It took one turn of my body to become a shadow—another girl on the street—and I kept walking west on the cobblestone streets of Soho, holding myself as though I knew where I was going. Blocks away I climbed up into an empty loading dock and sat cross-legged, metal-and-glass grating pressing into my ankles. I watched people go by and wrote in my notebook for an hour until the clock turned eight. I did know enough to know that I should wait for the party to get going. I think I ate a banana out of my backpack, and that was my dinner.

It was my first time ever in New York City.

When I returned to the gallery, it was packed. Spidery people poured out of the massive double doors. My first impression was the scent of fading chlorine mixed with Chanel No. 19 and du Maurier cigarettes, and my second was of secrets being exchanged, of whispers floating from lipsticked mouths to earlobes encrusted in diamond-bedecked safety pins. Somebody passed me a cold beer out of a trash can filled with ice, but before I could even say thank you, they were gone, another body in their place: a thin man in a gray flannel three-piece suit. He wiped his nose with his folded handkerchief and it came away with a blossoming red stain. He caught me staring and winked. I looked away, uncomfortable, then watched a wasplike woman—her shoulder blades sharp, like wings—pull up in a cab. She threw a twenty at the driver, the crumpled bill sailing through the divide, then crossed the sidewalk confidently in a low-cut lavender dress before compressing herself into the packed gallery and disappearing.

The overall crowd has glommed together in retrospect into a shiny, pointy landscape of shadows—of willowy, satin-haired city people, fine and crisp, black and white, like a Stockholm funeral. Mostly, I remember feeling mortified—of myself, of my oversize man’s shirt and ripped jeans and Chucks and pink hair (Why did I think this was a cool outfit, I look terrible, grunge is over, grunge is for kids, nobody here is a kid except me). I would have left early but didn’t know how; the Chinatown bus stop was a bedraggled street corner covered in bursting garbage bags and milky puddles of sewage, no exchange office in sight. Later I would learn you could give the ticket to any driver for any bus going your way, and if there were enough seats, you were fine. But that night I didn’t know. I thought I would have to wait—so I did.