“I can’t see.”

He hunkers down and squints at my face. “Do you wear contacts?”

Oh. “Yes.”

I blink again, and now I recognize this. This is what the world looks like with one contact in.

The guy is kind of blurry, too, but in a nice way. He has really short brown hair in tight curls and a dimple in his chin.

“You think one got knocked out?”

“I do. Was that woman made of bricks?”

He smiles. Dimples there, too. Dimples all over the place. “She probably outweighs you by a hundred pounds. That was pretty hard-core. You want a hand getting up?”

I take his hand, thinking, I got hit so hard I lost a contact.

“I’m Scott,” he says.

I’m so distracted, I barely hear him. I’m too busy thinking, Oh my God, I got tackled and I’m not dead. I’m totally hard-core.

“Caroline,” I say, but I guess I must have mumbled, because he spends the next five minutes calling me Carrie while he fetches me some water from the Carson Athletic Department cooler and insists I use his folding chair.

I watch the game and try to figure out more of the rules. I ask Scott to explain the tricky bits. He does, and when he dimples at me, I go ahead and smile back at him.

What can it hurt? He doesn’t know my name.

The whistle goes off a few minutes later. Quinn looks at me with that eyebrow up. I nod my head and jog back onto the field.

Afterward, I learn that all rugby games end at a bar. This is, it seems, nonnegotiable. The Carson team’s coach shakes Quinn’s hand and drives away, and the rest of us form one huge mass of muddy, bruised womanhood—plus Scott—and walk along the railroad tracks that bisect Putnam’s campus. We pass the science center and the phallic sculpture that reminds me of West’s rubber chicken. One of the Carson girls tries to climb it.

By the time we burst through the door of the bar, most of the players are singing a song so filthy it makes me blush. Scott is beside me, somehow, at this exact most inopportune moment. “Not going to sing?” he asks.

“I don’t know the words.”

He smiles. “You really are new at this, aren’t you?”

“I never touched a rugby ball before today.”

My vision’s a little blurry with just one contact in, but I can still see all his dimples deepen. There are two in his left cheek, one in his right, plus the one in his chin. Quadruple dimples. When he steps up to the bar with one of the women on his team to order the first pitchers in an endless stream of beer, I close one eye so I can appreciate how broad his shoulders are, the chiseled shape of his calf muscles.

The Putnam players start shoving tables together in the main part of the bar. It’s only two o’clock, so we rugby women have the place to ourselves. I grab a seat and am gratified, a few minutes later, when Scott sits by me and not by any of the Carson College players.

When he throws an arm over the back of my chair, I’m threaded through with excitement and wariness in a combination I’m not sure what to do with.

He’s flirting with you. He likes you.

He looks nice, but how nice is anybody, really? What does he look at when he jerks off?

Maybe he’s seen my pictures, and that’s why he’s being so friendly. He thinks I’m an easy mark. He’s imagining my mouth on him. Calling me a slut inside his head.

“So, Carrie.” He’s half smiling, his body loose, everything about him relaxed and easy. “What brings you to the game of rugby today?”

I remind myself that just because my pictures are online doesn’t mean every man alive has seen them. I’d never even heard of these gross porn picture sites before August, and while I know guys look at a lot more porn than girls do, I don’t think that means they’re all scouring the Internet for crotch shots in every second of their free time.

It’s possible that Scott is just a guy who thinks my name is Carrie and wants to get to know me better.

More than possible. Likely.

So I take a deep breath. I smell yeasty beer and dirt and perspiration. I look around the table and think, I’m safe here. These women have got my back. And if they trust Scott—if they like him, which they obviously do—then it’s okay for me to trust him, too. At least a little bit.

“Quinn strong-armed me into it.”

“Really?” His eyes kind of flick over me, but not in a perverted way. Just in the normal way that a guy looks at a girl when he’s about to say, “You don’t strike me as someone who’s easily strong-armed.”

“Well, I was kind of drunk at the time.”

“Ah. I know how that goes.”

One of the Carson girls is standing on a chair, pint glass in the air. Everyone is shouting and happy, and I can’t concentrate on more than snatches of conversation.

“Blow jobs.” “Six tries.” “The best rucker in the universe.” “World Cup.”

Quinn grinning her widest grin, wiggling her fingers, saying, “Some of us don’t need a cock to get off.”

Gwen pours and pushes a glass in my direction. “Drink!”

When she turns away, I tell Scott, “Just so you know, I’m not drinking this whole thing. I have a quiz tomorrow.”

“That’s fine. I’m not drinking, either.” I look at his glass and see that he’s got water instead of beer. I hadn’t noticed. “I’m the designated driver.”

“Is this, like, your job?” I ask.

“No, I get paid to assist the coach during the games, but now I’m just here because a bunch of these girls are my friends, and I don’t want them to get themselves killed on the way home.”

“That’s good.”

He smiles. “It’s not like it’s a hardship. You want me to get you some water?”

“No, thanks. I’m good.”

He lifts his own glass and clinks it into mine. “To your first game of rugby. Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

“Wait, whose first game?” one of the Carson players asks.

Scott points at me. “Carrie’s. She never played before today.”

“Ladies, we’ve got a virgin in the house!”

Before I know what’s even going on, I’m standing on top of a table, and forty women are singing to me.

Oh, rugby women are the biggest and the best

And we never give it up

And we never give it a rest

And we build a better ruck

And we give a better fuck

And no matter who we play, we can never get enough

Out in the field! Down in the scrum! Rugby women will make you come!

My throat is so hot, but I’m smiling.

It is impossible not to smile. I feel strong and fast, bruised and shaken, surrounded by affectionate solidarity.

I feel normal again, like I used to, before everything went off the rails.

In Massachusetts, there’s an office building where it’s someone’s job to erase Caroline Piasecki’s vulva from the Internet. If it works, in a year, that girl won’t exist anymore. She’ll be dead, and part of me will be dead along with her.

Maybe in the meantime what I’m supposed to do is grow into someone new. Find something green in me, feed it, watch it shoot up toward the sun. Turn into a girl who plays rugby and dances at parties and flirts with boys who are sunny and open and who don’t deal drugs or avoid discussing even the smallest details of their personal lives.

Rugby is awesome.

I’m so flipping hard-core, I can’t even stand it.

The first time I see the inside of West’s apartment, he’s not home.

I feel weird about it, but it’s not as though I snuck in. Me and Bridget ran into Krishna at the student center, and he invited us over with him and Quinn to watch bad TV and drink “even worse” alcohol. None of us could resist the allure of the mysterious “even worse.”

So here we are, sprawled out on a big leather sectional couch, sharing a bottle of butterscotch schnapps that Krishna produced from the depths of the coat closet, and watching reruns of What Not To Wear, which Krish has stored up on his DVR in numbers that kind of frighten me.