting my forehead against the hot front tire and saying, “It’s because they don’t have helper monkeys.”

I don’t even know what I meant. I was all addled and sleepy suddenly, and he was really close, reaching for me. I felt his breath on my neck, heard him mumble something about get inside and you.

I liked the sound of that.

A heavy weight on my shoulders turned out to be his arm coming around me, easing me down onto my back. For one slow, perfect beat of my heart, he was poised on his elbows above me, his hips pressing into mine. He smelled good. Warm and rich, like something amazing to eat that would melt on my tongue.

Then he shifted away, and we were lying side by side on the ground. I wondered vaguely if my desire for him to climb back on top of me made me a bad girlfriend. Did it count as cheating? Because I liked his hands on me. I liked the smell of him.

I closed my eyes and breathed in West Leavitt and green grass and warm earth.

I’m pretty sure I was still smiling when I lost consciousness.

Bridget hails me from beside the glass-paned doors that mark the entry to the dining hall.

She’s beaming the whole time I cross the lobby, right up until I get close enough for her to see my face.

“What happened to your nose?”

“It collided with an elbow.”

“You’re going to have to explain that.”

“Yeah, I know. But give me a second.”

We go through the doors, grab trays, and wait for the handful of students in front of us to make their way down the line before I dive in. “You know the fight? West and Nate? I kind of got caught in the crossfire.”

“Nate hit you? Oh my gosh! That’s terrible. Did you call security? Because that’s serious, Caroline. I’m not even kidding, you can’t let this keep going on like it is, or—”

I touch her arm to stop the stream of words. Bridget talks like a faucet. She’s either on or she’s off. You have to interrupt the flow if you want to get a word in edgewise. “It wasn’t Nate. West elbowed me, I think. Neither of us was too sure, actually.”

Her eyes get huge. “You talked to him?”

I know what she’s imagining—West and me huddled somewhere private and intimate, and him holding a warm compress to my forehead. That’s how I met her, in fact. I had passed out next to West’s car, and I woke up on my dorm bed with a cold paper towel on my head and Bridget leaning over me, all forehead wrinkles and concerned blue eyes, like some kind of adorable red-haired, freckle-faced angel.

“Not really,” I say. “That’s a good color on you.”

It’s the truth: Bridget looks good in blue. But mostly I tell her because she’s a jock—a long-distance runner on the track team—and I make a habit of complimenting her whenever she wears normal clothes, just to encourage the practice.

We’re making our way down the hot-food line now. “Do you have chicken without the fried stuff on?” she asks the student worker.

“No, just what you see.”

“Okay, thanks.” She’s in training, so she’s super careful about what she eats.

I take a plate of chicken-patty parmesan and two chocolate mint brownies. I have bigger things to worry about at the moment than calories.

“Don’t even think I didn’t notice you changing the subject,” Bridget says when we’ve made our way from the line to the salad bar, where she loads up on hard-boiled eggs and greens. “I need to know what he said. Like, was he still mad from fighting, or was he nice? Did you guys go somewhere quiet, or were you in a crowd? How upset was he that he hit you? Because Krishna says—”

“He didn’t say anything,” I clarify. “He had to leave so he didn’t get caught and end up expelled or whatever.”

“But you said you talked to him.”

“No, I didn’t.”

She rolls her eyes. “You implied it, lawyer girl.”

“We exchanged a few sentences. He wanted to make sure I was okay.”

We’re on to drinks now. Bridget goes for the milk. I get myself a Coke with ice. “Did he say anything about why he did it?” she asks.

“No.”

“Did you ask? Did you hear them arguing? Give me something here. Only you could act like West and Nate hitting each other and you getting whacked in the face is no biggie. Hey, where’s your sweater?”

“I had to throw it out. Blood all over it. And, no, I didn’t hear them or ask.”

“That sucks. I liked that sweater.” We swipe our cards at the checkout to put the food on our meal plans, and she starts walking toward the closest free table. Looking back at me over her shoulder, she smiles. “Want to know what I heard?”

“What?” I set my tray down on the table a little too hard.

Her smile falters. “You’re upset.”

“No.”

I’m not. I’m just … confused. Something’s going on, and these days when something’s going on, it’s rarely good. And if the something involves West and Nate, I’m very much afraid I don’t want to hear it.

We sit down. I brace myself. “Just tell me, okay?”

“I heard they were fighting about you.”

Crappity crap crap crap.

“Who told you that?”

“Somebody in their class. They’ve got Macro together.”

“Nate and West?”

“Yeah, and Sierra, you know her? She said that after class Nate made some random joke, and West got on his case, and it turned into an argument about you.”

“What did they say?”

There’s a rock in my stomach, dense and hot. I sip my Coke, closing my eyes against the doomed feeling slipping over my shoulders.

“I’m not sure.” Bridget’s tone is cautious. “Sierra didn’t catch all of it, only your name.”

I push at my chicken with my fork, but I can’t even bring myself to cut it. When I put it in my mouth, it will taste like ashes. The burned-up remains of the life I used to have.

People talk about me. Not to my face, but behind my back? All the time. I’d made Bridget promise to tell me whatever she heard, because I need to know. It’s the only way I can be sure they’re forgetting, like I want them to.

I’m nothing special—just a normal-looking college girl. I should be able to fade into the background if I keep my head down. In a year, I’m hoping that barely anyone will remember this. Caroline who?

It’s not what I had planned, exactly. I’d thought I might shoot for student-body president my junior year, senior year at the latest. But I can table that ambition if I have to. I’d rather be anonymous than notorious.

“Sierra said it was kind of romantic,” Bridget offers. “He was defending your honor.”

It’s such a preposterous idea—that I have honor. That West would defend it.

I barely know him. I’ve only talked to him one time.

West and I are not friends.

