“This isn’t your fault. Even if you had warned me, I still would’ve done the same thing. He made me feel special.”
Yes, I’m that girl. I fell for the jock. The hot basketball star who has every girl on campus wanting to drop her panties. Feeling complete elation when I received the first message from him, being so happy I was even on his radar. Almost giddy when he knew me. Naïve in believing he saw me among all the perfection surrounding him. I ignored the warning signs and trusted him.
With an IQ of 160 and SAT scores of 1500, finding someone to talk to is hard at times. I miss social cues a lot and often speak over people heads, ramble on about useless facts and hide behind knowledge. When I registered for classes, I tested in at the sophomore level, Chase and I crossing paths in a few of my classes.
He’s beautiful—Adam Levine style eye-candy. Almost seven feet of solid, lean muscle infused man. Dark hair, short on the sides and floppy on top often styled into a faux hawk, always looking like someone just ran their fingers through it, his bright childlike smile lights up his whole face, his bedroom eyes will give you wet dreams and his charisma draws you in like a moth to a flame.
When I first started receiving messages via SnapTalk, I thought, this is my fresh start, a college man would look past all the superficial bullshit and like me for me. I never thought he had malicious intentions. I’m the moth who gets electrocuted by the bug zapper.
His beauty shined, bright like the sun but staring into the sun will leave you blind and seeing spots. Those glowing colored dots clouded my vision, blocking what was right in front of me.
SnapTalk is a social media app allowing the user to communicate with photos that disappear within seconds of being viewed, never to be seen again. Unless the person viewing them takes a screen shot. A reminder to everyone, what is out on the internet, is always there. Lurking, waiting to destroy. Screaming to be careful of what you send.
Chase and I talked back and forth for two weeks, hundreds of messages, touching on everything from our families to his basketball career; we became great friends with the promise of more, I thought. I knew something was fishy when he suggested we keep it to the messages. Advising we not acknowledge each other in class or any other public place. Claiming it was for my benefit. Having no association with him would keep the ‘wolves’ away from my door, the ball groupies and other people who are always after him.
The warning signs were blaring at me but I ignored them. I enjoyed his attention so much I was blinded by the obvious.
Chase Masters, the campus king. Wanted a picture of me. Tensanne Craig, the invisible, fat, smart girl. I should have asked “why?”, I should have said “no”, I should have been smarter. If should have’s were money, I would be a rich woman with all of them.
I was so flattered when he started asking for me to send him a topless picture, thinking he found me sexy when most thought I was revolting, that I forgot who I am. I believed he was so enamored with me, so infatuated with my inner beauty, he found me attractive on the outside too. Forgetting he’s shallow and self-serving, I believed he wanted something to get him by, our hidden relationship never allowing for alone time. We’d had a few heated exchanges in our messages, a few times where I wanted him so bad I could taste it and I believed he wanted me too.
He convinced me he needed to see ‘more’ of me so he could take care of himself. Telling me if he couldn’t touch me in person, a visual image would let him look at me while he fantasized about the bliss he would find when could sink into my body. Instead of offering to meet and move our relationship into the land of physical contact, his request rang as romantic in my attention starved brain. His words were something I would read in a romance novel, the fantasy world I could lose myself in from time to time when my brain needed a break. Right off the pages and into my life, bewitching me beyond foresight.
I wouldn’t agree to a topless nude picture, no matter how much he begged; he changed tactics asking me to send him one of me shirtless. He was relentless in his pursuit until I agreed, the biggest warning sign was his persistence.
If he genuinely cared for me he would have respected my reluctance but for one small second, I felt sexy. My brain recalling all the times I heard girls in high school talking about sending pictures to their boyfriends, finally, someone wanted one of me.
I took off my glasses, whipped my shirt off my head, posed in my best duck lips because that’s what sexy vixens do, snapped the picture and sent it off. Butterflies eating at my stomach while I waited for a response. The response never came.
Wondering if something was wrong, I pulled up my contacts to call him when Ronnie came charging in the room, furious. When she said there is an unflattering picture of me pinging on every phone on campus, I knew why I hadn’t received a response.
My boobs, better known as North America and South America, and I had gone viral.
Why didn’t I leave my face out of the picture you ask because book smart does not always equal good common sense.
Now, when I step out of the dorm, I hear nothing
