How would you know? the first one asked.

Because I’m her kid, I said.

110. Skateboarder, Bicknell Hill, Santa Monica, 1975

When I walked into life-drawing class the Tuesday after I’d outed myself in the solarium, twenty people were there in addition to the usual fifteen. Instead of everyone talking to each other like usual, it was quiet. Specifically, it was the quiet before the curtain goes up on a sold-out show that everyone in the audience feels lucky to have nabbed a seat for. The light started doing the same too dim/too bright thing it had done in the solarium, and I felt a little like throwing up, but not in a bad way. I was good at playing the part I was about to play, and I liked having an audience. I went behind the screen, got undressed, then came back out and held poses the way I always did, to the sound of thirty-five pencils drawing in thirty-five sketchbooks.

Back when I was nine, if someone had said, Samantha, the thing making your life a daily misery will one day make you the coolest kid in school, I would have called him a dog-breath dipstick and kneed him in the groin. Under no circumstances would I have imagined a future in which being Samantha Preston would mean free liquor or weed for the asking, a standing invitation to every art party in Los Angeles, and a distinguished-artist boyfriend who liked to eat me for dessert. Leo’s whole thing was paintings of animal-headed people working in factories, or actual factory machines with animal-headed people painted onto them. Pretty soon it was the rare evening he wasn’t taking me somewhere. Naturally, in a place where everyone went by first names, it wasn’t hard to miss that Leo always introduced me as S. Jane Preston, but I liked how it sounded. S. Jane was more sophisticated than Samantha or Jane alone; and if that name meant a dedicated toothbrush in Leo’s bathroom and people who looked at me instead of past me when he brought me around, I had no problem with that.

Had my mother visited Los Angeles earlier, she just would have been Jane’s mom. Now that I was S. Jane, she was Lillian Preston. I was tormented by the thought that wherever we went, I’d be demoted from headliner to opening act, if I was still written into the program at all. At thirty-five, Leo was much closer to my mother’s age than mine. My twenty-year-old self conquered these fears by disappearing on Leo the weekend of Lillian’s visit, telling him I’d be out of town, and then carefully dividing the time between photo walks in Santa Monica—which was far enough from Clyde to preclude being seen—and the Holy Mount campus, where I was practically as much a stranger as my mother.