HE DROPPED ME at my Airbnb. The foyer, full of shoes. The common area, strewn with laundry. Someone had left a big sketchpad and caboodle of art supplies on the couch. I borrowed the pad, a few paintbrushes, and took them to my room, leaned a blank page against the wall, set up my selfie ring and went lampshade to lampshade, fiddling to get the light right. I sat on the floor with my props and picked up my phone, opened Instagram. I typed Leah’s handle in the search bar. She had 365 followers and a feed full of landscapes, animals and food. Unreal expanses of earth she tagged #Aussie. #Kangaroos, #Koalas, #Beaches. There was a burger without the bun, a perfect, unbitten burrito, the Sydney Opera House. It seemed intentional, the absence of her body, and had since the day she left. Freshman year of high school, her parents relocated from Houston to Australia, another oil hub. A sudden promotion, an unexpected move. Every day since then, I’d looked for her on Instagram. As if any image I found could return me to the real girl, anyway. Leah, who chewed with her mouth open and got food stuck in her braces. Leah who twerked poorly when she danced and laughed from her torso, gruff, like a man. Leah who was a know-it-all. Leah who was sometimes secretive. And yet her body was my body’s imperfect twin. The sweat and stick of it, the sweat and stick of mine. Nights of our girlhood we slept back-to-back in my bed, no space between us, no screens. Only the bunch of long nightgowns around our middles, the soft shell of Leah’s butt, pressed against mine. It was sometimes difficult to tell where she ended and I began.

My mother was the one to remind us. To parse the differences in our personalities: Leah’s, obsessive and extreme, focused on animals, sports, the great beyond. And mine: scared sometimes, sometimes needy, but happy with the safety of my world, the best friend I shared it with, the mother who pointed out our diverging bodies like she was trying to warn us we would someday grow apart. Which, of course, we did.

I put the phone down, took off my top. I forked paintbrushes between the fingers of my left hand, picked up my phone again with my right and snapped a selfie of my artist self. In Facetune, I softened my skin to a poreless sheen; I snatched my waistline, my jawline. I applied a grainy filter, to simulate the skin texture I’d erased, then arranged the edited image in the square of a new post. “The Artist’s Way,” I wrote for a caption.

I knew how trolls would respond, knew better than to engage with them the way I used to, the way I knew they wanted me to when they said—

@Super_mom_mel213: clothes please