When I was fifteen or sixteen, just for a few months in that time frame, I was very close to a girl named Shannon. We sat next to each other in Western Civilizations class. She was fascinating and strange. Beautiful, all freckled, had good genes (her parents were still fucking each other, which I knew because she told me she could hear them, this bothered her but I was jealous she was the spawn of people who were still attractive enough to do that), I liked her. She made me feel special. She was bizarre, obsessed with the concept of evil (she kept an ongoing list of the Most Evil Man in History, updating it as the West Civ class progressed, eventually putting Stalin in the coveted number-one slot and then floundering between uncertainty and assuredness that the gulags were much much worse than anything Hitler did). She said a psychic came to her house once and said that in a past life she had been her brother’s mother. I loved knowing her. When he had to do book reports for our Literature and Composition class, we both chose Fahrenheit 451. I cared about book burning. She cared about the future.

She had a flat tummy and her bra looked molded to her body.

One day Shannon came to school visibly upset. Her daddy had been taken in on soft drug charges the night before. I was jealous. My daddy read Hemingway and subscribed to running magazines.

In gym class, we walked to Starbucks instead of to the park, like we were supposed to. I didn’t bring my money. She bought me a Frappuccino.

Today she posted a picture on Facebook of herself in a body-con black minidress, hugging a boy in Bermuda shorts, the caption was ‘derby day with the Kappas,’ her sorority, or maybe his frat, I’m not sure.

The first guy I did oral sex with posted a photoset of her on his Tumblr. He got the photos from Facebook. In each photo, Shannon is wearing the same leopard-print dress, standing at the same 45-degree angle, hand on hip, her hair slung back, other arm around a girl in a similar dress mirroring her position.

I have no conclusion.