Thankfully, I had a medium-format camera where I looked down at the viewfinder to take the picture, so Ben couldn’t see my face as I clicked the shutter, which triggered the flash of my studio strobes. If he did, he might have noted the evolution of emotions there as we continued our studio session, him striking pose after pose, while my mind flashed to that Halloween weekend five years before and those men in the car. What Ben conjured was a possibility I had not considered, that I could have approached them, introduced myself, and made them realize I was not the girl they thought I was, but instead of beating me up, they could have still wanted me.

“I’ve been mistaken for a girl before,” I told him when I finished our session and looked up at his face.

“I’m not surprised.”

He asked me if someone had taught me how to put on makeup, and I shook my head.

“Wait here.”

He left my studio and came back a few minutes later with some foundation that matched my skin, from the CVS on the ground floor of my building. We squeezed into my utilitarian bathroom with its tiny rectangular mirror, and he showed me how to spread the liquid all over my face. He then applied darker powder under my cheeks, my jaw, my forehead, as he explained that this made my face look thinner. Already, I found myself overwhelmed with instructions, so he showed me how to dab eyeshadow just with my pinky finger and how to put on lip gloss, as he puckered and toyed with the wand.

The most I’d ever done was put on lipstick and mascara. But as I watched my face change in Ben’s hands, when he drew in my otherwise pale, bleach-blond eyebrows, curled my eyelashes, swept on some blush, I realized that I could be even more feminine and beautiful than I imagined. For the first time since those glimpses in college years before, I saw a physical manifestation of that woman’s spirit who lived inside of me, suddenly more powerful because of Ben’s makeup.

Seeing that beguiling face, with its sharp, high cheekbones and full lips, the striking contrast between my blue eyes and their almond shape, I realized how much I could actually resemble that archetype of innocent blond beauty I’d read about for so many years, yet also harbor an undefinable, alluring quality due to the mystery of my Asian features set against the fairest skin. A plan also began to form in my mind, a sequence of steps that, if my hunch was correct, could lead to a love that up to that point I had thought impossible.

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