And for the past few weeks, the only people who have cared about my honor are Bridget and me. None of my old friends can look me in the eye. Nate and I came as a unit, and when they had to pick sides, I guess his side looked like more fun.

“I would never do something like that,” Nate had said, straight-faced, when I confronted him in front of a bunch of those friends in this very dining hall. “How could you think I would?”

And then, after I sputtered and he denied for another few minutes, he’d said, “I guess a lot of those girls just want attention so bad, they’ll do anything to get it.”

I look out the window at the lawn, unable to chew up and swallow the idea of West Leavitt defending my honor. Unable to process it at all.

Last year, when I regained consciousness after fainting by West’s car, the first thing I heard was an angry male voice in the hall. My dad was shouting, which was nothing new. He’s a judge, so he spends most of his professional time being calm and rational, but outside of work he’s the single parent of three young daughters, and he has a tendency to get shouty when he feels threatened. Which is a lot.

You just have to know how to handle him. My oldest sister, Janelle, sucks up. Alison usually cries. I present him with reasoned arguments, appealing to the logical brain until the ranty brain calms down.

Dad must have been all the way down the hall by the stairs, because I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Occasionally a lower, calmer voice broke into his tirade.

West’s voice.

I didn’t sort all this out until later. At the time, my head felt overlarge and tender, and I asked the girl leaning over me, “Who are you?”

“I’m Bridget,” she said. “Are you okay? You fainted. This cute guy carried you up the stairs, and I don’t know what he said to your dad, but your dad is ticked, and is he always that scary? Because, if so, I’m glad you’re here—it’s going to be a lot more pleasant for you—and also …”

She kept going until the door flew open and my dad came back into the room, red-faced and sweaty under the arms of his golf polo. He sat beside me on the bed, so obviously agitated that fume lines might as well have been rising off his head.

“How are you feeling?”

“Okay.” This was a lie.

“I’m going to get you moved to one of the girls’ dorms.”

I sat up abruptly. “What? Why?”

“That boy out there—he’s not a good influence. You shouldn’t be living near a kid like that.”

“Like what? What did he do?”

Well. That was the wrong question. For the next several minutes, I learned how entirely alarming it is for a father to leave his youngest daughter for just a few minutes and then rediscover her laid out on the ground underneath an unknown male. Especially when your daughter turns out to be unconscious, the kid has “an attitude,” and you don’t “like the look of him.”

All of this was compounded, according to my dad, by the “drug paraphernalia” in the backseat of the punk’s car. By which I think he meant the aquarium and lights and the bag of dirt, not the Dinty Moore. Although who knows? I was entirely out of my league. I heard the words drug paraphernalia, and I imagined short lengths of thick rubber, bags of heroine, syringes.

My dad was still lecturing when Nate showed up and made everything worse. Dad had invested three years in trying to guarantee that Nate and I were never alone near a horizontal surface, and now here Nate was, sauntering into my bedroom without knocking.

My dad turned a deeper shade of red.

Quickly, I introduced Bridget to Nate and Nate to Bridget and Bridget to my dad. I smiled a lot, making an effort to seem healthier than I felt, because this was the first stage of what would turn out to be an arduous campaign to ensure that when my father left—three days later instead of one, because the campaign was freaking long and hard fought—I’d still be in this dorm, in this room, with Bridget.

I won, but West was the necessary sacrifice. My dad wouldn’t leave until I’d agreed I would have nothing to do with “that boy.”

It was laughable, really, to think I might have. It turned out Dad was right about the drug thing.

West and Krishna’s door was always closed, the curtains pulled shut. They had a steady stream of guests, played loud music, and annoyed me with their late hours and the whiff of sandalwood and sticky-acrid smoke from their room that infested our entire floor.

West set up that aquarium and those lights someplace secret—no one seemed to know where—and grew a bumper crop of weed. This was according to Krishna, who hung out in our doorway a lot, chatting with Bridget and me.

Krishna I can talk to. But West … no. The way he walks—that swagger that isn’t a swagger—it’s like he knows his way around, even if he’s somewhere he’s never been before. His confidence makes him seem older than me, and Bridget is always telling me stuff about him that cements the impression. Apparently he loaned money to this guy in Bridget’s psych class so the guy could buy a plane ticket to see his girlfriend. West charged him interest. It makes me wonder whether he breaks kneecaps if someone doesn’t pay him back.

He’s just more than I could handle, even if I were allowed to talk to him.

I confined my relationship with West to staring from afar—and I wouldn’t have done even that, except I can’t help it. When he’s around, I have to look at him.

He knows it, too. He smirks at me sometimes. One time, when he was coming down the hall in a towel? God. I think I was red for an hour afterward.

I never found out what he said to my dad. I have a feeling that, whatever it was, he wasn’t defending my honor. It’s hard for me to see why he would start now.

Maybe I should be grateful, but I can’t. I don’t need guys like West Leavitt defending me. He’s infamous. Between the drug dealing and that face, that smile … pretty much everyone on campus knows who he is.

He’ll draw attention to me. My primary purpose in life at the moment is to disappear.

When I mentally come back to the table, Bridget is peeling a hard-boiled egg and watching me. She’s gotten used to my long silences. She’s fiercely loyal, endlessly supportive. The best person I could possibly have on my side.

“If people want to know what I think about what West did?” I began.

“Yeah?”

“Tell them it was all a misunderstanding. It had nothing to do with me.”

Her forehead wrinkles. “But I figured it was good. Somebody else on our side, right?”

“I don’t want to be on a side, Bridge,” I say gently. “I want people to get amnesia on this whole issue. Fighting tends to be a thing people remember.”

She bites her lip.

“I don’t need people linking me up with him, okay? I need to keep a low profile.”

“If that’s what you want me to say, that’s what I’ll say,” she assures me. “That’ll be the end of it.”

