It had all started the beginning of her senior year at Columbia University, when she was deciding whether to apply to PhD programs. It had been the crux of her young life, but its seed had been present from the very beginning. For one of Carmen’s earliest memories is of her mother, a huge head of plastic-perfect blonde hair and dangling jewelry, presenting her before some man (in the memory the man has no face) in some nondescript hotel ballroom and saying—“Here she is. I told you! She could turn you to stone just looking at her.” It had been at one of those pageants her mother used to drag her to. Little Carmen would stand up on stage in her frilly dress and talk about how she wanted to be a scientist, and how she actually liked doing math in school, and all the while the judges would nod with wide-smiling approval. Carmen got the sense that her statements were taken about as seriously as the other girls’ requests for world peace. And she had hated the smell of hairspray and the fake eyelashes with their tacky strips of adhesive. She hated the hotels she and her mother stayed in, with their double beds and her mother’s elaborate nightly rituals of face masks and scrubs. Generally Carmen placed well in the competitions, but never Grand Supreme. Somehow everyone could tell she didn’t want to be there. And so, as her mother’s dreams to see her crowned Miss America disappeared with each runner-up performance, a new dream materialized: one of glossy editorials, billboard ads, and runways. Her mother stepped nimbly into the role of de facto agent and began to book Carmen as many gigs as possible. The two would travel to go-sees, cattle calls, and test shoots together; her father, a quietly supportive but overworked engineer, never came along.