I called the school, but Jane isn’t enrolled there anymore. There are no Los Angeles listings for Jane or Samantha Preston. Since she and I last spoke nineteen weeks ago, she’s called Mother twice. Mother feels guilty about this; I’m just thankful she’s still speaking to one of us. No matter what Mother asks, Jane only wants to talk about what birds Mother has seen out the kitchen window. Mother says Jane sounds cheerful enough, but thinks she isn’t sleeping well. Jane’s calls have come just as Mother was waking up, which means that in California, it was four a.m. It’s hard not to fill the spaces in between those lines with worry, but both times Jane called direct and not collect, so she must have a little money. Any small, fleeting glimpse of her is better than nothing at all.

One weekend I was passing around a joint and watching Saturday Night, still cracking up over something Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi had done before the last commercial break, when all of a sudden this skinny girl with spiked hair and black makeup across her eyes started singing “Mommy is sick, Mommy is sick,” in a voice like her head was on fire. I was watching the same way as everybody else until the guitarist took a solo and the girl put the microphone between her legs and yanked off her dress. Who’s that? I asked. I was feeling warm all over partly because I was stoned and partly because underneath her dress, the girl’s boobs were barred with black tape. That’s Franny Panic, someone said. The girl jerked the microphone back to her mouth and started singing “Mommy is sick,” wearing nothing but fishnets and a line of black tape across her chest, before the show cut quick to another commercial. When it came back, the girl was gone and Chevy Chase was making a joke about downtown New York fashions.

I got her civilian name from a copy of Rolling Stone, though by the time I called the Manhattan operator and asked for Francis Pell’s number, I’d convinced myself that I’d hallucinated the whole thing. This meant when a pissed-off voice said, “Who’s this?” into the phone, I was totally unprepared. Samantha, I told her, even though I hadn’t spoken that name out loud in twelve years. Suddenly, I realized I didn’t know what time it was in L.A., not to mention New York, so when that same pissed-off voice growled, “Samantha who?” it wasn’t a question I felt prepared to answer.

When Under the Fence came out, Monica Kay was the name in the credits, finishing something I’d started the night I gave myself that name at the motel. I’d missed so many of my Holy Mount classes by then that I probably would have dropped out anyway. Even if I’d been willing to keep taking “Samantha Series” money to cover my tuition, it seemed stupid to shell out for an education when I was getting paid for one each time I got a part. Not that I was making much, but even before Under the Fence, it was usually enough to eat and pay rent. Then came Parkland and No Going Back and Fever Dream and a certain kind of independence.