I try on a smile and push my chicken across the tray, then pull my mint brownie closer and sink my fork through the thick layer of frosting. Dark fudgy black over a green so bright it’s almost neon.

That’ll be the end of it.

I wish I could believe her, but I can’t make assumptions like that anymore. I’ve learned that when evil crawls out of a snake pit, you have to track it down and squash it. Then you have to assume it had babies and go looking for them.

I have a past to erase if I’m going to claim the future I’ve always wanted—a future that requires me to get into a good law school so I can clerk with a great judge and start making the connections my dad says I need if I want to be a judge myself someday. Which I do. I want to go even further. State office. Washington, D.C.

My dad always says the first step to getting what you want is to know what you want and what it takes to get it. There’s no shame in aiming high. For my sixth-grade History Day project, I wrote a book of presidential limericks, one for each president. By ninth grade, I was volunteering to canvass door to door, and I got on the mailing lists for the Putnam College Democrats and the Putnam Republicans before I even received my acceptance letter.

I know what I want, and I know what it takes to get it. It takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice—but it also takes a clean record. No arrests, no scandals, no sex pictures on the Internet.

I don’t need anyone going around beating people up on my behalf. I can’t chance it happening again.

I need to talk to West.

I find him on the fourth floor of the library.

It’s all journals up here, the shelves shoved together in the middle and study desks lining the outside walls, plus a Xerox machine where I spent way too much time copying literary criticism of T. S. Eliot last year.

West is standing by a cart full of books with his back to me, shelving a fat red volume of something. It takes me a minute to realize he’s him. I’d already looked all over the first three floors, and I was starting to panic that he might not be here. I’ve noticed that I often see him with his cart on Thursday afternoons, but that doesn’t mean much.

He’s got earbuds in, and I don’t think he’s seen me, so I take a second to think about what I want to say to him. I feel kind of sweaty and unkempt, even though I took time after lunch to change my shirt and slick on lip gloss.

I’ve never done this before.

I’ve never initiated a conversation with West.

It feels more intimidating than it should, not only because of who he is—the forbiddenness of him—but also because this is the fourth floor. It’s an unwritten rule of Putnam that the fourth floor of the library is a space of sacred silence.

West grabs another book. He has to reach above his head to shelve it, which means his shirt lifts and I see he’s got a thick brown leather belt holding his jeans up. It doesn’t match. His boots are black, and so is his T-shirt. It’s got this big jagged orange seam sewn across the back, as though a shark came along and bit a giant rip in it and then he handed it over to a seven-year-old to fix.

I can’t imagine how such a T-shirt even happens. Or why anyone would wear it.

West’s clothes are sometimes like that. Just … random.

I kind of like it.

When he lowers down to his heels and bends over the cart, his shirt rides up again, exposing some of his lower back.

I clear my throat, but his music must be too loud, because he doesn’t turn toward me. I step closer. He’s got his head down, his hand reaching for a book on the lower shelf.

Crap. Now I’m so close that I’m bound to startle him when he finally figures out I’m here.

There’s nothing I can do to prevent it. I reach out, meaning to touch him just long enough to get his attention, but I end up pressing my palm flat against his lower spine instead.

It’s an accident. I’m almost sure it’s an accident.

Eighty percent sure.

He doesn’t jump. He just goes completely, utterly still. So still that I can hear the music playing over his earbuds. It’s loud, with angry vocals and an insistent, pounding beat that matches the sudden pulse between my legs.

Oh, I think.

Maybe it’s not an accident, after all.

West’s back is indecently hot beneath my palm. I stare at my fingers, ordering them to move for several long seconds before they actually obey. When I pull my hand away, it feels magnetized. Like there’s this drag, this force, tugging it back toward West.

I’m pretty sure the force is called lust.

West straightens and turns around, and I know even before he does it that I’ve miscalculated, and now I’m totally at his mercy, which means I’m doomed. I’m not sure he has mercy. He sure didn’t seem like he did when he was hitting Nate hard enough to make me physically ill.

He pulls out his earbuds, and I try to think something other than the word doomed. Doomed, doomed, doomed.

I try to remember what I was going to say to him—I had a whole speech planned—but I can’t. I can’t.

I stare at his belt instead. I think about grabbing it and yanking him closer. As if this is a thing I could do. A thing I have ever done, with anyone, much less West Leavitt.

Doooooomed.

“Hey,” he says.

Which isn’t fair, because it means I have to look up.

I do, eventually.

Our eyes meet. His pupils are huge, and there’s something so intense about the way he’s looking at me, it’s kind of scary. Only scary is the wrong word. I’ve felt a lot of scary in the past few weeks, and this is different.

This is scary like pausing at the top of the steepest hill on a roller coaster, bracing yourself for the drop.

“Hey,” I say back.

“What’s up?”

“Can I talk to you?”

He considers this request. “No.”

It’s not what I was expecting him to say. All I can come up with is “Oh.”

Then it’s silent again except for his music, and there’s this … this atmosphere. I think it must be him. I think he’s making the atmosphere with his skin and his eyes, which look almost silver right now, and maybe he’s also making it with all the muscles in his forearms, which are clenching and unclenching his hands in this way that’s just—

It’s just something. Intense, I guess. Menacing, but without the menace.

I have never stood this close to him before. I’ve never been alone with him since the day he parked his car right next to my feet and made me pass out.

I’ve never felt this excited, awkward, and senselessly worried in my whole entire life.

Until he takes a step toward me. That’s worse.

Better, too.

Better-worse. It’s totally a thing.

I back up.

He’s supposed to stop stepping toward me when I back up, but he doesn’t. He keeps coming. He moves right into my zone of personal space, and I get pinned up against the stacks, my butt pressing against a low shelf, West’s hands braced on either side of my head.

