BUT THAT WAS THE EXPERIENCE I had longed for, once. It wasn’t necessarily Brenae’s experience. There she’d been, a first-generation college student, all alone, in a prestigious university in an enormous city. Had she concealed that her mother worked in an auto parts store, that her father managed milking protocols? Such lives weren’t anything to be ashamed of where I’d grown up, but Los Angeles schools drew many worldly and monied students, coached all through their childhoods to secure a competitive college berth, to ensure they retained their social class. Had Brenae known how much she would change among them? She’d said in her bio for Packing that the day she’d entered her first art history course, she’d switched her major from premed to art. Erik must have been there.

What had Erik been like three years ago? I tried to conjure a younger, dewier version of his flop-haired charm, but all I saw was his power. Erik was Brenae’s gateway. He was already an artist, he had department connections, and he held the camera as she began making her own work. He knew how to shoot her, and he made her ideas more real than ever before. Erik was a legitimizer. He belonged, and if he said Brenae belonged, too, then she did. She needed that, coming from nowhere, feeling like no one.

What else did she want from him? The lust, the sex, that was clear, at least according to him—but had she wanted love? Was it too old-fashioned or naïve these days to want love?

Say Brenae hadn’t. She’d only wanted knowledge. Intellectual gains. What if their relationship had started as lessons—Erik had so much to show her, she wanted to learn everything—and then moved to manipulation, the way Picasso had manipulated the young Françoise Gilot, praising and pursuing, embracing, then later deriding, then making her admit his mastery over her, driving her out, begging her to come back?

It was impossible to know. Yet as I looked around the vaulting bunker, with its bulletin boards layered thick in posters, I realized that over the decades of LAAC’s existence, this space would hold every version of the powerful story of mentor and student: both the generous and the cruelly indifferent ones, the one that ended at the classroom, and the one that began there; the one where they never touched; the one full of abiding trust; the one where they buoyed each other, gift of a lifetime—as well as the version where one held the other down, the version where they both drowned.

Gilot had refused to be a victim. After ten years, and numerous threats from Picasso, she’d left, taking what she’d gained and leaving the rest behind.

Brenae had left, too, but she had gained nothing.