Everything about my childhood that had previously seemed utterly normal to me—TV trays, Lucky Charms, bologna sandwiches with mayo and pickles on Wonder Bread, microwaved meat loaf, store-brand Kool-Aid, hanging out with boys who skateboarded in the parking lot at Walmart, getting our makeup done by my friend Jolie’s mother, Lea, who was a topless dancer and part-time hairdresser—all these things were suddenly unforgivably terrible once Max came to stay because she had literally never seen anything like it before. She was polite but asked so many sincere questions (Max didn’t know what mac and cheese was, even) that I knew my whole life was a garbage pit. It was like hosting an exchange student from Planet Money. Everything was a strange and curious wonder to her, which could only mean that every single thing in my life was something that Max and her friends, the glamorous girls who appeared in magazines, wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.

The Saturday night of her visit, we walked along the highway after smoking a joint with two boys on the basketball court where she’d taken my photo. Straining for another cool thing to do, I suggested that we stop by the Sally Beauty in the Sun Towers strip mall and look at makeup. Max perked up right away. That was how we first bleached my hair and toned it with the wrong bottle, accidentally tinting it the palest of pinks, like the inside of a seashell, a color I had never seen before on a human person, only cartoons. Yet Max pronounced it beautiful and chic, and she meant it. That was the only moment of the weekend that she looked at me with awe instead of confusion.

I remember thinking that Max would never want to be my friend after that trip, a prediction that came true once we got to college and she could brush me away without feeling badly—chip the barnacle of hideous me from the smooth, painted surface of the luxury yacht that was her life. I realize now that the experience of visiting Gainesville must have been agonizing for her, to witness the strange, manufactured, standardized poverty in which we lived. It must have been a waking nightmare, to see every sad contour of my life.