When the pictures posted I catapulted from 6,000 to 20,000 Instagram follows, earned $4,000. So much growth, so quickly. Like the solution to an ailment I hadn’t known I suffered, a power I’d known was possible, but hadn’t anticipated would be easy to claim. So easy, the number of dollars in my account, the number of people at my fingertips, all of them wanting, waiting for solutions I might offer, products I might sell, power I might promise. When I hit 20,000 I screamed and jumped and took a selfie, trademark smiling, proving to myself how happy I was. But really, I was thinking of what more I could make for myself, what more I could make for my mother, now that I was backed by a number that would continue to grow if I worked at it, leveraged my number for a bigger, better number. Leverage was how empires were built, the walls of a well-made house high and thick and every bill paid on time, everyone inside healthy and safe. I subscribed to Business Insider, spent hours reading beyond their paywall. I learned that persistence is an essential quality of successful entrepreneurs. Gut, I thought when I took selfies. Keto, I whispered when I opened the fridge. It felt like a promise Los Angeles could help me keep and I begged my mother for a trip. Finally, when summer came—my seventeenth, her forty-eighth—she agreed. We flew from Houston to Los Angeles for Star Tours, studio tours, the Hollywood Sign. We stayed three nights, walked for three days up and down Sunset Boulevard, Melrose Boulevard, Hollywood Boulevard, in and out of amusement parks: Universal Studios, California Adventure, and the newly opened Fairy Tale Land, our favorite. Afterward, I imagined graduating high school and returning to LA. And now here I was, returned.

LATE NIGHTS IN the Airbnb, once my housemates went quiet, I turned on every lamp in my room, set up my ring light and tripod, which was cheap and plastic. I arranged its spider legs tenderly, like a girl with a doll, then took off all my clothes and experimented with angles that suggested, but did not show, my naked body. Gut. Keto. Facetune. Photoshop, which I’d learned in an afterschool class my freshman year of high school. At the time, I used Instagram filters, but that was all. At the time, it sort of outraged me, how people were Photo-shopping their content in secret. So even as I learned to alter my images, I told myself I’d use my power carefully. The class progressed, and I got into searching for Instagram versus reality accounts that placed celebrities’ and influencers’ untouched photos and unpaid paparazzi candids next to the edited images they posted on their accounts: realistic waists and jaws slimmed down and snatched, cellulite painted over, passed off as real. Yes, it outraged me to see how they’d lied. It entranced me, what they truly looked like versus what they shared.