When I was fourteen, and deeply obsessed with Diane Arbus, I saw Cass mentioned in a footnote in an Arbus biography. I knew the name, from hearing my parents talk—Cass was the closest thing Hudson had to a celebrity. I rode my bike to her house and went up to the door and knocked. She was pretty impressed by my fourteen-year-old chutzpah, and the camera around my neck (a battered barely working vintage Leica I’d bought cheap online), and she took me on a tour of her house. Her walls were covered in exquisite, priceless framed photographs by the greatest artists of a century and a half, carelessly hung in chaotic jumbles. Haunting sculptures crowded shelves and tables. She also agreed to look at my photos, if I brought some back, and give me her honest—brutal—opinions. That was the beginning of our awkward awesome relationship.

I poured myself a cup of (cold) coffee and went up to see her. Her work desk was heaped with old photos and she was inspecting them with all the intensity of someone who still had a job. I picked up a photograph and then immediately dropped it. An Avedon; I could tell at once, from his signature minimalism and the almost-invisible expression on the model’s face. I felt like I’d just committed a grave sin. Like accidentally getting my greasy dirty fingerprints on a Rembrandt.

“Calm down,” she said. “He’s dead; he can’t yell at you. Although he definitely would, if he saw that.” She tsked. “Such a little bastard.” She shuffled pictures from one pile to another. I noticed that she was wearing thin white gloves. “So, Ash, how is your project coming? What have you figured out?”

“I’m stumped,” I said. “I want to create something that means something. Tells a story that needs to be told. If I’m going to get into a decent art school—and get the kind of scholarship I’d need to actually be able to go there—I need to create something . . . important.”

I’d stopped at home, after school, to develop the pictures I’d taken and round up a bunch of other recent prints. I handed them to her, nervous as hell, the same as always.

“This is shit,” she said of the first one, a photo of Jewel.

“What’s wrong with it?” Jewel was smiling, in her living room. Hard focus on her, background blurry. Nothing special, but I hadn’t thought it was shit.

“There’s nothing there. You can’t see that?”

Now that she said it, I saw it. And I cringed as she shuffled through the next ten images, saying Shit for each one.

“I think they’re very competent,” I said, struggling to keep my voice from breaking. I worshipped Cass, and she was forever putting my fondness for her to the test.