That’s what got us all into this mess in the first place.

A bar of moonlight split my room in two. I sat at my desk and flattened my hands to stop their shaking.

“Ellis, have you ever thought about killing yourself?”

I turned on the banker’s lamp. Pulled a sketchpad from beneath a pile of art history books, a drawing pencil from the cup. Dull tip. It took a minute to find a razor blade and another to shave a point.

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“But I mean, have you fantasized about how you’d do it?”

The last time I’d drawn was three months ago. I flipped past my final sketches, studies of hands, wrists, delicate birdlike bones. Blank page. The pencil looked like someone had massacred it with a hatchet, but there was enough graphite to work with.

I switched it to my drawing hand.

At physical therapy, they said my nerve damage was healing well except near the elbow, where bone had broken through skin. When you hit your “funny bone,” what you’re really feeling is the tingle of the exposed ulnar nerve being struck. Mine felt like that permanently. They test ulnar damage by having the patient grip a piece of paper between thumb and forefinger, then they pull the paper away. An uninjured person holds on easily. Someone like me crooks their thumb into a claw, desperately trying to hold on with the surrounding muscles.

I failed the test every week. It wasn’t healing.

“You’re lucky you’re young,” the physical therapist had said. “You have time to retrain.”

“What the fuck is lucky about this?”

The medical questionnaire had asked what I’d done for a living before the injury. Did I expect this injury to negatively impact my career? Would I like assistance transitioning into a new job field?

I’d crumpled it (with my trainable hand) and flung it in the trash.

The PT had ticked a box on his clipboard that I assumed read DENIAL.

Now I propped the sketchpad in my lap, held the pencil in a loose paintbrush grip. Much of drawing comes from the shoulder, not the hand. The hand is for fine detail; bold, smooth lines come from the whole arm. Even though my ulnar was toast I could compensate with other nerves and muscles—with vastly diminished control and progressively increasing pain.

When I pressed the onyx tip to the paper my arm drooped and a thick black scar tore across the sheet.

I had as much grip strength as a toddler.

I gritted my teeth. Try again. This time I managed to draw steadily for an inch before my hand weakened and the line zigzagged.

Try again.

“If I really wanted to die,” Ellis said, “I’d build in redundancy. Opiates and alcohol in a warm bath.”

“Wow. You’re even nerdy about suicide.”

“Anything can fail. Always have a fallback.”

The page filled with a schizoid flurry of dark wires. Lines that could not connect to each other, out of sync, out of touch. An accidental self-portrait.

Desperately, I took the pencil in my left hand and tried again. Same result: childish scribbling.

Everything was still in my brain—how the human skeleton fits together, how ribbons of muscle furl and twist around bones, how light and shadow paint objects into three dimensions—but it was locked inside and I could not extract it and put it on fucking paper anymore.

“If you were actually going to kill yourself, how would you do it?” Elle said.

“I don’t know. With whatever was nearby, I guess.”

“You don’t care how?”

“I care more about the note.”

It was so like us—she was always hung up on how, when all I cared about was why.

“What would your note say?”

“Not really a note. A drawing.”

“Of what?”

I ripped the sheet from the pad (with my trainable hand) and mashed it in my fist, tighter and tighter till it felt like my skin could absorb it, make it vanish.

“Of what I love most.”

Of you.

(—Bergen, Vada. One Thousand Ways to Say Good-Bye. Charcoal drawing on paper.)

The razor glinted on the desk, clean and bright.

Calling to me.

Put something else in your hands. Now.

I took out my phone. And there was Frankie’s message.

I know. It’s a cliché: life robs girl; girl sells body. But I didn’t think of it like that. And I didn’t think of it affirmatively, as me finding worth in my flesh despite losing the part I prized most, my primary hand. I didn’t think of it as being sex-positive or even having much to do with sex at all.

I was just broke and sad and lonely, like everyone else on this planet. The Internet is life, and life is a bunch of lonely people making money off each other’s longing.

I hurled myself onto the bed and flipped open my laptop.

Okay, cam girl. Show me what you’ve got.

The front page was a grid of images: pussies, asses, tits, mouths, a catalog of every fuckable orifice and cleft in full HD. Skin everywhere, pale peach and buttery gold and creamy brown. Few faces; the occasional tat or piercing became a substitute for identity. The bodies were in the middle of teasing themselves and others with toys and fingers, spreading legs to the lens, stroking breasts and cocks. The images had captions like #cumshow at 500 tokens and #anal play close-ups. Most of the cammers were girls, waxed and tweezed and lotioned till their hairless skin shone, but a handful were boys, also polished. They were ranked by popularity.

Tiana was number one.

Clicking her thumbnail took me to a page with a live webcam and a chat box. In the cam, Tiana/Frankie, still in her white dress, sprawled across a canopy bed. Amber light drifted through muslin bed drapes and diffused into a warm mist. Tiana looked like a reposing empress, one knee raised to show the shadow between her legs. She smiled down at her laptop screen.

The chat was full of things like this:

ImUrDaddy: spread ur legs more honey

ImUrDaddy: u look so hot

jiffylubed: how are you tonight bb?

AlphaBillionaire has tipped Tiana 200 tokens.

choclit_luvr: lets see dat pussy

Tiana’s mouth quirked. “You’re impatient tonight, boys and girls.”

Her hand trailed up her shin and caught the hem of her dress, as if on accident. It rode up her thighs. She wasn’t wearing panties.

choclit_luvr: FUCK YEAH BB

jiffylubed: exquisite.

ImUrDaddy: touch urself

She teased. When a user tipped her with tokens, more skin appeared. Eventually the dress came off. She cupped her breasts, dipped a hand between her thighs. Took her time. Those hands moved over her own skin as if she were sculpting it for us, creating herself out of nothing. Her viewers grew wild. Trash-talked each other. Lunged against invisible leashes, barely civil. The more frenzied they became, the more languorous her movements.

No. She wasn’t slowing down—I was just caught up in the hysteria with all the others.

At two thousand tokens, the page informed us, Tiana would perform a blowjob. The tokens ticked up. So did my pulse. Part of me prayed she’d blow the blond boy from the party. He was my type to a T—slender, viperous, his eyes hooded and knowing. Boys like that usually knew how to fuck, took it slow, made you come first. But another part of me felt a strange resentment. As if I deserved to be in that room with her. As if I were the one she called to every time she gazed deeply into the cam. I knew that on her side she was facing a black pinhole on her laptop, a lens into nothingness. There was nothing between us. Only light dancing down wires. But somehow it still felt like she was looking at me.

Which was exactly what every other Joe Blow was undoubtedly feeling.

The token counter flashed GOAL MET.

“Thank you, gentlemen. Ladies.” I could swear she winked at the cam. She bent over, flashing bare ass and a slash of damp pink, and pulled a box from beneath her bed. “Biggest tipper gets the honors. Alpha, who will I fuck tonight?”