I eliminated the ones who didn’t want to send photos since they probably wouldn’t agree to be part of my project. I had no idea how to sift through the rest, so I wrote quick, single-line responses to the ones on the first screen who I deemed acceptable and attached a picture of myself that I asked a bystander to take after a night at the club: me leaning against a black wall in high-waisted jeans and a spandex tank top, my arms gathered languidly above my head, the very epitome of cool chick.

Early that evening, I waited until after everyone had left the lab to check email again, where I found dozens more new messages and mused to myself how I was so hard up for sex at eighteen, when I could have easily just put on makeup and slept with as many guys as I wanted. I had to mute the sound on my computer because the “You’ve got mail!” announcement kept going off every five minutes when it checked for new messages. In the middle of this chaos, a message popped up on my screen: “I’ve been waiting for you.”

I didn’t realize that anyone I responded to could chat with me; I matched the username on the chat window with a message I’d gotten from a guy named Bill, a construction worker in Needham, thirty minutes south of Boston.

“You’re very pretty,” he continued as he asked me about my life. I told him I was an art student, and the idea of me as a college co-ed made him even more excited. He wanted to meet up that night.

Bill sent over a couple of pictures of himself, a thin man in his forties, with a mustache and a backward baseball cap. Not really my type, but he did have attractively tanned skin, which confirmed his profession and activated my straight, working-class fantasies. He asked me for a naked picture, but I told him I didn’t do that, and it turned out I didn’t have to. He offered to pick me up, so I gave him my apartment address and told him to meet me in an hour and a half.

“Also I bring my camera with me everywhere,” I wrote. “I hope you don’t mind if I take pictures.”

“As long as you don’t mind I have a wife and kids,” he replied. It turned out his wife, Barbara, was visiting his in-laws and brought along their two children.

That was how I wound up in a car with a stranger, who drove me to an anonymous house in the suburbs. We stepped out of a dark garage and into an eat-in kitchen, fluorescent-lit, the floor lined with linoleum, a circular wooden table in the middle with a glass top, family pictures sandwiched in between.