I dressed, bare skin behind my clothes like a secret, safe with me, a pulled together girl, all the mess shorn off. A girl wise enough to identify the mess in the first place, and to fix it. I tipped using a formula my mother taught me (move the decimal point, then double it), called a car and walked out into Los Angeles. Ash on the air, and fire.

MY LYFT DRIVER was a man who spoke with fear about his teenage daughter. “Six thousand dollars to get her on drill team,” he said. “But she has to maintain a 4.0. Then she can do what she wants.”

“Smart,” I said.

“What do you do?” he asked.

I didn’t have an answer. I had only been in Los Angeles two weeks, only been a high school graduate for six. No father cared what I did or didn’t do; mine had always been absent. Rich and old, he’d left by my third birthday. But in a way, he’d given me a gift, freedom, by abandoning me. Because here I was, hustling harder for what I’d lost.

“I’m a freshman at USC,” I told the driver, a lie in the shape of what I thought he wanted to hear. We pulled up to my Airbnb.

“Be safe out there, baby,” he said. I thanked him, got out, rolled my eyes. As if he knew what was safe for girls. As if his own daughter wasn’t miserable most likely, forced onto the drill team, so lame.

THE AIRBNB WAS a room in a bungalow off Robertson, shared with three other girls—community theater kids turned Hollywood waitstaff, auditioning endlessly, whining about flakey agents and acting coaches. Girls with next to no internet presence, who wanted a different sort of stardom, a different screen. When I suggested they build platforms, use Instagram to get noticed, they thanked me, but laughed a little, snarky, like they thought social media was superficial, uncreative, a crutch. So almost as soon as I moved in, I stopped talking to them. At night, they sat around the communal kitchen table running lines, projecting and enunciating like they were already on stage. To escape them, I walked. Beyond the smoke, the air smelled of flowers. Red bougainvillea draped over balconies and looked, in the fading light, like entrails, touched with blue. I took photos for my feed, captured the LA light, the Spanish-style mansions, winding wrought iron, ocean on the air, which cooled at night to a deep desert chill I’d never felt before. All of it was so new, so utterly unlike Houston, my mother, the stale and humid library where she worked, the chronic complaints she made about her body—its size and shape and ailments—always searching for something to cure. I turned the camera to my face and spoke as I walked. “Gonna be a big staaaah,” I said and smooched the lens.