“I’m working,” he says. As though I’m a book, and he’s shelving me.

I try to say, I’ll come back later, but instead I make this sort of clicking, gargling noise that makes me sound like a bullfrog. I can feel my throat flushing—always a dead giveaway that I’m embarrassed. I clear it and manage to say, “That’s fine. I can … come back. Or I’ll c-call you.”

I don’t have his phone number. Or any intention of calling him.

I don’t know why I’m imagining I can feel the heat off his skin, because that’s impossible. He isn’t that close, surely. I cast my eyes up, trying to visually measure the number of inches between our faces.

It’s not very many inches at all.

West doesn’t touch me, but he is much closer than he needs to be, and the way he’s looking down at me, his chest rising and falling rapidly, color high in his cheeks—I can’t help but think about his fist connecting with Nate’s mouth. The way Nate fell to the floor, heavy and limp.

He did that for you, I think.

I came here to ask him, but I already know.

He did it for me, and this is how he looked afterward. Dilated everywhere, his skin warm and his breathing rapid and shallow.

This is how he would look in bed.

I close my eyes, because I need to get my bearings. I had imagined a businesslike talk with West. Please don’t do that again, I would say. Okay, if that’s the way you feel about it, he’d reply. Yes, that’s the way I feel, I would tell him. Then maybe I’d give him a lecture about the importance of settling conflict without violence, followed by a brisk handshake.

I didn’t imagine the ruddy skin of his neck right by the collar of his shirt. The stubble on his jaw where it curves into his ear. I didn’t anticipate his smell, like spearmint and library books, detergent and warm skin.

God, he smells fantastic, but he’s also kind of scary, and I have no idea what the rules are right now. No idea at all.

I need rules to get through this. I’m a rules kind of girl.

“West,” I whisper.

It’s supposed to sound calm and businesslike, but instead it sounds like I’m begging him for something, and I guess he takes that as a cue. He drops his head toward my shoulder. His lips … I can’t be sure, but I think his lips are really close to my skin. I feel his breath near my ear, and my nipples harden.

“West, what the hell?”

“Why’d you come here, huh?” he murmurs.

And then—this is the worst-best part, by far—he turns his head and kisses my jaw, openmouthed.

It’s like satin. Like lightning.

I don’t know what it’s like.

I do know that it’s not what’s supposed to be happening at all.

Except that the atmosphere West is creating makes me feel like this is what’s supposed to be happening. Exactly this. The West menace is, like, sex in aerosol form. He’s making it with his body, and then he’s putting it all over me.

My body is into it, too. My body is on board.

My body is such a traitor.

“Why’d you have to come?” His voice is low and husky. Languid. His voice is a hook, catching on me. Reeling me in.

The music from his earbuds is a faraway drumbeat, and West doesn’t move his hands. I do, though. Mine have slid up to his neck, tangling in his hair, pulling his head down.

Okay, no, they haven’t. But they want to. They are positively itching to go rogue, and maybe he can see that in my eyes, because he makes this sound that’s not even a sound. It’s just an explosion of breath that does incendiary things to my panties.

“Tell me,” he insists.

Tell him what? I have no idea what he’s talking about. The only thing I know is if he doesn’t kiss me soon, I’m going to die. He’s so hot, and it’s not just that his skin is warm, although it is. It’s that I can feel all the energy from the fight coursing through him. He’s still jacked up and high on adrenaline and chemicals. He’s not himself. I’m not sure how I know this, but I do. West isn’t West, and I’m not Caroline. Not with him so close. Braced over me, heating me up, breathing against my neck, he feels like a guy who’s barely keeping it together. A guy who would beat the living shit out of the wrong someone if the wrong someone happened by, but who’d rather spend the rest of the afternoon and half the night fucking the right someone raw.

The right someone could be you.

I can’t believe I just thought that.

“Tell me,” he says again.

“Tell you what?”

“Why you’re here.”

I look away, to the side and up, because I want him to kiss me and I shouldn’t. I don’t know him. I’m not sure I like him. He scares me. His knuckles are split where they grip the metal shelving—gripping it so hard, they’ve turned white. West is holding himself back from what he wants to do to me, and I wonder, what happens if he lets go?

Do I let him turn me around, bend me over this shelf, sink inside me?

I try to be disgusted by the idea, but, God, I can feel a ghost of what it would be like. It would be electric. Hot and slick, full and fast, the most erotic thing that’s ever happened to me. I know it. I know.

But then it would be over, and I think I know what that would be like, too. West silent and stiff-jawed. A closed door.

I’ve never even had a conversation with him.

I push at his chest, trying to break the spell. “West. We have to talk.”

“We’re talking.”

But I don’t have his attention. His attention’s lower, as it should be, because when did his knee get between my thighs? And am I really … ? Oh. I am. I’m kind of almost riding him.

“Get off,” I say.

I’m whispering, nervous again about being overheard and despised by studying students—though I haven’t actually seen any—or, worse, being seen here, doing this. They would talk about me. They would never stop talking about me riding West’s thigh in the library barely an hour after he punched Nate in the mouth.

This is the worst possible thing I could be doing right now.

“West, get off.”

He lifts his head. His dark hair is falling in his face, and his eyes look like chips of sky.

He eases back. “What is it?”

“I have to talk to you.”

“I’m not in a talking mood right now, Caro.”

My head is clearing. Nobody’s getting bent over anything.

This is all just hormones. Adrenaline. It’s got to be. West is biologically driven to want to rut with something after his testosterone-fueled display of masculinity, and I’m … I guess I’m biologically driven to be rutted on.

But I’m strong. I can rise above my biology.

I think.

“Too bad,” I say, “because that’s why I was looking for you. So we could converse like civilized beings.”

West just levels that stare at me.

“Not rutting beasts,” I add.

