My mother, to this day, keeps a green square of clean AstroTurf in front of the screen door because she thinks it looks “classy.” That Saturday night, when Max and I were walking home from the strip mall, Max stepped in a puddle and got dirt all over her boots. She wiped the mud on the AstroTurf mat, thinking she was being polite. But when my mother came home from the bar the next morning and saw the dirty mat, she slapped me hard across the face for making such a mess in front of a guest. I don’t think I even blinked—I was so used to it. It didn’t hurt. What I felt was humiliation—that she’d done that in front of my most important friend. And I think that I wanted Max to be shocked for me. But Max didn’t say anything at all.

Then, to make it worse, my mother, who by that time of day was too drunk to drive, made us take the bus to the airport. Max and I barely spoke as the bus lumbered down the freeway; I mostly stared out the window. When I got home I discovered that Max had accidentally left a bottle of her expensive salon shampoo behind, and I used it on special occasions for the next two years until it ran out.

We’d never discussed that weekend. Not ever.

I held up the photo—that photo that has been in three museums, that photo I never look at, that photo she put in the ICP show years ago. This was the thing that prompted me to start painting again after the lost years, to make 31,492 (Hair Money).

I looked at it and couldn’t believe how young I had been once, or how beautiful. My face was defiant, sneering, angry; I saw myself so clearly, a little girl smarter than her circumstances who was yearning to follow Max onto the airplane, back to the exquisite cocoon of her life so that I too could one day emerge as something gleaming and precious.

“I hated Florida,” I muttered. What I hated was that Max showed everybody where I came from, when I only wanted to be known for where I’d gone. I wanted to make more of my life than what I’d been given. Every time I pictured that photograph, I worked harder—even now I wanted to run to my studio, to overcompensate for it, for the image and the underlying fact that the photo was probably the reason that Parker Projects knew my name. But most of all, I hated that it still pumped gas into the oven of my being, that it could still motivate me, that competing with Max still mattered.

“I don’t know how you did it,” Max said.

“I read a lot of books.” I shrugged. “The schools weren’t so bad.”