The girls were awful, too. She was slut-coughed in a wave that followed her around the dining hall as she bussed tables. Her friends stopped hanging out with her. She had multiple nicknames catcalled at her when she crossed the quad. Choo-Choo. Corn on the Cob. Double Horny. The one that stuck was Knotty Pine. Because she’d had all her holes filled.

Trey and Spence knew nothing of this at first. Lexie didn’t show up at the diner or the coffeehouse for a span, but that happened sometimes. Trey got a few elbows in his ribs, but these were more like attaboys, and only from brothers. He assumed that Ansel had dropped some hints. He shrugged it off until a couple of weeks later, at a party, when he caught two sorority girls staring directly at him over the rim of a picture. They were flushed and giggling.

“What?” he asked. They only giggled harder, until he held out his hand. “Can I see?”

One gaped, blushing, but the other said slyly, “Sure. We’re trying to figure out who this is right here.”

She passed it over, her finger pointing to the trunk and upper legs of a man, kneeling and headless. Trey’s whole body flushed with red shame as he recognized his own small potbelly, the trio of freckles on his hip.

Spence was also kneeling, headless, but not anonymous to Trey. Lexie was between them, legs splayed open, the photo taken from a gynecologist’s brutal angle. It was not artful or even attractive, nothing like his memories of the night. It was clearly Lexie, halfway into a sit-up, so her face was still visible in profile. Her pretty features were distorted by the things she was doing, but not enough to shield her identity.

Trey left with the picture and went immediately to the frat house, storming down into the rec room. Ansel was there, alone, still on probation. Trey yanked him up off the couch and punched him so hard he collapsed back onto it. He went to hit him again, but Ansel curled into a ball and cried out, a high-pitched scream like a child’s. He stayed in a defensive ball until Trey finished cussing him out. Then Trey threw the picture down onto his quaking body.

“I didn’t print any of the ones with your face in them. Or Spence’s,” Ansel sniveled when Trey finally let him up. He added, “You’re my brothers,” in a way that made Trey itch to punch him again. He frog-marched Ansel all the way back to his dorm room and burned the negatives in the metal dorm trash can. Trey made Ansel throw in every print he still had, too. He didn’t look at them. The one had been quite enough.