As usual her ex’s texts generated a range of emotions. She felt relief: He still wants me. Annoyance: Why do I still care? And anger: If they’d been together over spring break like they’d planned she wouldn’t have been hammered and wandering around the Village last Friday night. But when Ben—and apparently everyone else in the universe—saw the clip of Rich Kids the previous week, he got moralistic and disinvited her from the protest for immigrant rights he and some friends were going to in D.C.

“That’s not the Claudia I know,” he’d said sadly. They were FaceTiming, Ben in his dorm at Bard, Claudia in her Gramercy bedroom where she stayed most weekends. “I just can’t believe you let them put that out there.”

“I didn’t let them,” she said.

“You must have signed something.”

She had, but when she walked into the party and scribbled her name she hadn’t considered that there would be cameras in the fucking bushes. She’d had no idea she’d become a plot point.

“I didn’t know,” she said.

“It makes you look like a slut.”

Claudia felt that word in her stomach. In her knees and her feet. Ben had managed to convince her to “open” their relationship when he left for college the year before. We’re too young to commit sexually, he’d said. We should explore. He insisted it had nothing to do with love. He insisted it would strengthen their bond. They’d come back together because they wanted to, not because they had to. He held her hand as he said all this, looked into her eyes, and stroked her hair. No one can replace you in my heart, he said. What could she do? He gave her a book about polyamory, but it was a bunch of bullshit. What if someone saw her reading it? They were supposed to create ground rules as a couple—radical honesty, no hooking up with mutual friends—but Ben broke them all, and all they did was fight. He told her she’d understand when she got to college. He told her the “mores” were different. And now he was calling her a slut.

“Fuck you,” she said.

“I said it made you look like a slut,” said Ben, feigning hurt. Like this was all so painful for him. “Honestly, I thought you’d understand. This trip should be about the kids in cages. We don’t want anything to distract from what’s going on with those families.”