I walk in to my dad’s office armed to the teeth.

West stays in the car, parked all the way down at the end of the driveway. I feel shitty about that, but he said I can only fight one battle at a time, and he’s got a point. Probably the day to reintroduce West to my dad and fess up to his being my boyfriend is not Sex-Picture Day.

Still. Just knowing West is out there, waiting. Knowing he’s on my side. It helps.

We both skipped class this morning. He called in sick to the library. I don’t think he’s skipped class all year, and he’s definitely never missed work, so I appreciate the gesture. Plus, I need him. He’s not much good with computers, but he’s good with me. He sat next to me for hours while I pulled up my spreadsheets, Google-searched until my eyes itched, ranted and raved as I uncovered layer after layer of Nate’s assault.

It’s worse this time. Way worse than before.

The pictures are everywhere, of course, freshly posted at all the meat-market sites along with my name, my school—yeah, yeah. I’ve long since lost the ability to find them shocking.

What’s shocking is all the other stuff.

Hateful posts on my Facebook wall. Personal notes to my school email from strangers who want to rape me, fuck me, punch me in the cunt. My Twitter account is sending out spam messages with links to my vulva. And somehow, God, my professors all must have been contacted, because I’ve gotten concerned-sounding email from three of them and a phone message from the Student Affairs office requesting that I set up an interview as soon as possible.

In six hours, I’ve cycled through hurt and anger, disgust and fear, resignation and fury. I’m a hundred-pound bag of flailing feelings. I’m sad. I’m mad. I’m a wreck.

But West is with me.

More than West: After her eight o’clock, Bridget showed up with Quinn. They called Krishna, who pulled his laptop, mine, and Quinn’s into a temporary network on the living-room coffee table. Within an hour, he was directing a search-and-record-keeping operation with Quinn and Bridget. They’re doing screenshots of everything, calling in favors with a MathLab geek friend of Krishna’s who has crazy computer skills, combing through the student handbook to figure out what kind of rules Nate’s breaking and what can be done about it.

I’m a wreck, but they’re all on my side, and that helps. So much.

Krishna’s friend is the one who figured out what started it all. Tucked away on one of those unmoderated sites where bros like to hang out and be dickheads together, there’s a thread about me. A link to the pictures, a standard complaint about what a frigid, evil whore I am, and then a call to arms: What can we do to teach this bitch a lesson?

Dozens of them took up their weapons. While I was at the bakery with West, sleeping in his arms, having sex with him—all that time, I was being attacked. By strangers. For no reason at all.

If this had happened to me seven months ago, I think I would have crumpled under the weight. Knowing my professors have been sent those links, that my sister and my aunts and maybe even my grandparents have been Facebook-spammed with naked pictures of me—it sucks. It hurts. It makes me want to cry if I dwell on it, if I think too hard about what it means for my future, what it says about the shape of the rest of my life.

But it also makes me so, so mad.

I’m ready to fight. I have a stack of printouts in my arms, a bag with my laptop in it weighing down my shoulder. I have West at the end of the driveway.

In front of me, my father sits in the maroon leather recliner by the window, his own laptop open on his thigh, his glasses pushed up into his thick gray hair, ruffling his otherwise dignified appearance. I study his familiar face—thick eyebrows, that dumpling nose Janelle inherited but I didn’t, his jawline jowlier than I remembered. He’s putting on weight. Too many drive-through cheeseburgers.

He called me home, and I came.

My palms are sweaty when I sit down in the other chair in his corner. It’s deep and tall, and my feet just barely reach the floor. All of my memories of being punished as a girl begin here, with the helpless weight of my swinging feet. I know the number of brass studs anchoring the upholstery onto the end of his chair’s arms. Nine around the arch. Twelve more down each side. I’ve studied each pucker in the leather and memorized the geometrical arches and whorls in his abstract office carpet in order to avoid having to look him in the eye.

Today, I sit with my spine straight, damp palms clasped in my lap. I pulled up my hair into a ponytail and wore jeans and the sweater he paid for at Christmas, pale-blue-green cashmere the color of West’s eyes. My armor.

I sit quietly and wait, because Janelle is the one who sucks up to him, and Alison is the one who cries. I am the daughter who comes to him armed with counterarguments, clever defenses, tricky maneuvers.

I am the daughter who fights.

For months now, I’ve been too scared to fight. I’ve been trying to live in a bubble that Nate popped way back in August. I didn’t want to believe it. I told myself I could fix it. Throw some patches on there, paint over the cracks, avert my eyes, and pretend everything was fine.

Everything’s not fine.

The bubble is well and truly fucked.

But outside the bubble, I’ve found rugby parties and new friends who don’t care about my stupid sex pictures. Outside the bubble, there are nights at the bakery, phone sex, and long naps in the middle of the afternoon with my arms wrapped around a boy who smells like fresh bread and soap, and who makes me feel like I matter, no matter what I look like, what I’ve done, what’s been done to me.

The world hasn’t changed. It’s full of men who hate women. It’s stuffed to the gills with assholes who will mount an attack on a stranger just because she’s female and they’re small-minded monkey-boys with an inferiority complex.

The world hasn’t changed, but I have.

