The bouncer waved us in, underhanded, his eyes fixed on the line I’d left. Jake took my hand and his palm was clammy. I moved closer, close enough to eke heat, close enough to smell his Acqua Di Gió, which all the boys in my high school had worn. Jake was twenty-nine but he reeked “fresh aromatic” like an eighteen-year-old, familiar, unthreatening. He led me down a narrow hallway, a dark canal that opened into vampiric light, house music and beautiful bodies arrayed in patterns that seemed ornamental, everyone with wet, parted lips and drinks in their hands. Like something from a movie, something I hadn’t believed existed in real life. But I had wanted it to be real, had surrendered my self-limiting beliefs, and now here it was, real. Girls on Instagram called this manifestation. Entrepreneurial gurus like Tony Robbins and Pat Flynn called it creating one’s own reality. The music swelled. Strobes timed to match it split the dark. So I could still see Jake’s eyes when he turned to face me, pewter blue contact lenses, too bright to be real, obviously fake. And almost bold because of it. But also basic, dated, especially next to the beads, the cologne. Though he didn’t seem to know it. I knew the truth and Jake did not and this gave me power.

Mine was, “the fickle power of teenage girlhood,” a temporary currency, according to my mother. Objectifying myself could never make me happy, she said, though she was wrong. Her version of feminism was outdated, too rigid to work in the real, digital world where I was in control of my body, my content, and smart to leverage the short blush of my youth for what was permanent and sure: power like Jake’s, his power to sign and promote me, his power not to. His was a power shored up by money and other men’s power. His was the power of choice, the power to leave and not be left. Which was what I wanted. To transcend my mother’s fate, and mine. To make more of our abandonment, my father’s leaving. I wanted to turn the story around and choose how I spent my time, made my money, presented my body. I wanted the power that came with certainty, what was real, what was illusion. I wasn’t sure there was a difference, wasn’t sure there should be.