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.

That would be the binder neatly labeled If You Weren’t with Nate.

But it wasn’t the way the guy looked that got me. It was the way he moved.

I want to say that he swaggered out of the car, except that makes it sound like he was trying too hard, and he just obviously wasn’t. He was naturally that graceful and loose-hipped and, God, I don’t even know. You’ll have to take my word for it.

He glanced all around. His gaze settled on me. “You the welcome wagon?”

“Sure,” I said.

He stepped closer and stuck out his hand. “I’m West Leavitt.”

“Caroline Piasecki.”

“Nice to meet you.”

His hand was warm and dry. It made me conscious of my clammy, gritty grip and of the sweat under my arms. My deodorant had failed hours ago, and I could smell myself. Awesome.

“Did you drive here?” I asked.

The corner of his mouth quirked up, but he sounded very serious when he said, “Yes.”

“From where?”

“Oregon.”

“Wow.”

That made his mouth hitch up a little more, almost into a smile.

“How far is that?”

“About two thousand miles.”

I looked at his car. I looked in his car.

Okay, so the truth is, I stepped closer to his car, away from him, and leaned over and peered inside. The backseat was crammed with camping gear and an aquarium full of lightbulbs and tangled electrical wire, plus a giant clear trash bag that was moist with condensation and contained what appeared to be dirt. There was also a huge box full of cans of Dinty Moore beef stew and a few randomly flung shirts.

The car looked like a hobo lived in it. I was fascinated.

I was also kind of afraid to keep looking at him. I could see from his reflection in the car window that he was stretching his arms behind his back, which had the effect of tightening his T-shirt and putting things on display that I was probably better off not looking at.

“You drove by yourself?” I asked.

“Sure.”

He lifted his arms up into the air to stretch his shoulders. His shirt rode up, and I glanced away from his reflection, embarrassed. “With the windows down?”

I was just making words with my mouth at that point. All sense had abandoned me.

“Yeeeeeah,” he said slowly. When I snuck a look at him, his eyes were full of mischief. “Sometimes I even got crazy and stuck an arm out.”

I felt my throat flush hot. Returning to being unforgivably nosy about his car seemed the wisest course of action.

I noticed a sleeping bag on the front seat and wondered if he’d been using it right there where it lay. Did he just pull over on the side of the road, lower the passenger seat, and sleep? Did he eat cold stew out of cans? Because that was definitely a can opener in the cup holder.

And that was definitely a slightly crushed, open box of condoms on the passenger-bay floor.

“Don’t you worry about botulism?”

Now, in my defense, I actually did have a reason for the question. I saw the cans, noticed that a number of them were dented and dinged up, and then remembered this high school bio class where we learned about anaerobic bacteria and how they grow in airless places. Sometimes cans get dented and there’s a teensy tiny hole that you can’t even see, but bacteria get in and they go crazy replicating themselves. When you open the can, the food just looks normal, so you eat it, but then you die.