Who else had seen Chad’s video? It could be a thousand people by now. And how would she know? Would anybody call her up and say, Claudia, there’s a video of you getting double-teamed on Snapchat. You might want to, like, call somebody about getting it taken down. Her head was bowed, hair obscuring her face for most of the fifty-eight seconds, so you’d have to freeze that one frame to know it was her. But if you did, you’d know. And it was never going to go away. It would live in the cloud or the wires or whatever the Internet actually was until the end of time. Anyone with high school hacking abilities could pull it up in five minutes. For the rest of her life she was going to have to assume that every person she met had seen her with a dick in her mouth. For the rest of her life she was going to see that look she saw on Trevor’s face when she knocked on his door. Pity and scorn and lust and revulsion. That was how she would be greeted for the rest of her life. And all because she’d agreed to go to the movies with Chad fucking Drake four years ago.

If she hadn’t said yes they would never have held hands. And if they had never held hands he wouldn’t have had a reason to hate her.

She could blame Edie, if she thought about it a certain way. If her sister hadn’t slept with Chad’s epically slimy dad, Ridley, Claudia and Chad would probably just have remained acquaintances. Students at the same school, occasionally seeing each other on the beach or at the ice cream shop or at a party on the Vineyard, where both their families had homes. For years, Claudia Castro and Chad Drake had been in the same rooms together, but she never found him especially attractive or interesting. He seemed to talk almost exclusively about sports. Then, all of a sudden, they had something in common.

It was Memorial Day weekend and the annual Edgartown yacht club opening party. She had just turned fifteen and Edie was off to college in the fall. Claudia was standing by the railing of the club’s deck, staring at her sister and Ridley flirting in a corner they probably thought was private, when Chad came up to her.

“He can do it in the open now,” said Chad. “They’re officially getting a divorce.”

Chad was almost a foot taller than she was and when she turned to look at him she noticed his jaw was red with razor rash. Edie had commented on the bumps along Claudia’s bikini line just that morning, and she remembered thinking it must really suck to deal with that on your face.