I had reason to believe I could touch stardom, and the money that came with it, as a model on Instagram. This is what I’d told my mother, how I’d sold her on my move to LA. Instagram was a business opportunity, a new frontier for entrepreneurial youths like me, youths with initiative. College stifled that sort of thing and I had read online that even rich kids were taking gap years to experience the real world. I had read that student debt was shackling my generation, condemning us to the same hardship I watched my mother weather, month by month, a running list of questions: which bills needed paying, which she could put off, what could she forego. Travel, therapy, dental work. The real world, shrunken by lack. But technology was wide open. It was where the money was. Influencers with one hundred thousand followers earned a thousand dollars a post, easy. Two hundred thousand followers equaled paid vacations to five-star resorts. Almost foolish, to want to do anything else.

I was fourteen when I received a phone of my own, but I already knew how to use it. The first thing I did was save Leah’s number under the contact “BEST FRIEND FOREVER.” My mother’s I saved as “Mommy,” which I still sometimes called her. The second thing I did was start an Instagram account, gather followers with hashtags and selfies that accentuated my youth, the teeth that took up half my face when I smiled.

My mother said my smile belonged to the grandmother who’d died before my birth. “You look so like her,” she would say and gesture at framed photographs, old black and white images of the beautiful mother she’d lost too soon. It was a source of pride for my mom, to have produced a child to carry on the legacy of her own mom’s bright smile. But she was wrong. I was prettier than my grandmother ever was. I was special, destined to transcend the small lives of the women who came before me; I was deserving of DMs from Instagram scouts, brand offers to “collab.”