“I’m a beast,” he says slowly. “And we’re rutting?”

He doesn’t like the word rutting. He spits it out like he’s disgusted with it.

“What would you call it?”

“I don’t know what to call it. Maybe you should tell me what you’re chasing me around for.”

“I’m not chasing you. I just—”

A pissed-off male voice says, “Shh.”

Fourth floor. Shit.

When I open my mouth again, my thoughts have scattered like marbles, and I can hardly even look at West. He’s crossed his arms. His split knuckles are wrapped around his biceps. It looks hard.

Everything about West is hard.

Talk, Caroline, my brain urges. Words. Sentences. Go.

“I wanted to, um … About earlier. See, I heard from Bridget that—”

“Shhhhh.”

The same irritated voice again. I lose my words, flustered and ready to bail on this whole thing.

West says, very calmly, “There’s three other floors, buddy. Pick one or shut the fuck up.”

“This is the quiet floor,” the invisible guy complains.

“Show me where it says that.”

“Everybody knows.”

West shakes his head. “I’m not everybody.”

There’s silence for a moment, then the resonant sound of a chair being pushed back. A backpack zipper. Footsteps announce the approach—a student glares at West with angry eyes—but he keeps going, and I hear the stairwell door opening.

A beat later, just before the door slams shut, the words stupid slut drift through it.

The ugliness of those words cuts into my hurt place, deep.

He’s not the first person to call me a slut, but he’s the first one to say it so I can hear him. And honestly? It doesn’t help that he says it right after I let West push me against the stacks and stick his knee between my thighs.

It doesn’t help that my panties are wet. I feel like a slut. I feel like I’m rattling apart, unable to stick to a direct line for more than five minutes.

Stupid cunt would spread for anyone, the men inside my head say.

I’d like to see him fuck her. I’d pay good money to watch that.

I look up at West. I feel despised and powerless, and it’s so frustrating that he’s seeing me this way—that he’s watching so intently and really seeing what I try not to let anyone see, ever.

That I am right on the verge of falling apart. All the time.

His eyes soften, gentle with pity, and that makes it a hundred times worse.

Stupid, pitiful slut.

“It’s fine,” I say. “I’ve heard it before.”

“It’s not fine.”

I wave my hand in the air, pointlessly, because I have no response. It isn’t fine. But it’s my life now.

“Caroline, it’s not fine.” West puts his hands on my shoulders.

I shrug him off and step sideways to get out from under him. “I know, okay? You don’t have to yell at me. I know. He’s going to tell everyone, and then the whole campus is going to be whispering about how we were practically screwing on the fourth floor of Hamilton. I get it. I’m sorry, all right?”

I think his eyes could burn holes through me, they’re so fierce. The little flecks seem to flash. The grooves beside his mouth carve themselves deeper. “What are you sorry for?”

What am I not sorry for? I regret everything I’ve ever done with a guy. My first kiss, which took place after an eighth-grade dance, with a boy named Cody. My first French kiss, which was with Nate. Letting Nate take off my bra, put his fingers inside me. Sleeping with Nate and thinking we were making love. Buying lingerie for him, going down on him, letting him take the pictures when I thought it would bring us closer.

West, too. I regret what just happened with West.

“Everything,” I whisper.

It’s the wrong thing to say. His hands push into his hair, clenching. “Christ. I can’t even—what’s the matter with you, huh?”

“Nothing you can fix.”

“So why are you here?”

I take a deep breath. I can do this. “I need to know it’s not going to happen again. That you’re not going to go around punching people because of me.”

He frowns, a deep slash between his eyebrows. “Who said it was because of you?”

The question catches me off guard. “I heard—I heard you guys were arguing about me. Sierra told Bridget.”

“I don’t know a Sierra.”

“I guess she knows you.”

His face goes even darker. “It’s not her business. Or yours. It’s between Nate and me.”

“I think we’re way past the point where you can play the none-of-your-business card.”

That makes him even more agitated. He wheels away, stalking to the end of the row. Then he comes back and grabs the cart with both hands. He looks like he wants to shove it at me. “He pissed me off. That’s all you need to know.”

“Yeah, but—”

Head lowered, he kicks the toe of his boot against the cart. Not hard, but hard enough to make way too much noise.

“You have to tell me what happened,” I say, as calmly as I can manage. “Then I’ll leave you alone.”

His head comes up. “You think that’s what I want? For you to leave me alone?”

I don’t know what he wants, so I keep my lips pressed shut.

“He pissed me off because he’s a smug, arrogant prick,” West says. “And I was fucking sick of hearing him talk, all right?”

“So it had nothing to do with me.”

He rakes his hand through his hair again. Turns away.

“West?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

I wait.

It occurs to me that I am good at waiting, and maybe that’s one thing I have on West. He’s more worldly, more confident, but he’s volatile and I’m not. I’ll stand here until he’s done throwing his tantrum, and then he’ll have to tell me.

I wait some more.

He turns back around. “I didn’t do it for you, okay? I just couldn’t take it anymore. He deserved to get beat down, and nobody else was doing it. But if you have some kind of hero fantasy, you can forget it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know. If you’re getting your rocks off thinking I hit your ex because I’ve got a thing for you.”

“Are you serious?”

“Why wouldn’t I be serious?”

For a few seconds, I can’t speak. He’s just yanked me so rapidly from ashamed and awkward to righteously pissed off, my brain is having trouble keeping up. “That’s so … conceited,” I finally manage. “I mean, so, so conceited. After what you just—why would you even say something like that?”

He steps closer. He’s vibrating with emotion, and I can’t sort him out. I don’t know what he’s thinking, how he feels. I only know he feels it a lot. “Why did you touch me?” he asks.

“I was trying to get your attention.”

“People tap when they’re trying to get someone’s attention. That wasn’t a tap.”

