But then she was typing again. I held my breath as she started and stopped, started again. When she stopped for more than a few seconds, I shoved my phone under my pillow and went to the bathroom.

I came back to a stream of messages, all from her, links to websites I did not recognize. I had to scroll up through the links to find the reason she sent them.

here is some of my fav erotica, if that helps

I dropped my phone.

By then the messaging service we used would have indexed those links, if not tied them to her or my specific accounts, or if we were lucky, we were anonymized as links that young women, likely Asian, enjoyed, and shared. The contents of those articles had likely also been scraped, the sentences tokenized, topics determined—lust, sex, perversions—and added to the model of things the computer knew about me.

I picked up my phone again, scrolling through, more slowly this time. None of the domain names were terribly suspicious sounding. Some of them were from magazines I had heard of before. Perhaps if I did not click on the link, the app would not bother trying to scrape it. A mark of disinterest.

But I was not disinterested. I combed through the slugs of each URL, heart beating faster as I realized I now had evidence of whatever it was that Louise enjoyed sexually. A hard lump formed in my throat. The slugs did not give enough information, almost always cutting off too early:

/2015/12/a-surprise-christmas-visitor-comes

/women/2016/the-hotel-balcony-and-the-hot

/lit/how-to-stop-screaming-for-the

It would be impossible not to read these. I crawled to my desk, rummaging through the bottom drawer until I found my first smart phone. I had wiped it clean years ago and intended to take it to electronic recycling but never got around to it. It didn’t have an account associated with it anymore. The features were limited—pretty much only a web browser, which was all I needed.

While waiting for the old phone to charge, I tried to compose a response to Louise. I had been silent for too long.

wow, thanks!

Add something more, I told myself. The truth? Why not, since we’re already this far in. If I could tell grandmother about my sexual experience, I could tell anyone.

I’ve never actually done this before. I’ve been trying this week but no luck . . .

She would probably see me as I am—sheltered, antisocial, with not even the most basic sexual experience. I assumed it was normal for people to have experimented with masturbation at my age, even earlier. But there had never been any time or desire on my end. High school was for studying and helping my grandparents. And college, what little of it I had experienced, had been for studying and trying to make friends.

whatve you been trying?

I typed slowly.

just touching myself. circular motions? I think that’s a thing