I had told him to put the phone down before we continued, and he had. But it hadn’t occurred to me to ask him to delete these.

A cool, snarky voice inside my head commented, At least you look good. And I did. I had sexy hair and bedroom eyes, my lips were puffy from kissing him, and my breasts looked fantastic. But as the likes kept going up, a nauseating feeling took hold of me, a groundless, falling sensation that made me think I was about to vomit. I ran to the bathroom and gagged while bending over the toilet. My phone clattered onto the tile floor, barely missing the toilet bowl. Two hundred and fifty-three likes and counting.

—

Everything happened pretty quickly after that. I was supposed to go to Martha’s Vineyard with Haley after graduation. Her parents had invited me to stay with them at their Edgartown house through the Fourth of July. By then, Tasha would be back from her marine ecology internship in Thailand. Her parents had a summer house in Oak Bluffs, also on the Vineyard, and I was going to stay with them till August. Then I was going to California to see my grandmother for a couple of weeks before coming back to get ready for college.

My dad had been relieved when the plan came together, because he’d been accepted at the Deer Bay Writers’ Colony in Washington State, and he wanted to be there the entire summer. Martha’s Vineyard was the perfect plan. I’d have one last summer with my friends before we all scattered to different colleges in the fall. Haley was going to NYU, Tasha to Spelman, and I was starting at MIT.

But the day after slut was painted on my locker, Haley’s mom called my dad to say that unfortunately they were not going to be able to host me on the Vineyard. Haley told me it was because her mom had seen the pictures, recognized the seashell lamp on the nightstand next to me, and realized the photo had been taken in their basement. I tried to convince my dad I could stay at home by myself until it was time to go to Oak Bluffs with Tasha, but then Tasha called and explained that her mom was taking her to France for a couple of weeks after Thailand, so I couldn’t stay with them anymore.

“I’m really sorry,” Tasha said gently.

And just like that, my parents decided I’d spend the whole summer with my grandmother. No amount of arguing could convince them that I would be fine on my own, that I hadn’t done anything wrong.