That was okay. I’d learn. I’d change. I could refine my voice and clarify my point of view. My travels had deepened and educated me—didn’t I backpack through Europe with ten bucks in my pocket? Didn’t I sleep under a tree in the Parc Municipal in Luxembourg? I bought breakfast for the old woman who begged for food outside Temple Expiatori del Sagrat Cor in Barcelona and talked to the heroin addicts of Manchester. Surely all those things made me a real artist. I would take it all and express it, beauty and darkness both, hope and despair, rage, loneliness, love . . .

“Sadie,” my professor sighed during my senior year conference, “you have to stop trying to be what you’re not.” She pointed to the angry scribbles of charcoal. “This is what you think art should be.”

I tried not to let my confusion show. Wasn’t that the point?

She tilted her head. “Do you even know what you want to say with your art?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “It’s the melding of rage and darkness with the, um, the scope of architectural beauty and . . . uh, poverty. But hope, too. That things will change. For the better.”

She grimaced.

“How is this worse than Zach’s work?” I asked, because yes, my classmate had also done a series of black charcoal abstracts and gotten a show at Woodward Gallery in fucking SoHo.

My teacher folded her hands. “Zach’s work shows a modernist fusion and battle of urban life and nature. It’s a poem to the fragility and strength of humanity. The minimal quality of movement, the strength of message . . . if you don’t see the difference, Sadie, I’m concerned.”

I cried on the phone that night to Noah. “She’s wrong,” he said. “You’re fantastic, Sadie. You are. You just have to . . . I don’t know. Find your audience.”

“You mean, paint pictures of sunsets and sell them to the summer people?”

“Well, yeah. What’s wrong with that, Special?”

It was the wrong time to use that nickname, beloved though it had always been. I had just been told I was anything but special. “I want more, Noah! I don’t want to be stuck in that stupid town, painting stupid pictures of stupid clouds!”

He answered with silence.

Right. I’d given him that painting of clouds, and he’d just hung it in the little apartment he’d rented over the hardware store. He’d sent me a picture of it there.

“I’m sorry,” I said belatedly.

A few weeks later was the senior art show. Our school sent out invitations to art buyers and critics, gallery owners and collectors. Some students got a big break this way, and I was hopeful, anxious . . . and a little desperate.