“Have you seriously never seen the movie The Shawshank Redemption? Tim Robbins plays a man wrongly accused of his wife’s murder and after years and years and years of scraping at his cell wall with a tiny geology pick finally breaks out of prison and then must crawl, painstakingly crawl, through a long sewage pipe full of shit. And once he’s out you’ve never seen a happier guy. It’s one of the most satisfying endings in the history of cinema. That’s what you’re flying home to: your own personal shit pipe. So accept it and just move forward, inch by inch, and you’ll get through it. The whole sex tape thing? That’s just the bad luck on your part growing up in the age of smartphones and zero privacy. My money says Vronsky didn’t do it. That video was meant to fuck you over. It’s revenge porn.”

Revenge porn, Anna thought, were two of the ugliest words in the English language.

Anna and her aunt hugged for a long time at the curb with Kimba sticking her head out the back window, panting.

“You’re going to be okay,” Jules said one more time. “I promise. Being a teenager sucks, but it gets easier the older you get. Actually, that’s a lie. It gets easier when you don’t give a fuck what anyone else thinks. Oh, be sure to tell your dad I say hello, okay?”

“Aunt Jules, can I ask you a favor?” Anna asked. “Can you call him and tell him what happened? I don’t know if I can do it. Please?”

“I guess that’s what estranged aunts are for,” she said. “‘Hey, big bro, I know we haven’t seen each other in five years, but nothing brings a family together like a sex tape!’ Kidding! Just shoot me the video and I’ll text it to him … Kidding! I’ll call him. Now go, don’t miss your flight.”

When Anna walked through the automatic doors into LAX, she felt as prepared as she possibly could be to crawl through the sewage pipe to salvation.

XXVI

Since it was nearly the end of the year, and given the extenuating circumstances, Greenwich Academy agreed to let Anna work with a tutor and finish the semester at home. After a thorough investigation by school officials, the origin of the video could not be determined and was left to the FBI to handle, as it was a federal crime to distribute a video of minors having sex. At every private school in the tri-state area, every student who had initially received the email (and there were many) had to have their phone checked for the video. All found copies of Anna K.’s sex tape were deleted. (Of course, there were still plenty of copies floating around if you knew who to ask.)