It’s not unheard of for Kristine to call her such names in raunchy camaraderie, so Sara texts back,
Oh shit.
If there were a customer service center that regulated the whole information superhighway, she would have dialed it immediately. But it’s the Wild West. Utter anarchy. No one’s really in charge, so long as you’re not trying to coerce a kid into bed or buying weapons. No one would help her track down a measly sex tape unless she were famous with mountains of money, lawyers with lockjaw. And without any help hunting the clip down and snatching it away, Sara’s helpless. The sex tape rushes and ricochets around, completely out of control.
Their movie is already moving like water, washing over the world. On one site for a few seconds and someone else sharing it, then it’s onto another, momentum building between mouse clicks and posts, skywriting Sara’s naked body across an online horizon, one that everyone can marvel at simultaneously. No countries. No continents. No time zones. The zeroes and ones of the sex tape coursing through the earth’s circulatory system.
The texts keep pouring in:
They were asking questions and so was Sara. Why Nat would do this to her,
And if love is a bit of an overstatement, didn’t these types of tapes find their way online only after a couple breaks up? Some sexual retaliation? As far as Sara knows, they’re still dating, or had been until he first sent the clip out into the wild.
Because last time she checked, this isn’t how love works — or almost-love. Call her a stickler, but she doesn’t think it functions on dupes and deceptions. Its engine won’t even turn over with only lies in the tank.
But apparently Nat has his own definition of almost-love, and it includes dubious ingredients like malice, selfishness, abject cruelty. That’s the only explanation for why he’d post their sex tape. At least he could have asked. And is this his way of breaking up with her?
Sara snatches her cell and asks Nat,
She stares at it and stares at it.
Nothing coming back.
This is a savage violation, one that Sara should have seen coming: This is what happens when she starts believing in someone. It all turns out to be so much worse than she ever thought possible. And she’s right. What Nat did is digital rape, sharing their sex without permission, making it public consumption.
Sara wishes she could claim she had no idea about it. A hidden camera, maybe, the tape made without her knowledge, but those would be hollow claims. She was into it. They were into it. They’d watch it together and have even more amazing sex and what was the harm in that? They were eighteen, their bodies looked the best they’ll ever be and, fine, she’ll say it: Making the tape turned her on. Granted, one of the major liquors in this aphrodisiac was consent. It was theirs, they owned it, and they shared it, only with each other.
More texts pour in, some people even traveling back to the twentieth century and calling Sara. The point is that people knew about it. People she knew
She can’t say she wasn’t warned. Nat liked to phone flirt from the get-go. He was tall and skinny and pale, and Kristine, one of her friends from work, called him Frankenstein. As in, “Are you sexting with Frankenstein’s monster again?”
“I think it’s hot,” said Sara.
“Are you sending him pics?”
“Only when he sends them first.”
“Dirty ones?”
Sara shot her a look like
“Sexting with monsters is dangerous,” the friend said.
Which at the time seemed funny to Sara. A joke. Some sexual gallows humor — they were young and being controversial and loved every minute of it, consequences seeming too remote to even entertain their fallacies.
The critical problem, at least in terms of chronology, is Sara needs to be at work in half an hour. The job that’s already in precarious standing. Her manager, Moses, has said, “I have a three-strike policy and you’re on your twelfth. But what can I do? When you’re on, you are my best server. It’s that other Sara who shows up every once in a while that I don’t like.”
That other Sara.
