My screen test went well—that part I can take credit for—and I got the role. Then I got a little work done on my face and went on what was, at the time, the craziest diet and workout routine I had ever heard of. We did press, they set me up with a team of managers and agents and people to tell me what to do and wear, they took over my social media, they hired paparazzi to take pictures of me doing things in places I wouldn’t normally be with celebrities I wouldn’t normally interact with. Including Grayson.

We were supposed to go on a few dates, just to get a little buzz going—he’d been going out with too many models and was starting to look shallow—but we ended up liking each other. I think I was a little starstruck, I mean he was Grayson fucking Gamble. I was so pleasantly surprised that he was nice and fun and, I guess, human that it went a long way toward making me like him. He liked me too, which was no surprise, I was putting my very best self on display. Not only physically, as I had a new wardrobe and had been introduced to many beauty procedures I hadn’t previously known existed, but also I was confident. On a blissful high that my career had started to take off.

So we decided to keep seeing each other. It wasn’t pure romance; we always knew it made us look good. And then, like in lots of flawed relationships, we got used to it and stopped wondering if we actually wanted it. Until, I guess, he met Elsa.

And so that’s how I made it. A star was born. In a lab.

It’s funny. People talk about nepo babies, but they forget about the blank canvases the industry picks to Pollock all over.

Maureen and I drift up the stairs and into the rotunda of the college now: a two-story hall with grand, ornate floors and walls made of gleaming chestnut wood that arch at the top, where the beams support a jade-green glass dome. It’s the kind of shit you can only really build in a century like the 1700s, when architecture like this was a priority and time must have stretched on endlessly.

Two girls breeze past me, laughing. One of them is saying, “If I have to do another mime routine, so help me God I’m transferring!” in a charming English accent. Of course it’s impossible not to think of them as an iteration of what might have been for Aimee and me. Two girls happily loathing the requirements of our fun little major.