I don’t know why I did it. Looking back, it was the stupidest thing anyone could ever do. We had all those talks at school about how, if you took pictures of yourself, they could end up on the internet forever. But, for me, someone who felt like they might die at any time, or that there was no future, or that if a future did exist it was going to be miserable, you had to ask yourself, does it really even matter?

So when Riley Baker gave me his phone number, because he needed help with his Trigonometry homework, the gears of fate were already turning. Inevitability was slowly shifting into focus, quicker than I could activate the front facing camera on my Android.

I didn’t flirt with him. I let him handle that. I knew he had a girlfriend, and that she was a popular bitch named Lena, who everybody liked, even though she was a snake and would stab anybody in the back, including Riley. I knew she had fucked at least one guy behind his back, so I didn’t feel particularly bad about showing him my ass. Don’t ask me how I knew and he didn’t. He was as oblivious as he was painful to look at. He was blisteringly handsome and had a six-pack from being on the baseball team. You couldn’t exactly blame him for being focused on things other than what his dumb bitch girlfriend was doing when they weren’t making out in his mom’s basement, where he relocated in our Junior Year, putting up Foo Fighters posters and a bevy of Sports Illustrated full spreads. Please don’t ask me how I know that, either. I was never proud of my obsession with Riley, primarily because while he wasn’t an anti-intellectual, he was, absolutely, an idiot.

But in a small town like Buffalo Falls, West Virginia, a handsome idiot was about as much as you could ever hope for, especially if you had acne, an eating disorder, or social anxiety. I had plenty of all three.

He’d text me sometimes with the kind of low commitment one liners you’d expect from a testosterone fueled ace pitcher.

“wyd??? ;)” At 3:00 A.M.

I’d say nothing, because I was usually sitting in my room looking at high resolution fan art of Levi from Attack On Titan, and I wasn’t about to admit that. I had been slowly assimilating a pretty spot-on real life approximation of Levi’s soldier garb, and when I cropped my hair short and dyed it black like his, I let people I assume I was slowly turning into a lesbian, rather than know the truth that I was a sad white girl whose primary emotional outlet was cartoons from Japan about handsome boys killing each other when I wanted them to be kissing.

In hindsight, maybe the former was closer to the truth than the latter.

“lena just left” He said after a five minute period to confirm his lack of interest in the face of my almost immediate response.

“shes turning into a real bitch lately / we didnt even… you know”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“its w/e can you help me with this problem on pg 3???”

I opened my school bag, which was leather and from Japan, but inconspicuous enough for the uninitiated not to recognize the look I was trying to pull off, and rifled around for my Trig homework.

And then I let the bag drop to the floor.

Was I really going to let this circular dance where he was academically retarded and I was masquerading as a math tutor go on forever? Was I going to accept my station as the smart girl hot guys could manipulate into free answers because I was desperate for romantic affection?

Not anymore.

“Sorry.” I texted back. “I’m a little busy. ;)”

I knew the winky face alone would be enough to let even a guy as dumb as him catch on to what I meant. And my intuition came up correct when he fired back, pretty much immediately:

“doing what???”

“You know…” I texted, and then for good measure slapped on another gratuitous “;)”

“oh fuck” He replied, again, instantly.

My heart started pounding with the thought that, possibly for the first time, a guy as hot as Riley was probably embarrassingly turned on by a thing I said, even if it was just in a surreptitious 3 A.M. text conversation.

I started deliberating on exactly what my next move was going to be, if I even had the guts to make one. As much as I was forward thinking, deeply feminist, and totally not into gender roles, I did wish that for once in my life a guy would just take the fucking initiative.

“You shouldn’t date stuck up bitches who hold out.” I fired back.

“damn. you dont fuck around huh??? who knew”

“No. I don’t. ;)” I replied.

All of his messages up until this point had been almost automatic, but after my last response, he didn’t say anything for an entire minute or two. My heart was hammering in my chest, and I immediately started silently cursing myself for somehow totally fucking up such an obvious exchange.

