“You know I still live with my parents,” our friend Lola said. Everyone threw popcorn at her. “You can sleep in my sister’s room if you want. But she has sleep apnea.”

“Go back to the Academy and squat. Take a studio.” Agnes was being sincere.

“Break into a warehouse in Trenton. There’s a million.” So was Jonny.

The room broke into an argumentative din. Our friends didn’t know what to do. None of us had truly made it yet—I was the furthest along—and no one had the slightest room for variation along the tightrope of their financially precarious lives.

“We need to be talking to rich people,” Jimmy Daltry yelled. “What the fuck is going on tonight? Who has a fancy invitation we can give to our favorite girl painter?”

“Brilliant idea,” Cady said, pawing at a stack of mail. “There has to be something.”

“HOLD ON,” Agnes cried out, dumping her satchel upside down on the floor.

One hour later, wearing a blush-colored dress of Cady’s with my pink hair in a tight ponytail and my feet strapped into a pair of her blocky wooden sandals, I was ushered out the door and put in a cab to Chelsea.

“I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you cry right now,” Cady said quietly, holding open the car door. “It’s not healthy to keep all that inside. It’s going to come out sooner or later.”

“You’ll give me a hundred bucks anyway,” I said, and she smiled and rolled her eyes and handed me a roll of twenties, bound with a rubber band.

“Spend it on drugs,” she insisted. “Do them with someone who can help you.”

Fifteen minutes later, I was at a sit-down dinner for someone I’d never heard of. They were serving turtle soup, apparently some kind of social protest except there we were eating turtles, and nobody seemed to care that I was sitting at Agnes’s embossed place card, because the people sitting next to me had read about my “situation” in the paper, which they mentioned loudly and frequently, though no one seemed to understand or care that it meant I was actually broke and actually homeless. Instead they seemed excited by it, in that disaster pornography way, the way their eyes gleamed when they said, HOW ARE YOU? YOU MUST BE *SO* UPSET. And I knew in their eyes they would go home to their big bedrooms and whisper to each other, across the genteel wrinkles of their fine sheets, We are so lucky.

“What an opportunity for you, though,” some drunk old crank in a shiny teal dress told me. “A real life change. Cleansing. I felt that way about my divorce. The Buddha teaches us to leave the past behind. Lucky that your old work is gone. You can be a new person.”

“I don’t want to be a new person,” I told her.