Outside the bubble is life. West.

I like it out here. I’m staying.

Dad clicks on something, closes the lid of his laptop, and looks at me. “Caroline,” he says.

Just my name, for a moment.

Just my name, because you begin by identifying the accused.

“I received a call last night from your aunt Margaret. She’d seen something distressing on your Facebook page, and she wanted to know if I was aware of it.”

His eyes are my eyes, dark brown and full of sympathy. His manner is reasonable. His diction is clear and measured. He doesn’t yell in the office. He judges. We come to him like criminals, and he passes sentence on us, calmly and rationally.

“When I told her I didn’t know what she was referring to, she sent me the link, and I checked it out for myself. The link took me to a website where …”

He clears his throat—the first sign that any of this is disturbing to him.

“… where I found several pictures of you unclothed. Some of them compromising. Sexually compromising. Although it wasn’t possible to positively identify each of the pictures as you, there were certain …”

He looks away from me for a second.

This is not your fault, I tell myself. You didn’t do this. Nate did.

Dad clears his throat again. “There’s no question that at least one, if not more, of the sexually explicit photographs is of you. I followed a second link to much the same thing, and I can only assume that the additional links were also to these photos.”

There’s a long pause, and I wonder if I’m supposed to say something. But what can I say?

Yes, that’s me.

That’s me, giving Nate a blow job.

That’s my vagina, my hand between my legs, stroking my clit.

Yes, that’s me riding Nate’s cock. My face with his semen on it.

Yes.

That’s your baby girl. Your pride and joy.

I sit silent. I knew this would be hard, but it’s harder than I expected. I’d thought about his judgment, feared his disgust, but I’d never thought about his grief.

The grief is in his face, in his eyes.

These pictures make him sad, sad because of me, sad for me, and it’s unbearable.

“So.” He folds his hands on his stomach, over the top of the ratty beige cardigan that he wears on top of his Oxford shirts at home. “Tell me how this happened.”

I take a deep breath and imagine a string tied to the crown of my head, pulling me up straight and tall. An exercise that our high school choir director gave us, but one that comes in handy anytime I need to be perfectly poised, perfectly careful.

“Nate took the pictures. When we were still going out. And he—they showed up online right after we broke up.”

The lines around his mouth deepen, twin parentheses framing his impatience. “Am I correct in remembering that you broke up with Nate soon before returning to school in August?”

“Yes. It was August when he first posted them.”

“You know that he posted them.”

“No. I assume it was him, but I can’t prove it. They were submitted anonymously to the sites. He denied it.”

“Caroline.” My father looks right at me, leaning in a bit. “It’s March.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what happened between August and March.”

“I made a systematic effort to remove the photos from the Internet. I set up automatic searches, sent out cease-and-desist email—”

My dad makes an impatient sound. He doesn’t approve of homegrown lawyering.

“—and whatever else I could think of to get them off-line. And then, when that wasn’t working, I hired a service to help me scrub my reputation. On the Internet, I mean. They do the searching for you, get photos wiped, try to push the legit results up on the search pages …”

And I haven’t heard from them in weeks. The reports they did send me were late, sketchy, and incomplete. It’s possible they’re frauds or just crap at what they do.

It’s possible I threw away fifteen hundred dollars of West’s money on a pipe dream.

How many hours of his effort, his sweat, did I waste so I could cower in my dorm room, wishing life were fair?

On the list of my regrets, that loan is way up near the top.

“But this latest attack was launched from an online bulletin board,” I continue. “Presumably by Nate. A number of others participated in it with him. I don’t know their identities. What I do know is that the pictures have spread so far and wide, it’s probably a wasted effort trying to get them removed. I’d like to focus my energy at this point on—”

“A wasted effort? Do you have any idea what’s going to happen to you if you don’t remove the pictures?”

“I have a good idea, yes.”

“You’ll have trouble getting into law school. Recommendations will be difficult, but even assuming you can present a good application—admissions committees search the Internet. Internship applications, scholarships, job applications. There’s no chance at the Rhodes Scholarship, the Marshall. Getting the pictures off-line will have to be your top priority. You should have brought me in from the beginning, Caroline. So much damage has already been done.”

So much damage.

But to what? To whom?

“I’m not damaged.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“It is, though. You’re talking about this—about my future—as though it’s this white, pure thing that I’ve gotten dirty. Like you sent me out to play in a white dress, and why wasn’t I more careful with it?”

He frowns.

“I’m not a white dress, Dad. And I didn’t take those pictures. I didn’t share them. I didn’t say all that stuff about me. Nate did.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“Fine. Someone did. The important thing is, that someone wasn’t me.”

He grunts and looks out the window at our yard. Our house is in the nicest part of Ankeny, with a big shaded lot and an acre of lawn that I had to mow in high school if I expected to be allowed to go out on the weekends. Today it’s overcast, patchy snow still on the ground, spring weeks away.

It’s not my yard anymore.

This isn’t my house.

I’m not a child.

“Did you report this incident to the college?” he asks. “Or to the police?”

“No. But I intend to.”

“You say you suppose Nate posted these photos in the first place because he was upset. Does he have any reason to continue to be upset with you? Something that prompted this second attack?”