“It was …”

I’ve got nothing. I groped him, and we both know it. The only thing I can do now is lie. “It was an accident.”

I hate when he does this. Looms over me this way with those eyes and that face. Looks at me. It is my new least-favorite thing: being looked at by West. Like he’s trying to sex me to death.

“Honey,” he says finally, “that was one hell of a long accident.”

“Don’t call me honey.”

“I think you like it.”

“I think your ears are too small.”

I nearly groan after I say it. Stupid blurting mouth.

But I had to say something, because honey is degrading to women, totally inappropriate, utterly unexpected. And I do kind of like it.

West exhales a laugh through his nose, smiling. “You have a gap between your front teeth.”

“It’s useful. I can spit through it.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“Well, you won’t get to.”

“Won’t I?”

“No. We’re not going to be friends. We’re not going to be anything. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

He doesn’t like that. His mouth doesn’t, and his eyes don’t. “It’s not what it seemed like you wanted to tell me a minute ago.”

“I don’t care what it seemed like.” If he keeps leaning closer, I’m going to pinch him.

He leans closer. I pinch him.

Okay, I try. But my hand gets near his arm, and lust sucks me in, and then I’m just kind of groping his sleeve.

His biceps is as hard as it looks. I take my hand away before it can declare its allegiance to the enemy.

“Looked to me like you wanted me to kiss you,” West says.

I cross my arms and examine the books on the shelf behind his shoulder, a neat row of thick blue spines that say PMLA.

“It doesn’t matter,” I tell him. “I can’t afford it. If people think we’re together, or that what happened between you and Nate was about me, they’ll keep talking about it, and this whole mess will go on and on. That’s not what I want. I want it to go away.”

“You want it to go away.”

The doubt in his voice fires up my anger again. I hate that some people think I published those pictures myself, just for the attention. I hate that he might think it.

“Yes.” The word comes out a little louder than I intend, so I say it again. “Yes.”

“Rich Diehms called you a slut three minutes ago, and you didn’t say anything to him. You said it’s fine.”

“What do you want me to do, chase him down and punch him in the mouth?”

“Maybe,” he says. “Yell at him, at least.”

“What would that accomplish?”

“Does everything you do have to be about accomplishing something?”

Here, at least, is a question I can answer easily. “Yes.”

“So what are you trying to accomplish now?”

“I’m trying to get my pictures off the Internet, and I’m trying keep a low profile so people will forget it ever happened.”

He laughs at me.

My hand comes up so fast, I don’t even realize I’m about to smack him until he catches my wrist.

“Honey—”

“Don’t call me honey.” I’m struggling against his grip, so angry that he caught me and won’t let go. Caught me easily. I’ve never tried to slap someone before. I’m breathless and too emotional, balanced on the brink of tears. “Let me go.”

“You gonna hit me?”

“Maybe.”

“Then no.”

I wrench my wrist, then try pounding at his chest. He captures my other wrist.

“It’s a lost cause,” he says. “Trying to get at me. Just as hopeless as the idea you can erase something from the Internet or make people forget what you look like naked. Completely hopeless.”

Once his words sink in, I stop struggling, and he lets me go. I spear him with the iciest glare I can muster. “Thanks for the pep talk, but you are the last person on this campus I would ask for advice.”

Something in his eyes shuts down. “Oh? Why’s that?”

Because you’re a drug dealer.

Because you’re the kind of person who punches people when they piss you off.

Because you’re trouble.

I can’t tell him any of that. I can’t make myself sound like an angel. I suck dick on the Internet.

“Because I was with Nate. And you’re …”

When I trail off, he lifts one scarred eyebrow. “I’m?”

“Not Nate.”

This time, his laugh is bitter. “No,” he says. “I’m not Nate.”

I want to apologize, but I’m not sure how, or even what to say.

West doesn’t wait around for me to figure it out. He takes his cart, checks the spine of the next book in line, and begins rolling down the aisle away from me.

“I’m sorry,” I call to his back. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Don’t worry about it, princess,” he says without turning around. “I won’t say a word to anyone.”

“Okay.” I wrap my arms around my stomach. “Thank you.”

He doesn’t answer me. I guess we’re finished, and I’m relieved. Sort of.

I’m also shaky and weak. It seems possible I might puke.

West pauses, right in the middle of turning from our row to the next one. He leans over the cart, balancing his forearms on the books, staring down at them for a long, awkward minute that feels like a year.

He lifts his head and looks right at me. “This wasn’t a good day for us to have this talk.”

“No,” I agree. “Probably not.”

He blows out a breath. “I shouldn’t have hit him. It was a dumb-ass thing to do, and I’m still pretty wired from it. Sorry I …” He waves his hand at me. “Sorry for all that.”

I don’t know what to say, so I nod.

“Is your nose okay?”

“It’s fine.”

“It hurt?”

“A little. But it’s not a big deal.”

He flexes and releases his swollen hand a few times, staring down at it. It’s his left.

“What about your hand?” I ask.

“It’ll heal.”

The floor falls silent. I wonder if anyone is up here. If there’s a girl around the corner, sitting in silence, listening to this whole thing.

Maybe she’s like me. Scared and stuck, frozen in place.

“You know,” West says, “you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Yeah. That’s what Bridget tells me.”

But she only says it because it’s what she’s supposed to say. I know what she really thinks. It’s the same as what I think—what everyone thinks.

I did do something wrong. I trusted the wrong person. I made a stupid mistake. I made it possible for Nate to take advantage of me, and it’s my responsibility to own up to it.

West shakes his head, as though he can hear all these thoughts, but he doesn’t buy it. “You took some sexy pictures with your guy. Lots of girls do it. If some girl gave me pictures like that, I’d never fucking stick them on the Internet, no matter how pissed at her I was.”

