“That’s not me,” Angel made herself say. She felt very cold and sick with the sense that her life was on a precipice and that everything would soon become very, very horrible. The library was mostly empty except for three girls on yearbook conferencing in the far corner, but still Angel covered the screen with her hand. “That’s not me,” she said again, voice hoarse.
“I know that.” Ryan blushed.
“No you don’t. Delete it.”
“Of course. I just thought you should know. See? I’m deleting it.” And he did, right in front of her, which was pretty considerate of him, except that it was also the bare minimum of human decency.
If Priscilla had been hoping the pic would go viral, she was disappointed, because all the people she’d implored not to show anyone hadn’t shown anyone, which, when you think about it, kind of makes you feel good about the teens of today.
Angel was nonetheless humiliated. Every one of the recipients of the text—maybe about twenty people, Angel’s classmates and friends—must have imagined Angel naked, must have compared the image in their heads to the image on their phones. Every one of them must have wondered if posing in such a way was, indeed, something Angel might do. And it scared Angel to think, given how easily she’d hooked up with guys she hardly knew （mostly with protection）， that maybe she might actually have allowed herself to be photographed or filmed—or, even scarier, how easily she might have been photographed or filmed without allowing it at all. She’d seen how swiftly girls’ lives got ruined. It took a fraction of a second.
Even now, thinking about what might have happened, Angel feels the heat of humiliation spread through her. Priscilla denied originating the image—“Don’t play like that! We’re best friends!”—and Angel pretended to believe her red-faced denial, but who else could it have been? At any rate, when Angel discovered she was pregnant, it was an easy choice to drop out of school and deactivate her social media accounts and flee. She even felt grateful; if she had to be punished, pregnancy was preferable to showing up on the internet.
“By the way, Cilla,” Angel said as a parting shot, on that last day at school, her belly already swelling beneath her sweater, “you should probably know that Kevin’s the father.”
Kevin wasn’t the father—they hadn’t even had full sex, just some groping—but Angel said it to ruin Kevin for Priscilla. No, the father is Ryan Johnson, oblivious Ryan Johnson, and only Angel knows this fact.
Even before the Kevin episode, even before she found out she was pregnant, Angel had had moments when she really did feel kind of filthy and used. Certainly, in a few instances, it was tricky to tell who was using whom. Is it possible that Angel got so carried away with her own power that she actually did give something up—not her virginity or （she touches her belly） her freedom, because, yes, obviously those are long gone—but something hard to articulate between desire and dignity and choice?
One night last summer at a party, a senior girl who must have heard of Angel’s reputation brought her into the pink-tiled bathroom and gave her three condoms from her purse. “You don’t have to do it, you know. Only do it if you want to,” the senior told Angel, and Angel was so touched by the concern that she blushed. Then the older girl offered her heroin, waggling a little baggie, and, when Angel declined, smiled and shrugged and gestured to the door with her chin.
She was a little fool, Angel understands now. She’d felt chosen and desired, granted access to a rarified world. But all that time, she’d actually been excluding herself, incrementally and irrevocably, from the life of school and friends and teenage concerns.
And now here she is in Las Penas, wedged up in the mountains, cut off forever from that life. All around: pi?on and juniper and crumbly pink dirt. She’s so far out here that no future could find her even if it came GPS-equipped. Again she scrolls through her texts to see if she missed one from her mom. Not one single person knows where she is right now. Angel is a minor! Shouldn’t someone be keeping an eye out for her?