Tyler: “Everything that was selling was hyperrealistic figurative sculpture. We thought it was complete garbage. And even if we could have put our names on it, we didn’t want to. We wanted to make fully experimental works that could not be commodified. We thought we were Marxists.”

Marlin: “I couldn’t believe it when it won. That was—I mean, I was so surprised.”

Jack: “The prize was twenty thousand dollars. That was enough.” He shakes his head and lights a cigarette. There’s a brown drink in his hand. “That was all it took.” He takes a big swallow; it foams. It’s Coca-Cola. “I’m so ashamed,” he said.

Cut to Tyler. “We told ourselves that it didn’t matter. We thought we needed the money. We agreed to reveal it someday and then…we didn’t ever have a plan, actually. We always called revealing it ‘Plan A.’ ‘Plan B’ was to see where it went. We just kept saying, let’s use plan B for a little while longer.”

Marlin: “I honestly thought that someday it’d all be worthless. It was trendy, you know? Calculated. We didn’t believe it would go the distance, like it did. That’s—I mean, for me, that was why I didn’t want my name on it. I wanted to grow, as an artist. It’s hard to be rigorous and profitable. So…” She shrugs. “We separated the two.”

Jack: “It was easier to pay somebody else to deal with the brain damage of it all. And when it was done, they could go back to being themselves.” He stubs out the cigarette. “That was the plan, anyway.”

Jes: “Maria Clarke used to hang out with some of the theater kids from Juilliard. She was totally untrained, this runaway kid from upstate, and she’d been taking Method classes out of somebody’s apartment.”

Marlin: “Eliot&Sprain kept writing and writing to the email address we’d put on the entry form.”

Jes: “We thought about coming clean, but…then we figured out how to keep the money. The check would go to Carey Logan. Carey Logan, the business, could deposit the check.”

Tyler: “I assisted for a guy who had a great accountant. He set it up for us. A four-way partnership.”

Jack: “Maria was into the whole thing. Always. She told us that she was an experimental performer. She wanted to push boundaries.”

Tyler: “There are things you think about yourself at nineteen, and things you say about yourself, that have nothing to do with living a real adult life.”