Taking Nudes

by Annabel Gould

In a Brandy set, in a dorm mirror, in the library disabled stall because your situationship decreed it. It requires an aesthetic sensibility.

Recently though, I keep pausing mid-session to look at Sophie Rain leaks on Reddit. She has a beautiful figure. I wanted to feel aristocratic in comparison but all I got was disappointment.

Disappointment. In freshman year this Depop girl in the dining hall told me that guys only like me because I look young. Guys like me because I know about Hou Hsiao Hsien and cyclocross. TikTok warns us of pedophiles, or worse, ephebephiles.

Later that year, enter Claire’s dorm eating Cheez-Its and holding a flat beer. We watched a free Turkish dub of I Believe in Unicorns, which is about this Tumblr girl who gets groomed by Lil Huddy. We scrolled on our phones. One hour and two minutes into the movie he gets kind of rough with the girl. We can’t look away. That is disgusting, I reassured myself. I must be experiencing internalized misogyny or something. Before you look it up, there’s no full frontal. But the message of this movie is that you have to leave your victim in a barn.

But back to the Sophie Rain thing. You can join these goon chats online and talk to oil rig workers about their favorite videos. It must get lonely out there. But the Bop House is great.

I went to The Dalton School so I only became sexual recently. Dalton is this expensive K-12 where everyone is nerdy and repressed and it’s not at all like Woody Allen’s Manhattan. No one got groomed or anything. It was much more fun to hang out with the LaGuardia kids. They acted like these elusive skater thugs, even though they just drew all day, or so I imagined. They had cracked phone screens and weed pens, and sometimes they snuck into abandoned subway stations. But mostly they just fucked.

I idolized this Polish Brooklyn girl named Natalia, who had pantherblack hair and an amazing Instagram face. She vaped and wore flared leggings with crystals on the butt. Once on St Marks Place I watched her convince this busker that she was 18, and apparently they had sex in Tompkins. She was beautiful. But then she ran away from home to live with her plug boyfriend, Boofie, in Trenton. She was everything. She gave blowjobs. Her Snapscore was a million. Probably because of all the nudes she took.

I could identify her nudes anywhere, from her blurry Lil Peep tattoos.