Someone passed me another beer. Halfway through it, I started to feel a little brave. Maybe it was the contact high of everyone else’s self-possession: The people around me, kissing and hugging and drinking and talking, sincerely acted like they owned the entire world. I’d never seen such a concentration of confidence. Now I think that every single moment of every single day, somewhere new becomes the center of the universe, if only for a second—and that night, it was us. Or rather—it was them, Pine City, and I happened to be there.

The show was roaring in the middle of the gallery, but the crowd was so dense I could barely see anything without shoving, which I couldn’t imagine doing, so I remained in the corner until a third beer. Then, emboldened, I pushed through.

I spotted Jes Winsome first. Tall Jes, with her blue-black hair, lounged in the lap of a clean-shaven man in a tuxedo. He fed her puffs of light-blue cotton candy while one of her naked feet sat in a tub of wet, white plaster. Behind her, Marlin Mayfield—lanky, densely freckled—dumped a bottle of pink wine over her white t-shirt and white jeans. She laughed hysterically while Tyler Savage, the one who looked like a professional tennis player, ran his fingers up her stomach. The fourth member of Pine City, Jack Wells, spoke animatedly to a golden-haired teenage girl in a buttery fur coat, pale like butterscotch, that swung around her in a dream.

Finally, Carey Logan, the smallest one, worked around them, mixing quick-dry plaster into plastic tubs at a rapid, balletic pace. Even in that room of overly confident downtown people, her confidence stood out; it was in her movements, in her posture, in her step. There was a surety in her that I envied and coveted immediately. I hadn’t seen a lot of women behave that way. Hardly any—certainly none under forty. She was twenty-four years old at the time.

Carey cast forty-two different body parts that night, including mine, though it took me another hour and another beer to work up the courage to get in line. When she got close to me, I realized we were the same build, our hands almost the same size. Yet our bodies held space differently. Where I slumped, she was rigid; where I shrank, she expanded.

“Don’t move your hand,” she whispered. “Not until I say. Or it’ll be ruined.”

“You smell like grapefruit,” was all I could manage to reply. Her whole face opened up, those round cheeks and tiny pink lips drawing away to reveal a jumbled mouthful of pearl-white teeth, and she gave me a smile so luminous that I thought, for a moment, that we were friends.

“I like your hair,” she complimented me back. “It’s cool.”