“You saw them?”

“Everybody saw them.”

I close my eyes against a stinging pressure in my sinuses and behind my eyes.

Crying isn’t on my schedule.

“He says he didn’t do it,” I whisper.

“That’s because he’s a douchebag. Douchebags lie.”

“Can we not talk about this?”

His head drops, his gaze falling back to the books. “All I wanted to say was, I don’t think you can make it go away. Not the way you’re doing it.”

I have no reply. It hurts too much to hear him articulate it—my worst fear—and for the second time today I feel as if he’s the one who hurt me, even though both times I did it to myself.

I’ve just run into his elbow all over again.

“Caroline.”

The way he says my name forces me to look up.

“You know what?” he asks.

“What?”

He starts wheeling his cart away. Turning his head toward me, he smiles the tiniest bit and says, “Except for that gap between your teeth, you looked fucking hot.”

He turns the corner. The wheels squeak as he moves into the next aisle.

He’s a pig.

I won’t think about what it means that I’m not disgusted with him.

Or that I’m standing here, arms wrapped around my torso, smiling at my feet.

It’s too screwed up, so I just won’t think about it.

I won’t wonder if he’s right and I’m wrong—if everything I’ve done to try to rescue my future is pointless and really I should be doing something different. Fighting for myself, somehow.

Right now I can’t handle it. I can only breathe in deep and try to make myself remember what’s next on my schedule. Where I have to be. What I have to do to get through the rest of this day.

This is my fight. The only thing I know how to do to get my life back the way it was. Bury the pictures, rebuild my reputation.

This is my fight, and I’m not giving up.

Two weeks later, a nightmare wakes me.

It happens a lot.

I roll out of bed and slide my feet over the cool floor until I’ve found my flip-flops in the dark. Grab my keys from the dresser. Cup them against my palm so they won’t jangle.

When I pull a sweatshirt over my head, holding my breath because I want to be quiet, Bridget’s comforter heaves on the top bunk. Her head pokes out from beneath the covers.

“Where are you going?”

“Just out. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

I feel guilty for waking her up, but I can’t really help it. It’s hard to be an insomniac when you have a roommate.

“Be careful.”

“I will.”

She rolls over, and even though she’s awake, I ease the door shut slowly until it latches and locks with a quiet snick.

I’m always careful.

I walk to my car with my keys gripped in my fist, looking left to right across the parking lot, listening for anything, anyone. I had parked under the security light. From ten feet away I unlock my doors with the remote, and my heart beats so fast, so fast. The gasping sound of relief when I shut the door behind me is too loud in the clean, safe interior of my Taurus.

I turn on the stereo and crank up the volume and drive.

I have a series of loops that I do. First I go in a circle around the college, which is four blocks long and three blocks wide. Then I do widening circles around the surrounding college-owned buildings, the downtown, the fast-food strip and box stores, the Little League diamond and Frost-E-Freeze shack. I pass fields of cornstalks starting to break ranks and turn brown. My high beams spotlight the blank landscape of my home state.

One of these loops used to be my evening run, but I had to stop. After my naked body and my location became public information, being alone outdoors lost its charm.

I make only right turns, because I hate turning left, and my dad isn’t here to tell me I need to get over that.

I don’t know how to talk to my dad anymore. When I call him, I can’t figure out what words I would have said before, when I never had to think about it. I knew just how to make him laugh and love me. Now when we talk, it’s like I’m acting, only I don’t know my lines, and I suck at improv.

I can’t remember how to be the Caroline Piasecki who graduated from Ankeny High with her smile white and perfect, wearing her graduation cap and gown, walking onstage to give the valedictorian speech with her two sisters and her father in the front row of the bleachers, beaming with pride.

I haven’t told him about the pictures. I can’t.

I’m a mouth with a boy’s dick in it, a body to look at, legs to spread.

I spin the wheel, turning my car to the right. To the right. Always to the right.

I haven’t seen West for thirteen days, but I think about him. I walk myself through that afternoon at the library, trying to follow all the twists and turns of our conversation. Why did he push me back against the shelves? What was he thinking when he told that guy to leave? What was he trying to accomplish?

I think about him asking me if everything I do is about accomplishing something.

I pick over my relationship with Nate, trying to answer all the unanswerable questions.

Was he always bad and I just didn’t notice? Did he turn bad?

How could I have trusted him?

I think about West saying, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

I remember the way his thigh felt, pressing between mine.

One time last year, I was writing a paper at my desk, and I heard shouting and laughter in the hallway, periodic smacking thumps that made me flinch. Nate was lying on my bed, reading his Intro to Econ textbook. Bridget went out to see what was going on and didn’t come back. Then I heard her laughing and West’s raised voice.

“What are they doing out there?”

I tried to sound like I didn’t care. Like I was slightly annoyed and I didn’t feel this tug in my chest. This pressure to find out, join in, become part of it.

Nate shrugged. “Go see.”

I can still remember exactly how I felt when I stood up and headed out there. Balanced on a knife’s edge between good and bad, unsure which way I might tip—but aware, deep in my bones, in my tight lungs and tense shoulders, that something was about to happen.

In the hall that night, I found Bridget and Krishna, bowling with rubber chickens.

Yeah. It took me a minute to get it sorted out, too.

I don’t know where Krishna came by the chickens—probably he stole them from somewhere—but whoever had owned them before couldn’t possibly have enjoyed them as much. Krishna and the chickens were famous last year. The chickens showed up all over—occupying toilets, hanging from the rafters in the dining hall, perched on top of the big phallic metal sculpture in the middle of the campus, or dangling from the party keg.

But this time Krishna was standing at one end of the hall, twenty feet from a neat arrangement of pins, and winding his chicken through several tight arm revolutions. As I watched, he let go, an underhand throw that whipped the chicken through the air with surprising speed. It hit the pins, and they exploded, scattering all over the hall. Bridget shrieked, then bent over, laughing.

