Robin York - Deeper

BEFORE

SEPTEMBER: Caroline

OCTOBER: West

NOVEMBER: Caroline

THANKSGIVING BREAK: West

DECEMBER: Caroline

WINTER BREAK: West

JANUARY: Caroline

FEBRUARY: West

MARCH: Caroline

SPRING BREAK: West

APRIL: Caroline

AFTER

Note from the Author

Acknowledgments

Excerpt from Harder

About the Author

Sometimes I hate the girl I was back then. Its like how, when you see a horror movie, you cant help but feel contempt for the virgin who goes for a walk in the woods after midnight. How can she be so stupid? Doesnt she know shes about to get gruesomely hacked to death?

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

The thing is, the movie makes him seem like a force of natureunstoppableso the virgin comes off as a total dumb-ass for not checking the forecast to see if it calls for serial murder before she skips off into the night.

These days, if someone sent me a text that said nothing but OMG, I wouldnt wonder if whatever I was about to find out was going to be bad. Id only wonder how bad and how long it was going to take me to crawl out of whatever pit I was about to fall in. But in August of my sophomore year at Putnam College, I didnt worry. I thought maybe Bridget, my best friend and roommate, had gotten distracted before she could finish her train of thought.

I towel-dried my hair and stood up to lob the damp towel into my laundry basket in the closet. Missed. By the time Id picked it up and put it where it belonged, another message had popped up on my phone, this time with a link.

You need to see this, it said.

And then, immediately after, Im so sorry.

I clicked the link.

I think part of me knew even then. Because the thing about being a good girl is, you spend your whole life developing a finely honed radar for detecting anything that could potentially cause people to love you less.

Girls like meor, I guess, girls like the one I was last Augustwe eat approval. We live for it. So when we do something dumbor, say, when we do something really monumentally idioticwe know.

The screen filled up with a picture of me, topless, with Nates dick in my mouth.

I looked, and I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes.

I could actually feel itthe solid ground of my life, cracking open.

It sounds too drama llama when I put it like that, I know, but I cant think of another way to describe it. One minute, I was on firm footinga nineteen-year-old overachieving politics geek, on track to go to law school and take the world by stormand the next, my feet had lost purchase on the floor. I sagged against the desk. I couldnt get enough air.

The shock of it didnt take any time at all to sink in. It sank in immediately, traveling some kind of shortcut path from my eyes to the area of my brain that had made a quiet, private list of the consequences of those photos the second Nate took them.

Everyone will see you, mock you, hate you.

You wont get into law school.

Youll never get a Rhodes.

Youll never be a judge or get elected to office.

This changes everything.

Seeing those picturesI was devastated. Immediately. Because Id known.

That night when Id gone down on Nate and hed lifted his iPhone in the air and aimed it at my head, my good-girl radar was working fine. Bad idea, the radar told me. Such a bad idea. But I overrode it, because Nate was in a mood, and I thought if I went along, it would bring him out of it.

You trust him, I told myself. Nate would never.

But he did. He must have. The website identified me as Caroline Piasecki from Putnam, Iowa, and Nate was the only one who had those pictures. Either he put them there, or he gave them to someone who did.

There were two shots of my face smiling. One duckface from my car that Id sent him just to be an ass. One of me in my favorite animal-print bra and panties, which Id taken in the mirror in my high school bedroom, sucking in my stomach and pushing out my chest because Id wanted to look sexy. Id wanted so much to be sexy for him.

And the other, even dirtier pictures. The ones I almost couldnt look at.

Three of them.

At the bottom, my face again, with a cartoon bubble that said, Im Caroline Piasecki! Im a frigid bitch who needs to get FUCKED!!!

I couldnt cry.

I couldnt breathe.

I couldnt really believe it.

The page had four hundred sixty-two comments.

Four. Hundred. Sixty. Two.

If someone had asked me ten minutes earlier how I felt about Nate, I would have told them, Oh, there are no hard feelings. Three years together, and wed just grown apart. I guess it was college that did it. By the end of our freshman year, Id started to feel like maybe Nate and I didnt have all that much in common. In high school, Id been dateless until he asked me outa late bloomer, my dad said. Nate was cute, popular, smart. Flattering to be noticed by a boy like that. But at Putnam, I had started to think maybe there was something missing between him and me. Better chemistry. A deeper connection.

Id broken up with him before we came back to school. We shared a pizza and drank soda, and I tried to explain my reasoning without hurting his feelings. I thought I had pulled it off pretty well. By the end of dinner, hed been smiling and agreeable again.

I would have said he was a nice guy. That we were still friends.

So even though I wasnt exactly surprised, I was, too. Id followed the rules, worked hard to get good grades, dated a nice boy, and made him wait a long time for sex. This wasnt supposed to happen. I hadnt expected my prom date, my first boyfriend, my first, to use the Internet to call me a cum-loving slut who loves jizz in her face or to list the name of my college and my high school right there beneath the blow-job picture.

Because who expects that?

I sank down into the desk chair and thumbed through the first few screens of comments. Then the next few. Screen after screen.

She has nice tits.

Id hit that.

*fap fap fap fap thx Carolina, you hoor!*

What an ugly slut. I want more vag!

Every word I readevery filthy thing some basement-dwelling Internet creep said about meI thought, This is my fault.

My fault, my fault, my fault.

I never should have let Nate take the pictures. I knew it. I knew it when he took them, I knew it after, I knew it when we broke up and I had this fleeting, urgent impulse to beg him to let me delete every single photo of me off his phone. An impulse I shrugged off because I didnt want to offend him.