After a minute, Lou answered: YES GIRL

After three damn hours Josh replied: Same

It wasn’t until she was falling asleep after a whole afternoon and evening of trying to study while frantically texting with Lou and Annie about that one-word text from Josh that she realised she’d never heard back from Nic.

The message tone of her phone woke her at 3 a.m. She read Annie’s text with one eye still closed. It made no sense. She opened both eyes and read it again: fuck leen shithed recoded u

Another message: some1 sent to Mo he showd me

cant see face but must of told bcos every1 here saying its u here @Lawsons

I told every1 bullshit that as if ud fuck him but they know ur my girl & Im cryin a bit so obvs

Lena put her phone under the pillow and sat cross-legged in the dark, ran the mangled messages over and over, willing them to reveal a different meaning.

Josh recoded me.

Recoded me but not my face.

Sent my recoded body to Mo.

Everyone knows it’s me.

Who has been recoded.

The recoding is making Annie cry.

Because I’m her girl.

Not Josh’s girl, because he is the one who did this.

What did he do? She ran her own recording—organic, precious until now—through her mind, saw the thumbs-up between the boys when she and Josh arrived in Johnno’s room. Did they both glance to the side just before the thumbs-up? Look at the desk for a split second? Thumbs-up about something there to the side, not about her at all. The desk where Josh went to get the condom. There was a laptop computer and maybe it was open and facing the bed instead of lying flat but who notices things like that in the moment?

She ran to the window and flung it open as far as it would go, which wasn’t far at all. For safety, they’d said at orientation. Then, she’d imagined the bible-thick gap keeping danger out; now she saw it differently. She sat on the floor, tried to get enough fresh air from the narrow opening above. When she couldn’t stand not doing so, she returned to the bed and snatched her phone from under the pillow.

Seven new messages. At 3.14 in the morning.

One from a girl in her Mathematics and Numeracy tute who she’d exchanged maybe five sentences with all year. Thought you’d want to know, with an attachment which Lena clicked on immediately, because whether she wanted to know or not she goddamn well did.