CHAPTER
ONE
Audrey Coil and Blake Winston had been sexting each other for weeks.
Winston’s penis, of which Coil had seen perhaps seven or eight iPhone views in a variety of penile moods, was not clearly different than the penises of a dozen other classmates that Coil had seen, circulated through the smartphones operated by girls in their final year at The Claridge School—a school with a capital-T in “The,” so it wasn’t some Claridge School, it was The Claridge School, of Reston, Virginia.
And Coil suspected that images of her breasts wouldn’t exactly be breaking news among selected males of The Claridge School’s senior class. She was correct in that. Neither Coil nor Winston was a virgin, having dispensed with that handicap in the fifth form, known in less snotty schools as eleventh grade. They hadn’t yet fully engaged with each other, but were edging toward it . . . though, not yet.
All of that was neither here nor there. Right now, Coil’s main preoccupation wasn’t with Winston’s junk, but with his totally erect Nikon Z6 camera.
* * *
—
THERE WERE LED light panels to her left and right, dimmed by photo umbrellas that would kill any harsh shadows. A smaller light sat directly behind her, braced on a toilet seat, providing a rim light that gave a soft glow to her auburn hair. The camera sat on a tripod in the bathroom doorway, with Winston behind it.
Winston, who was seventeen, would someday inherit a bazillion dollars; his father ran a hedge fund with offices in Birmingham, Alabama, and Manhattan. In addition, Winston was good-looking, with dark eyes and dark hair, a square chin, and a pale, flawless complexion. He was further distinguished by the fact that he was already operating a profitable after-school business in video production.
At the moment, they were jammed into Coil’s bathroom on the second floor of the Coil house in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, DC.
Coil was dressed in a pale blue translucent chemise that revealed a slice of boob but—carefully—no nipple, because of the Puritan constraints of Instagram. Coil carried the fleshy pink face and body of a post-pubescent party chick, a tease and a promise, a girl that former President Bill Clinton would have instantly accepted as an intern. The daughter of U.S. Senator Roberta J. “Bob” Coil of Georgia, she was another budding entrepreneur and ran her own blog, which was spread across a number of social media outlets. The blog was called Young’nHot’nDC.
She had four paying sponsors: Macon Cosmo, a line of girly cosmetics out of Macon, Georgia; Sandy Silks, an Atlanta lingerie manufacturer marketing to richie-rich teens and college-age women; LA Psyche, a maker of dance-influenced tops and bottoms for young women, based in Paris (Texas); and Anshiser Aerospace, a defense company that simply wanted to encourage young entrepreneurs with no thought about influencing her mother, a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Coil turned away from a lighted makeup mirror, looked into the camera lens, smiled, and said, “Honest to God, I wouldn’t bullshit you girls: this line from Macon blows everything else out of the water. Why? Because the colors are gorgeous and smooth and best of all, they stay put no matter what you do to them.” She stuck out a long pink tongue, nearly touched her nose with it, then drew it back over her full upper lip, gave the lens a toothy smile, and asked, “Get it?”
* * *
—
“DONE,” WINSTON SAID. “We got it.”
“About time,” Coil said. That had been the fourth take for two minutes of video.
They went into her bedroom and Coil put on her glasses—she never wore them in public—sat cross-legged on her bed, and reviewed the video on Winston’s MacBook Pro. Coil, eyes narrowed in thought, said finally, “Y-e-a-a-a-ah, I think that’s got it.”
“If they don’t get the point from that, they won’t get it at all,” Winston said. He was standing behind her, looking down at the screen. “The big question is, you’re showing quite a bit of titty. Is it gonna pass with Senator Mom?”
“She doesn’t care what I show as long as I don’t do it in blackface,” Coil said. “And how come you say titty? Everybody else says tits or boobs. Titty sounds like an old man.”
Winston deepened his Southern accent: “That’s what you say when you’re from Alabama.”
“Oh, yeah,” Coil said. “That whole sweet-home thing.”
“Mmm. Listen, I need to clean the video up, put a credit on it,” Winston said. “I’ll email the file to you tonight.”
Coil nodded, then frowned and said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something. The other day you and Danny were talking about that photo-matching app. I was wondering if my stuff is getting around the ’net. You know, outside my own blog. Could you . . .”
“Yeah, take about twelve seconds,” Winston said. He sat next to her, took the laptop, grabbed a bunch of frames from the photo shoot that showed Coil’s head from different angles, including four that were almost head-on, but with varying expressions. He went to a website called Da’Guerre, dragged the photos into an open window, and pressed Return.
He handed the laptop back to Coil as it busied itself with whatever computers do. Winston stood and eased up behind Coil, who leaned the back of her head against his crotch and started slowly rubbing. In one minute, which was about two minutes too soon for Winston, the computer produced a hundred photos of young women who looked an awful lot like Coil, including six that were Coil.
“Are they all mine?” Winston asked. He leaned over her shoulder and touched the screen with a fingernail. “Wait. Not this one . . . I think that’s the yearbook photo from last year. Didn’t you put that up on the blog?”
“Yes—when I was bitching about how bad they make you look in yearbooks . . . but what’s this?” Coil asked. She reached out at the screen, pointing at one of the photos. “That’s me with Molly. We’re walking out of school. Where did that come from?”
“We shot that for the blog post about the see-through yoga pants, remember? You guys were talking about seeing some fat chick’s ass crack in the yoga class. It was only up for a day or two.”
“Yeah, but . . . what’s this link . . .”
They followed the link out to a blog called 1919, a primitive piece of work that featured candid photos of what looked like kids walking along different streets, or standing outside what appeared to be schools. A single column of type ran down the left side of the screen, which they ignored for the moment.
Winston said, “What the hell?”
“Yeah, what the hell? How’d that get over here?”
“Who are these other people?” Winston asked.