Then, after another minute of excruciating embarrassment, he wrote back. Only he didn’t just write this time. He sent a photo. Of an exposed six-pack and a smirk on his face.

“your turn?? ;)” He wrote.

I dropped the phone. My mouth went dry. This was exactly what I wanted, but a lifetime of never getting anything I wanted hadn’t prepared me for the intense shock of something awesome coming so easily. I had to force down the panic attack rising up from my stomach.

I looked down at my chest, and then thought about Lena’s. She was at least a C cup, if not a D. I, on the other hand, wasn’t working with much to begin with, and weeks of eating one meal a day had pretty much turned me into a skeleton, in the chest department.

Showing him my vagina was TOTALLY out of the question. Fuck. What was I going to do?

I rolled of my bed, went over to my mirror, and started looking at myself. I was quickly becoming thin as a rail, which some guys liked, and I definitely aspired towards. But, in this context, I doubted a washboard chest was what Riley was looking for.

I turned to the side. I called Lena to mind.

Right. She had big tits, but her ass went straight down her back like a billboard advertisement for a worthless bitch with no personality.

By comparison, even though I had lost a ton of weight, my ass was still as big as ever. It was probably even bigger now that the rest of me was shrinking. I’d always been embarrassed about it, and had spent the last four years of high school doing whatever I could to hide it. Until now.

I went back to my bed, and switched from the scrolling wall of Levi to a new tab, with a scrolling wall of butt shots. My phone buzzed.

“???” Riley thought I was getting cold feet. If he knew how intensely I was laboring over exactly how to make his dick hard, he’d probably go limp forever.

“Hold on.” I said. “Posing. ;)”

I did a last once over of what I considered to be the most flattering angle you could take a photo of a human butt, and then I went back to the mirror. I took my jean shorts off and looked down at my underwear.

Great. Spider-man.

I resigned myself to the belief that Riley either wouldn’t really care what I was wearing since he was seeing an alchemically composed photo of my oversized butt, or that he would find the dorkiness of the whole thing even more erotic. Quiet girl, church mouse vibe, fat ass. Guys fantasized about shit like that all the time, right? There were like whole categories of porn where the biggest guy on the football team fucks a girl who looks like she hasn’t had a meal this month. I was golden, right?

I snapped like twenty of the same photo before deciding on one, and then a thought crossed my mind.

He’s going to ask for more, isn’t he?

I reached down and started taking my underwear off, seeing Spider-man more or less crawling down my leg like the side of a building in New York, and then I stopped cold.

Was I really going to bare it all for this guy, just because he sent me a few flirty texts between Trig assignments?

Fuck it. In all likelihood I was never going to have an opportunity like this again. A guy hadn’t approached me in my entire four years at Buffalo Falls High, and I doubted any of them were holding their bets until two months before graduation. Might as well go out with a bang, and if not that, at least a stellar shot of my embarrassing ass.

I don’t know how all those famous girls on Instagram do it, because the kind of gymnastic twist you have to do to frame yourself up is maddening. Since I was hardly getting any Calcium these days, I thought I might actually snap my spine out of place.

But finally, the work was done, and I was even more keyed up by the intermittent buzzes that were obvious signals Riley was waiting on the edge of his seat.

I sent the first one, in my underwear, and shut my eyes hard. I waited, and waited, and waited. This is it, I told myself. This is where it all comes crashing down.

And then my phone lit up like a Christmas tree.

“HOLY FUCK!!” He wrote. I smirked, flushed red, and kind of wanted to cry.

Take that, Lena, you fucking bitch.

“its way nicer than lenas!!” He said. Classic, Riley.

“Yeah. I know.” I wrote back.

“fuck dude! i’m so hard right now”

“Good.” I said, and then fell back on the bed. Things were entering dangerous territory now, and I was ready for them to get as fucked up as possible.

“can i tho?? ;)” He asked.

I knew exactly what he was asking, but the whole thing was kind of surreal. If I just said yes, like the quiet, awkward girl he thought I was, this was going to seem as easy to him as it actually was. I had to grasp some kind of power in the situation. I had to convince him that this whole thing was happening on my terms, not his. He wasn’t the stunningly hot Adonis that every girl in school wanted to do this with. He was my bitch.

