Chapter 3: Digital Exposure
The silence of the library was a physical thing, a dense, dusty blanket that lay over everything. It was the polar opposite of the thrumming bass and shouted conversations that had filled her head for what felt like weeks. Brittany sat in a carved wooden carrel, her history textbook open to a chapter on the Renaissance. The words swam on the page, meaningless. Her body felt strange—hollowed out and heavy at the same time. A deep, tender ache pulsed between her legs, a persistent echo. Every few minutes, a phantom sensation would whisper across her skin: the chill of silk, the scratch of stubble, the bite of a grip.
She shifted in the hard chair, wincing. She pulled out her phone, a reflexive gesture. A notification glowed on the screen: a tag from an unknown account on the campus social app, “RushFeed.” The preview text read: EPIC Phi Kappa Beta Wrap Party. Legends were made.
A cold trickle, unrelated to the library’s chill, traced her spine. She tapped it.
The video loaded. The angle was high, looking down from the headboard or a shelf. The lighting was low, ambient, outlining familiar shapes. Her own blonde hair fanned out on charcoal silk. Laura’s curls, wild and dark. The first frame was static, then motion. Her own back arching, a soundless cry on her lips as Laura’s head moved between her thighs.
Brittany’s breath stopped. The air vanished from the room.
Her thumb scrolled. It wasn’t one video. It was a thread. Dozen of clips, stitched together from different angles. Some close, grainy. Some clear, horrifically intimate. There she was, on her knees before Chad. There was Laura, surrounded. Sweat-slicked skin, muscle straining, faces contorted in ecstasy she remembered and in grotesque close-ups she’d never seen. The final clip was a wide shot, the entire bed a tangle of moving limbs, a silent, squirming organism.
The comments scrolled beneath, a torrent of avatars and nicknames.
—Phi Kap goats doing god’s work
—which one is which lol
—cheer squad putting in WORK this year
—sluts.
—source? asking for a friend
—they’re loving every second of it look at her face
Brittany made a small, choked sound, like a mouse caught in a trap. Her hands began to vibrate, the phone shimmering in her grip.
“What?” Laura whispered from the next carrel. She was pretending to read a sociology text, her brow furrowed. “You okay?”
Brittany couldn’t speak. She turned the screen, her movement jerky.
Laura leaned over. She squinted, then her eyes widened, swallowing the dark pools of her pupils. She snatched the phone. Her thumb swiped, her face inches from the screen, pale under the library’s yellowed light. The video played. This time, with sound.
A low, rhythmic wetness. A high, keening gasp—Brittany’s own voice, tinny and foreign through the phone’s speaker. Laura fumbled, her fingers slipping, turning the volume up instead of down. A moan, deep and guttural—Laura’s—echoed in the silent study aisle.
“Turn it off,” Brittany hissed, her voice a ragged scrape.
Too late.
Heads lifted from books at neighboring tables. A guy in a baseball cap stared, his mouth slightly open. Two girls at a periodicals desk paused their whispered conversation, their eyes locking onto Laura’s stricken face, then darting to Brittany.
Laura finally killed the screen, plunging their carrel back into a silence now pregnant with something else. The silence of held breath. Of shared, illicit knowledge.
“Oh my god,” Laura breathed. All color had drained from her face. The reserved, knowing girl was gone, replaced by a panicked child. “Oh my fucking god, Britt. They filmed it. They fucking filmed all of it.”
“How?” Brittany’s words were numb. Her lips felt like rubber. “The door was locked.”
Laura’s eyes darted around the cavernous room, as if seeing cameras in every dark wood cornice. “The room. Chad’s room. It was set up. The angles… it was a set up.” The realization hit her voice, making it thin and sharp. “He planned it. The whole thing. The party, the coke, leading us up there… it was a fucking production.”
The weight of it settled on Brittany, crushing the last of the bubbly numbness from the night before. It hadn’t been a chaotic, passionate secret. It had been content. A transaction where they were the currency, and they hadn’t even known the price.
A soft snicker came from two carrels down. The baseball cap guy was looking at his own phone now, showing it to his friend. He didn’t look away when Brittany met his eyes. He smirked, a slow, ugly curl of his lip.
Laura stood up so fast her chair scraped against the stone floor with a screech that tore through the quiet. Every head in their section turned. “We have to go,” she said, her voice too loud. She grabbed her bag, shoving books in without looking.
Brittany moved automatically, a marionette. She gathered her things, her fingers clumsy. As she stood, her knees nearly buckled. The ache flared, a cruel reminder. She could feel every gaze like a physical touch—probing, judging, owning. They had seen inside her. They had seen the twist of her hips, the grip of her hands, the abandon on her face. The attention she’d craved now felt like a skin being peeled off.
They walked quickly, heels clicking a frantic tattoo on the polished wood. The library’s main hall seemed to stretch for miles, the rows of towering shelves like a canyon they had to navigate. Whispers rustled in their wake, a dry, following wind.
That’s them.
…the video…
…cheerleaders…
Just before they pushed through the heavy oak doors back into the blinding afternoon light, Brittany looked back. At a large study table, a group of students huddled around a laptop. The pale glow illuminated their fascinated, grinning faces. The sound was off, but on the screen, a blonde girl was being turned onto her stomach, a hand splayed possessively on the small of her back.
The sunlight outside was a shocking assault. It was just Tuesday. People were walking to class, laughing, carrying coffees. The world was normal. Laura leaned against the rough brick of the library wall, her chest heaving. She looked at Brittany, her eyes wide with a raw, unvarnished fear.
“What do we do?” Laura asked.
Brittany looked down at her own hands. They were clean. She could shower a hundred times. She closed her eyes, and all she could see was the high, clinical angle of the camera, capturing everything, leaving nowhere to hide. The momentum of the party was gone. Only the crash remained, and it was being broadcast on a loop.
“I don’t know,” she whispered to the sidewalk. The words felt like the only true thing she’d said all day.