The crowd began to nudge apart. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Yegina waving to me. And beyond her, Janis and Dee, roped together by their arms, Janis’s face calm and resolute, her wig slightly askew. They paraded across the room. I felt a rush of affection for Janis, mixed with the old awe, and wondered what she would tell me now.

But before I could reach her, a hand grabbed my elbow. It was the shaved-headed manager of the Super Shop where Brenae had worked. Dee had pointed me out to her, and she wanted to be interviewed. That conversation led me to one of Brenae’s coworkers, who rhapsodized about Brenae’s skills with the woodworking tools, and then to someone who’d known Brenae since USC.

As I filled my recorder with their words, I barely heard what Janis leaned over to say in passing, thronged as she was by her crowd of admirers and collector friends. Later, when I walked to my car alone, the school retreating behind me, the last few students still clustered and talking on the damp lawns, her comment registered.

I reached into my purse for my phone. I knew it was too late to call anyone, and still I wanted to share all the stories I’d learned that night about Brenae, and to feel the release of knowing her, imagining her. Alive again. Here.

She’ll be remembered now was what Janis said to me.

Acknowledgments

WHEN I SET OUT TO expand the Still Lives fiction project into new areas of the Los Angeles art culture, I knew I would need to cut out far more than I could include. All fiction about Los Angeles is an oversimplification. A city of four million people is four million cities, each filled with stories and points of view. And L.A.’s rich, multifoliate world of artists, dealers, curators, critics, professors, and students would be impossible to capture in its entirety, even in a slice.

Instead, I have created fictional institutions and characters in place of real ones, and a tighter web of relationships, in order to demonstrate some of the fundamental issues in American art-making in the early twenty-first century: the “hot” market for contemporary work and its rapid commodification; varying ideals about what a museum should be; the charged mentor-mentee relationships in expensive, reputation-building art schools; and the challenges of being a pioneering artist for a historically under-included race, gender, or class. Death, via suicide or murder, is also a heightened reality in this fictional world, emblematic of the extremes of Los Angeles and the way that young and vibrant hopes are often executed by power.