It was totally juvenile—the game, Bridget’s girlish reaction, Krishna’s red eyes and his stoned grin. I had a paper due in the morning and a lot of polishing still to do. I had Latin homework to get through, and if I had to go to the library because of these guys, I’d—

Suddenly the door right across from mine opened. West came out with a chicken in each hand and a two-liter bottle of soda under one arm. “Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking about chicken rockets,” he said, before he caught sight of me and stopped.

We looked at each other. Probably not for ten entire minutes, but that’s how it felt. Like an indecently long time spent staring at his face, when I almost never allowed myself more than a glance. A day of watching his mouth twitch. His nostrils flare. His too-pale blue-green eyes lit up with mischief.

I got all tangled up in those eyes of his, mentally tripped and fell, and then couldn’t untangle myself.

West arched an eyebrow. “Want to play?”

He didn’t mean anything by it. I’m almost sure.

Or, I mean, he did, but all he meant was, if I said yes, I’d get a chicken of my own and a free pass to indulge in this silliness, blow off my homework, act like a different girl.

He didn’t mean did I want him. Did I want to learn how to cut loose. Did I wish I could be different.

But, even so, my heart beat like a bass drum in a halftime show, and I couldn’t quite catch my breath to answer, No, thanks.

This isn’t for me.

You’re not for me.

The denial was too thick in my throat. If I tried to say it out loud, I would choke on no, because I wanted to say yes.

In the end, I didn’t say anything. Nate came up behind me and wrapped his arm around my waist, resting his chin on my shoulder. “What’s with all the noise?”

A door shut behind West’s eyes. His face closed off, and the tipping point where I was standing flattened out beneath my feet into the familiar, unexceptional terrain of my hallway, my state, my whole boring life.

“Just blowing off some steam,” West said.

“Could you keep it down, maybe?” Nate asked. “We’re trying to study.”

“Sure thing.”

Nate pulled me inside, closed the door, kissed my neck. His hands roamed under my shirt, over my bra, and then I stopped him because Bridget was in the hallway and I had a paper to write.

And also because I felt deflated, as though some rich possibility had been taken from me. Something more than a juvenile game of hallway bowling.

The alchemy of a boy who could turn two-liter soda bottles into chicken rockets.

I wonder, sometimes, whether the pull I felt toward West is the reason why I broke up with Nate. Whether it gathered power until it got so strong, it cast a shadow over all my other feelings, and I didn’t even realize it.

When I think about Nate, about West, it’s hard for me to tell what’s my fault and what isn’t.

When I sleep, there’s no peace in it. I dream of being chased, attacked, hurt. In my dreams, I’m a victim, and the dreams start to feel more real than the daytime does.

Semitrucks idle behind the Walmart and the grocery store. The guy at the gas station has gotten to know who I am, and he asks how things are going when I pay for gas and orange juice. He’s in his forties, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a gut. He seems like a nice man, but how nice can he be, really, working the night shift at the Kum and Go?

Even the name of the gas station is too gross. Before, I thought it was funny. Now it gives me flashbacks, and I’ve started driving twenty miles to the next town to buy gas there, because I can no longer talk to the Kum and Go guy without wondering if he’s seen me with my clothes off.

I drive by knots of drunk students walking back to the college from the bar or the pub, gripping one another’s elbows, laughing and shoving. One time I saw a girl fall down. She was alone with a guy, and I thought he was going to rape her, but he helped her up. I pulled the car over and took deep breaths, close to hyperventilating. Because, seriously, what on earth is wrong with me that I thought that?

I never would have, before. Never.

I don’t want to be like this for the rest of my life. If I had an undo button, I’d hit it so hard. But if there’s some way to go back to how I was before, I haven’t found it.

Most nights, I end up at the bakery.

I tell myself I won’t, but I do.

I’m under strict personal orders to stop driving here, stop parking out front, stop looking through the window for a glimpse of West.

Yet here I am.

Light spills from the kitchen in the back of the shop, through the plate glass and over the sidewalk. I set the emergency brake but leave the engine idling. With the car stopped, my music sounds too loud, so I lean forward to turn it down.

I imagine it’s warm in the kitchen and it smells good. The mental taste of it is sweet, an antidote to all the hours I spend on my laptop, sifting through the worst that humanity has to offer.

West’s figure crosses the doorway. By the time I’m standing up, one hand holding the door open and the other tucking my keys into my hoodie, he’s already disappeared. A gust of cold wind blows across my exposed feet and over the back of my neck. I hunch down, pushing my fists deeper into the kangaroo pocket of my hooded sweatshirt.

The men in my head want to know what I’m staring at and why I’m such a dumb cunt.

I don’t know. I don’t know why.

I’m about to get back in the car when the wind shoves at me again, a cold, hard push right in my face, and I squint my eyes and raise a hand to shield my eyes.

I’m annoyed.

I’m angry.

I’m pissed.

I’m standing in front of a bakery at four in the morning, furious, staring at an empty window.

I squeeze my keys so hard, they bite marks into my palm. West walks by the open kitchen door again.

Go in there and tell him you’re sorry. Tell him you like him. Tell him something.

But I don’t. I can’t. West isn’t what I need. He’s only what I want.

I want him because he punches when he’s mad.

I want him because he drove a wheezing car two thousand miles by himself, eating stew out of cans as if that’s something you can just do.

Because he looks at a soda bottle and sees a chicken rocket.

Because I feel like, if I was with him, he might fix me. He might save me.

He might ask me, Want to play? and this time I might say yes.

But I know that’s not what would happen. He wouldn’t save me. He’d ruin me.

I’m already ruined enough.

I turn around, get back in the car, and drive away.