Yeah. Right. Like that’d ever happen.

“Can you what? Jack off?” I asked.

“duh dude ;)” He replied.

“Why are you asking when you should’ve started as soon as you saw it?? ;)” I replied.

I closed my eyes and exhaled hard, trying to imagine Riley in his mom’s basement, losing his shit over a photo of me, a girl who nobody had ever lost their shit over in my entire life.

It felt good. I felt strong, like finally I could prove to everyone, Lena included, that I had something no one else had. I knew it was an illusion, that he had probably done this with tons of girls at school in the four years we’d been there together, but… It was different this time.

Because it was me.

“Better question.” I wrote back. “Why am I not looking at your fucking dick right now?”

I didn’t actually think it would do anything for me. I had seen hundreds of dicks in porn, and I could tell by staring at Riley in baseball pants at every opportunity that he wasn’t exactly a porn star in the making, but if he had gotten something out of me, I wanted to get something out of him.

“uh. i don’t usually do that…” He wrote.

“Why? You scared, bitch? ;)”

I almost didn’t send that, but it was too late to turn back. If I was going to really make the most of this thing, I had to pretend to be some secret nymphomaniac who didn’t mess around with boys at school because I thought none of them could satisfy me. Like, maybe I had already moved on to fucking guys in college, or there was a hot young teacher I was secretly wrapped up with.

“damn” He wrote. “you drive a hard bargain ;)”

I waited in numbed expectation while he did whatever guys do when they commit to taking a dick pic. The idea of him pulling down his pants and stroking the thing, messing with the camera with the other hand, trying to frame the photo in a way that made his dick look as impressive as possible, made me want to laugh. I put a hand to my chest to make sure my heart was still beating, and that I hadn’t crossed over into some alternate universe where everything played out like a late nineties sex comedy, and people didn’t need a working pulse to survive.

Then my phone buzzed, and I got the photo.

Riley Baker’s dick was actually massive. I suddenly understood what people meant by the phrase “grower, not a show-er.”

It made my heart hurt, to have already crossed the line with a boy I might as well have been in love with. I had never really had a crush on anybody else at Buffalo Falls, mostly because they were all retarded rednecks who cared more about sports than the imminent destruction of the entire universe, which might actually happen before they got too old to be in the Pros and died.

I was also achingly turned on. Which sucked.

“so… u gonna show me more??” He asked.

I didn’t even really deliberate before I opened my gallery and sent him the fully naked photo of my ass, which was, as much as I hate girls who talk themselves up, basically as perfect a photo of something you mostly use to shit as any boy Riley’s age could expect to receive rather than just creepily glare at on the internet.

“HOLY FUCK!!!” He immediately wrote back.

His response twisted me up inside. At this point, there was no way he was going to be genuinely interested in me. I had turned myself into a jerk off object, and I had done so with little to no hesitation. The best outcome was probably for me to keep charading as this crazed low-key sex kitten he was probably fantasizing about me being right now, but how long could I keep that act up for, especially on no sleep?

I knew from watching 500 Days Of Summer about a thousand times, that my best bet was to trick him into thinking about me more than I ever thought about him, letting him build up a fantasy version of me inside his own head that he could mentally paste over everything I did, fooling himself into believing that even the most idiosyncratic parts of me were just pieces of a cohesive whole wherein I was a sex crazed slut who was exceedingly good at hiding out in plain sight.

So I hit him with my best bullet.

“Hope you cum hard. I’m passing out. ;)”

“fuuuuuuuck dude” He replied.

Then I set the alarm on my phone, switched it to silent, and put on an episode of Friends to fall asleep to.

The One With The Race Car Bed.



As I drifted off to Matthew Perry ending every sentence with a cartoonish exclamation point, I was thinking about Riley Baker kissing me gently while taking my virginity, acting like a completely different person than the unaffected baseball wunderkind everyone suspected him to be.

I wasn’t imagining him ruining my life the next day at school.

Which is, yeah, exactly what he ended up doing.