Jacob didn’t seem to get punished at all. In fact, he only seemed to get more popular. Somehow the fact that he had managed to get my shirt off made him someone the other guys looked up to, but the fact that I had taken my shirt off made me a slut.

Officially, of course, the school condemned what happened. But there was also a kind of collective shrug. Jacob and I were both eighteen. We were two weeks away from graduating. The photos had been taken after school hours, off campus. They would have disciplined whoever defaced my locker, but nobody was talking. Maybe if I’d made more of a fuss about it—maybe if I showed school administrators the nasty messages I got after Jacob posted the photos—maybe then they would have done something. But I didn’t want to show anyone. I just wanted it all to go away, and the best way to make it go away was to say nothing.

—

I’m still telling this wrong. You have to understand something. I grew up in Wellesley, surrounded by all these rich people, but I was never one of them. It’s not like we were poor—we weren’t—but my friends were rich. Haley’s dad ran a hedge fund and had a collection of Rolexes; her mom headed up a wealthy arts organization that gave money to struggling artists. Tasha’s dad was a partner at a law firm who was always traveling to London or Geneva; her mom was a biotech executive who wore the most amazing suits I’d ever seen.

They all knew that my dad was a professor and a sort-of famous author, and that my mom was an opera singer, even though she was never around to impress them. That had some cachet, especially with Haley’s mom, but my artsy, educated parents could not make up for the fact that I didn’t have the money to buy Birkin bags or take spontaneous weekend trips to Paris. And I definitely didn’t have the resources to summer on Martha’s Vineyard without their charity.

They always made me feel like a guest in their homes, but as a guest, I was easily uninvited.

Chapter 4

The morning my dad left for the writers’ colony, I pretended to sleep late, until there was barely enough time to say goodbye on the doorstep before he drove off in the rental car. Joan asked if I wanted breakfast, but I mumbled that I would shower first. The guest bathroom was painted buttercup yellow, and there was a skylight in the ceiling that let in the sun, but when I stepped under the hot spray, I closed my eyes so I could be in the dark.