It was too late. The multiple copies Ansel had already passed out had assumed a life of their own, moving from person to person, all over campus. The one Trey had taken from the girls had been bent-cornered and floppy from handling.

This was the dawn of 1993. Most of the girls Trey knew had never seen anything more pornographic than a Playboy centerfold, where beautifully lit girls, airbrushed to perfection, lay on rose petals or silk sheets or perched on horses. Most guys had seen blue movies on VHS, but the women in those films seemed far away and almost fictional.

Lexie was real. Lexie was right there.

Trey went to the registrar’s to finagle a copy of Lexie’s schedule. To his chagrin he learned that the student intern already had a couple of copies printed out, and he was happy to slip one to Trey for five dollars. He was a dorky nobody, non-Greek, with no idea who Trey was.

He said, with a sly grin, “You’re the third guy who’s come by to get this, and that’s just today.”

Trey waited outside every one of her classes. She never showed, even though her scholarships depended on her grades. She didn’t show up in the dining hall for her shifts either. She hadn’t, a cashier told him, for more than a week. That floored him. He knew she had no other way to eat.

He finally found her by accident, very early one morning. He’d tamped down his drinking, and he was getting up early and running every day, ridding himself of his beer belly. The soft pooch in the single shot he’d seen was a tiny shame that stacked on top of his others like a cherry.

Lexie came scuttling out of her dorm building as he jogged past. She had a big black garbage bag slung over her shoulder. Already thin, she’d lost weight, moving from gamine to gaunt. Her eyes were dull, her skin was broken out, and her pale hair was janked back in a greasy pony.

“Lexie?” he called.

She turned, and when she saw his face, she froze, then shot him a look of such pure pain and hatred that it stopped him in his tracks.

“Leave me alone,” she said in a fierce, low voice.

“Lexie—” he started again, but she talked over him.

“One of those little-sister bitches you pal around with gave the pictures to the dean. I know it was a girl. He accidentally said ‘she.’”