Nor do I care about having nearly a million followers on Instagram thanks to Stella Shadid. A bunch of people recently tagged me in a RadarOnline post about how I’d been “doxed.” So dumb. I was never hiding! I just don’t believe in crafting an embarrassing online persona like everyone else my age. I see the internet as merely a tool to exploit. There is nothing to find if someone googles my name, other than that gynecologist in Tampa and star volleyball player in San Antonio.

I have a DM from Stella: Sorry for exposing you bb. ;( The press is a nightmare.

I write back, RadarOnline is hardly “the press.”

Then: Also there is really nothing to expose! Ur fine.

She responds quickly with two (2) hearts and seven (7) sideways crying-laughing emojis. God, everyone is so dumb.

My other notifications stare at me—from Cinnamon, from my dad. The voice mail from my therapist. I try to envision telling my therapist that I’d accidentally fucked my brother because my dad had a secret affair when I was a baby. Any therapist would probably be thrilled to hear this information, a Freudian wet dream. It would puncture the typical monotony of baseless inferiority complexes and mundane romantic dramas and provide some “real work” to do.

My therapist always said my parents had “crushed my spirit.”

She had no idea!

I don’t call her back.

I don’t call my dad either.

Instead I call Cinnamon.

“Thank god,” she answers. “You’re alive.”

“I wish I wasn’t,” I say.

“Same,” she says. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. It’s been the same record on repeat with the professor. It’s like Nirvana or something, and we all know how it ends.”

I am happy she is talking about herself, her own issues, and alluding to suicide.

“Should we get a drink?” she asks.

“Do you wanna just come here?” I ask. I still have some weed left over from Thomas. “I’m too depressed to leave the house.”

“Perfect,” she says. “Text me the address.”

Like Thomas, Cinnamon laughs when I tell her what happened, which is frankly a relief because I was worried she would be disgusted and never talk to me again. She also says something unexpected.

“This is exactly what the professor is writing his book about,” she says.

I am packing my bong to the brim. “Incest?”

“Yes!”

I take a big hit and exhale toward Lydia, who dances in the smoke.

“It’s called the Westermarck effect,” Cinnamon says, “or reverse sexual imprinting.” She takes the bong. “It was invented by this Finnish anthropologist—Westermarck. He argued incest is taboo because when people live in close domestic proximity during the first few years of their lives, they become desensitized to sexual attraction.”