9publisher’s offi ce. Soon, despite her best
eff orts to repress her feelings, she is suf-
fering from classic symptoms of PTSD
— fl ashbacks and intrusive thoughts,
hyperarousal and insomnia, avoidance
and withdrawal. She even disavows her
own memories of the event, describing
them to the police as images in her head
that don’t belong there.
The carefree, independent sense of
herself Arabella is trying to protect — the
safe, salable self she’s carefully construct-
ed and put forth in a book called ‘‘Chron-
icles of a Fed-Up Millennial’’ — is perhaps
not as solid or secure in the world as
she would like to believe. Her beloved
friends are not always trustworthy. We
learn that she is estranged from her fam-
ily. Her long-distance boyfriend — sweet
but traumatized himself — refuses to talk
about their relationship. After the assault,
her anxious editors pay for therapy and
hire a more established writer to help
with the book, but he resents and belit-
tles Arabella’s success, which he sees as
fl uky and undeserved. (He went to Cam-
bridge, while she got a book deal based
on a popular Twitter account.) He ends
up raping her himself, then gaslighting
her into thinking he hasn’t — which shenearly goes along with, because she, too,
wants to believe everything is fi ne.
The person Arabella is texting during
that spray-painting session opens up the
door into an especially fraught chain of
guilt, complicity and emotional damage.
It’s a former classmate, a white woman
named Theo, who has formed a support
group for survivors of sexual abuse,
which Arabella joins. In high school, we
learn, Theo was incensed when the Black
classmate she thought was her boyfriend
took her picture during sex and, when she
asked him to delete it, off ered her money
instead. She then falsely accused him ofAmount Coel
says she turned
down from
Netflix in an effort
to retain a
copyright share
in the show:
$1,000,