Eventually, tired of lying there sleepless, I got up and tidied the room, hanging the towels, zipping away my makeup, folding the evening’s clothes. It was only then that I noticed the faint stain on the front of my navy shirt. In the bathroom’s fluorescent glow: dark smudges from the man’s hand. I threw the shirt in the sink and turned on the faucet, squeezing and rubbing until the water ran rusty, then clear. Then I squeezed the cloth and hung it, dripping.

4

BRENAE BRASIL HAD BEEN RAISED in a small town in the Central Valley, the long swath of premier agricultural land off the highway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Her father was an assistant manager at a dairy farm that had been owned by his extended Portuguese-American family for three generations. Her mother was Italian-Chinese-Irish and worked as a clerk for an auto parts store. Brenae had three brothers: one a farmer, one a musician, the other likely headed to jail for dealing meth. None of them had commented on her death in the press last spring, but her high school English teacher had called Brenae one of the “most brilliant and definitely most provocative” students she’d ever had.

Brenae had gotten a scholarship to USC for premed, then switched majors to art after she won a student award for a video she made of her campout in a foreclosed home in South Central. Her junior year, she’d taped her mouth and eyes shut and filmed herself trying to swim the length of a swimming pool. She named the work First-Generation College Student. It turned into a series: Brenae folding herself tightly inside a cardboard box from the university bookstore, shifting and squishing her body until she could close the lid. Brenae with ten mugs of beer lined up in front of her, their bottoms taped with her course names, drinking one after another slower and slower, collapsing on the table before she finished the sixth. With another full scholarship offer, she’d rocketed straight to Los Angeles Art College for her master’s degree. This past March, little more than halfway through her first year, she had lain down on the mattress in her studio, put a pillow over her head, and shot herself. The police dated her death to sometime in the early morning. Two people had heard a loud popping noise then. The police found a suicide note, a bottle of sleeping pills, evidence of temazepam in her system. The gun was hers.

The official news stories were fewer than I’d expected: one short piece in the L.A. Times, one in the Valdivia Star, and several posts by art bloggers. There had been a quick school memorial, but by now the next class had arrived at LAAC, replacing Brenae, filling the studios with their own ideals, ironies, and micromanaged playlists.

And yet.