Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(5)

—figure out why West just punched Nate.

Yeah. That, too.

Unless I already know why. I hope not, though. God, I hope not.

I have to treat this whole deal as one more thing to cope with. That’s all it is. A problem to be solved. I can solve any problem if I work hard enough.

The men can laugh at me, fill my head with their poison. They can look at me naked, jerk off to me, post comments with photos of their dicks covered in semen, their fists wrapped around, the screens of their computers in the background with my body on them.

I can’t help it, Caroline, they can tell me. It’s your fault for being so f*cking hot!

They’ve done all of that already. They’ve made it so I can’t walk around campus in shorts without feeling slutty and stupid and completely at fault.

But I won’t let them beat me.

I pull my arms far enough into my sleeves that I can wring out the wet, then shove my hands back through the holes. I’ll have to change my shirt later. For now, this is the best I can do. Lip balm. Hairbrush.

One step after another, hour after hour, day after day, until it gets better.

If I keep going, eventually it has to get better.



I cross campus with my arms wrapped around my torso, scanning the blue sky, the cheerful red flowers, the students heading off in all directions, alone and in groups, purposeful as ants.

Before, I was so excited to be back at Putnam again. I love the campus, with its red-brick buildings and the arched open-air walkway that connects the dorms marching alongside an expanse of green lawn. I love my classes and the challenge of being at a college where I’m not the smartest. Unlike kids in high school, no one here gives me a hard time for caring too much about my classes or nerding out about Rachel Maddow. Pretty much everybody at this school is at least a little bit of a nerd.

But in the past few weeks, Putnam’s been spoiled for me. Maybe forever.

The thing is, Nate didn’t just post the pictures. He used the website where they went up to forward an anonymous link to a bunch of our friends. It got emailed around, and when I forced Bridget to tell me if anyone had sent it to her, she admitted that she’d gotten it in her college email seven times. Seven. There are only fourteen hundred students at Putnam—three hundred fifty in our class. I can’t imagine how many times the message circulated among the ones who aren’t my best friend.

The original post Nate put up is gone, but the photos keep popping up on different sites, and some of the posts still name my college, my hometown, me.

When I walk around Putnam now, I look at every guy I pass, and I think, What about you? Did you see me naked? Did you save my picture onto your phone? Do you whip it out and wank to it?

Do you hate me, too?

It makes it difficult to get excited about dancing with them at parties or cheering them on at a football game.

My phone vibrates in my back pocket. Bridget is texting to ask if I’m heading to lunch.

I type, Yes. You?



Yep! Gardiner?

I’m 5 min out.

Cool. Did u hear abt West?

I’m not sure how to answer that, so I type, Sort of.

She replies with Swoon.

Bridget likes to pretend West and I have a silent, simmering affair going on.

I like to pretend he and I are complete strangers.

The truth is somewhere in the middle.

When I met West, it was move-in day for first-year students, and it was hot. Iowa hot, which means in the mid-nineties with 98 percent humidity. The best thing to do under those conditions is to lie on a couch in someone’s cold basement and watch TV while eating Cadbury eggs. Or, if you must be outside, to seek shade and ice cream. Not necessarily in that order.

Instead, I was carrying all my earthly possessions from my dad’s car up four flights of stairs to the room I would share with Bridget. I have a lot of possessions, it turns out. I’d gotten a little dizzy on the last trip up, and my dad had insisted I plant my butt on the step by the dorm entrance and sit this one out.

So at that particular moment he was on his way up to the room, Bridget hadn’t arrived yet, and Nate was off moving into his own room on the east side of campus. I was alone—sweaty and grimy and red-faced and hot. It’s possible that I was mentally griping a bit about my tired hamstrings and the lack of trained helper monkeys to do the moving work for me when the ugliest car I have ever seen rolled up.

The car was the color of sewage, dented and rusty, with a passenger-side door that had been duct-taped on. As I watched, it cut across an open parking space and slow-motion-bounced right up over the curb onto the manicured college lawn, rolling to a stop in front of my sneaker-clad feet.

I glanced around for the RA, good-girl radar pinging like mad. There were tire tracks in the grass! The car was farting out oily-looking clouds of noxious exhaust! This could not possibly be allowed!

No RA in sight.

The driver’s-side door opened, and a guy got out.

I forgot my own name.

Now, probably that was because I stood up too quickly. It was hot, and I’d only had a Pop-Tart for breakfast, too excited to eat the eggs and bacon my dad tried to push on me. I definitely didn’t get woozy because of how this guy looked.

I mean, yes, I’ll admit, the way he looked might have contributed. The lizard part of my brain greedily took in all the details of his height and build and that mouth and his face oh my God, and then the rational part of me filed them carefully away in the appropriate mental binder.