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she was interested in radio.
    She had done some work for the local community radio station. In the beginning, it had just been answering phones and running errands, but she had worked her way up to the point where they actually let her co-host one of the weekly call-in shows. The program manager had advised her that if she wanted to go any further, she’d need to get some sort of professional education, so she’d applied to three different schools. Westhill was the only one that had said yes and even offered a special grant that would cover most of her tuition.
    Her parents certainly weren’t going to do it. Her father had been killed in a construction accident building a winter road for the Victory Mine. Her mother had a small part-time job sweeping floors at the water treatment plant. Her older brother had fried most of his brain inhaling solvents with his friends, two of whom had died in a fire the year before. She wanted a ticket out and was pretty sure that this was the best one she was going to get.
    It was quite an adjustment to come from a place where most places didn’t have heat or even running water to a city the size of Westhill. Shalene had never been off the reserve before. She had never seen a real shopping mall, let alone one with a parking lot almost larger than her home town. She’d never ridden on a city bus. Or eaten at a fast food chain. Or gone to a campus pub night.
    Which was where she met Terrence Devane.
    Terry, as he called himself, was supposed to be enrolled in the automotive program but hardly ever seemed to go to any actual classes. He spent most of his time hanging out in his apartment, which was in the basement of a rundown triplex in the north end of town. There he would drink, smoke a seemingly endless supply of pot, and tinker with his video setup. He said he was working on a series of short films that he would upload to the internet. He said a few of them had gone “viral”, whatever that meant, and that it wouldn’t be long before they made him rich.
    He had seemed nice at the beginning. She’d never had a real boyfriend before. Candidates back home were pretty thin on the ground. He bought her a small silver necklace. It was just a chain, but it was still nice. He took her to a real restaurant, then out to her first movie in a real movie theatre, where she had to wear 3D glasses and ducked and screamed when objects came flying out of the screen.
    She had no idea that he was videotaping her when they had sex. Or that it was the primary subject of the short films he was putting up on the internet for the whole world to see.
    She found out in the worst way possible. One of the other students in her class somehow found the video and emailed it to practically everyone else. She was humiliated. She complained to the head of the department, but all that happened was that the student who emailed the video was given a warning not to do anything like that again. Her classmates seemed to think the whole thing was hilarious, nicknaming her “Deep Throat” and “Fuckahontas” behind her back. She could barely bring herself to go in to school.
    When she confronted Terry with it, he got nasty.
    He said she had probably known all along and was just pretending to be upset because people had found out about it. He said he would tell her department head and she would lose her grant and be kicked out of school and be forced to move back to the reserve. He said he had friends who could make her just disappear because no one would care about another dead Indian whore. She was terrified, so she kept her mouth shut.
    And, of course, he kept doing it.
    He specialized in picking up girls at campus pubs and sometimes from the bars in town. He’d drop something into their drinks, bring them home, film them when they were barely aware of what they were doing, and then kick them out the next morning. Most of them had no idea they had become part of his growing porn empire.
    Shalene was forced to watch