She’d never played before. I handed her a controller and explained. We spent the next four hours playing a dozen rounds of Super Mario Kart. We ate three bowls of gummy bears, sneaked out of the lounge, took the monorail to a different concourse, and stole copies of Filly and Sassy from a newsstand.

Max was flying from her dad’s place in Los Angeles to summer camp in Maine, some ultra-preppy eight-week finishing school, with a gaggle of other rich girls to sail and play bridge. We exchanged our summer addresses and promised to write—a promise that we kept for years and years.

It felt special to have a pen pal, especially one as exciting as Max. Nobody else in my grade had one as good. Max lived in both a real New York brownstone and a real Beverly Hills mansion, and she sent photos giving me the peace sign in cool clothes from her vacations on sailboats on turquoise oceans, from limestone ruins in Rome, from a bridge in Paris. She sent dirty pictures that she stole from I’ll never know where and soap opera gossip about her prep school that I cherished. The stuff I sent back—Polaroids of my pet snake, Randolph, “posing” in different locations in our local mall with horrified people in the background—was less glamorous, but she always said she looked forward to them most out of everything.

“You’re the weirdest person in the whole world!” she always told me, and I believed that it was a compliment: She was so tidy and well groomed and good at tricking adults, and cosmopolitan, and I thought she knew everything there was to know about the world. She was my number one confidante and I assumed I was hers, and we made many plans for places we would live and businesses we would run and things we would do, together, when we were grown-ups. We carved out a whole world of mutual dreams.

Yet Max’s dreams were steps from her brownstone, something I did not fully understand until we were older. Her babysitters became boldface names in the Village Voice; her mother was a fixture in Sunday Styles. Her father’s family owned a whole town in Connecticut. He lived in Los Angeles half the year, producing movies. We spoke only once, on the phone, when I was fourteen. Her mother asked me questions with such disdain that I knew I would never be invited. Max came from privilege so elaborate it seems almost like an accident, but, of course, it is not.