High school changed everything. In tenth grade she was cast in a supporting role in a downtown movie about graffiti culture, her pubescent body on display like Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby. She won an Independent Spirit Award. Then Max and her friends started appearing in magazines, like her exquisite mother: Her clique had a whole spread in Sassy. She began traveling to places that were so exotic I had never heard of them, places like the Maldives, Moorea, Soufrière, even Rangoon, which was a word I knew from the menu at the Chinese restaurant in the strip mall, but not a place I could find on a map. She picked up a camera. Two of her pictures ran in Filly, and all my friends could see the credit, right there, when it came in the mail: Photo credit: Max de Lacy.

She made being an artist look so possible—so attainable, the result of mere choice, of waking up and saying I think I’ll be an artist, that seems right, though at the time I still didn’t understand the gulf between my life in Gainesville and hers in Manhattan—that I scrapped my plans to go to the state university and focused on making a portfolio. Miraculously, I got a scholarship to the Academy, while Max got into an elite university, early decision. She wanted to be “well rounded,” she said, didn’t want to pick a medium, majored in poetry, minored in French, apprenticed with photographers like Ellen von Unwerth and Annie Leibovitz during the summers, and took up with a crowd of people like her, ones with Dutch last names and very expensive opinions.

I studied painting and only painting.

During that time we were only a few hours apart. My freshman year, her sophomore, I took the bus down to see her for the weekend. Max had a whole gang of people under her thumb, people who resented my closeness to her, and when she wasn’t speaking directly to me, then I might as well not have existed. Everybody thought my major was stupid. “Isn’t painting dead, though?” they asked, unable to hide their pity. “I mean, who cares?”

I wish I had replied that we don’t all get to take counter jobs at galleries for minimum wage while still being expected to have a half-million-dollar education, a pert ass, a clothing allowance, a travel stipend, and multiple passports so we don’t have to deal with pesky international labor laws. We don’t all get to be dilettante jokesters who decide that our work doesn’t need to make money, that institutions are the enemy of truth, and then wake up someday and miraculously discover that we have become the people in charge, but I didn’t know that yet. I said nothing at all.