The collector’s house was all glass and white brick at the edge of a cliff. As soon as we arrived, a man with thick white hair and lots of rings kissed my hand and said, Samantha Preston, it is such a great pleasure to meet you. And you must be Leo. Please make yourselves at home. The living room was four times bigger than Leo’s apartment. The two walls that weren’t glass and sticking out over the cliff were covered in paintings and photographs. The paintings didn’t look like the sort of stuff Leo did, and I wondered if Creeland had whole wings of his house devoted to different art styles or what. I recognized a few people from L.A., including one of the painters I sometimes modeled for. I kept trying to ignore that Leo wasn’t introducing me as S. Jane, like usual, but as Samantha Preston, the way Roger Creeland had. I’d needed to pee for the last hour in the car, but I stayed with Leo long enough to drink one drink before making for a bathroom.

I was halfway past the wall paintings when I suddenly felt like puking, which was strange since I hadn’t eaten anything, and I’d only had the one drink. It took my brain a split second more to realize what my body already knew: I recognized the photographs on the next half of Roger Creeland’s living room wall. There were eight of them, all black and white, arranged in a nice straight line leading to the bathroom, the way family photos are displayed in houses where photographs are photographs and not trophies. I walked past each print as if it weren’t a hammer to my head. When I locked myself inside Roger Creeland’s bathroom, I sat on his Carrara marble floor because my arms and legs weren’t working. I was in Mrs. Barkley’s class all over again, after eleven years of thinking I was free. I focused on pressing the coolness of the white stone onto my knees and my palms. I stood up. I splashed cold water on my face until I looked mostly normal.

Leo was still working the room. Samantha! he said, there you are. Everyone’s asking about you. Babe, I said, I left my bag in your car. Give me your keys and I’ll be right back, and I pursed my lips in a promising way.

The longest I’d ever driven before that night was the forty minutes it took to get to the theater in Silver Lake. Three hours later, I threw Leo’s car keys through his studio window, grabbed my bike, and stopped at the first motel where it didn’t look like I’d get jumped checking in to a room. When I signed the register, Monica Kay was what came out: Monica after the freeway that had brought me to my first real acting gig, and Kay after the friend who’d put on a mask at Halloween and showed to me the power of becoming someone else.