And then dinner. Nevaeh hands me her phone. Messages from anonymous accounts.

She is insert racist slur. We are all insert misogynistic slur. She is racist misogynistic slur. I am a fat misogynistic slur. We are all disgusting, and we are pathetic attention seekers, and why would anyone pay money to see these nasty girls? We have been sleeping with a lot of dudes, and not always for money.

“You see this?” Nevaeh says to us, snatching the phone from me, slamming it back in her purse. “I deal with this literally every goddamn day. I am so tired of these people. And now there’s more of them, shrieking at us because the school has slapped an immoral-conduct charge on our foreheads.” Her phone whistles a notification from her bag. “Fuck these people. I have a paper due tomorrow.”

Nevaeh lets Katherine and me go through all the messages and comments to delete them, then posts that she’s putting her account on hiatus. She doesn’t open up the comments on that one.

Most of the messages—at least all the ones that are referring to the show—have to be from people from school. Who else would know what was happening on campus? We spend all day wondering who our real friends are, what else they could be saying.

On Friday, I find a photo of me posted on the bulletin board in our dorm lobby—a still from our Spring Dance performance last year. My costume is a sheer skirt, dance briefs, a bandeau. I’m smiling, in that costume the dance department issued us. The words FAT SLUT are written across the print in black marker.

I tear the photo down.

I am frozen all the way through now, staring at this photo in my hands, and I know there are probably people standing behind me, laughing at my reaction. Maybe filming it on their phones. I don’t care. I crush the paper in my fists, into a tiny ball.

I’m glad I go to rehearsal anyway, because Zoe is sitting in front of my locker. She jumps up when she sees me, throws her arms around me.

“My mom called and made me promise I wouldn’t talk to you, but that is ridiculous, of course. The first thing I was going to do was come find you and make sure you were okay.”

“I’m okay, Zoe-bear,” I say, smoothing her pale hair, which is falling out of a sloppy bun, out of her face. “This is not regulation hair.”

Zoe scoffs. “I am boycotting recital today. So are Bisma and Kaitlyn and Riley and Logan and Leslie.”

All my mentees. My heart hurts.

“It is not fair that they’re treating you so bad and acting like you’ve done something wrong or immoral or nasty,” she says. “It is so ridiculous.”

“Don’t get suspended because of me, Zoe, please,” I say. “You don’t have to boycott—”