I wait to see if the person is going to give me instructions for how to get in but they don’t. “Yes,” I say.

“What do you look like?” the voice says.

“Huh? This is the gallery, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay . . .” I take a few steps back from the door into the bright sunlight to see if I can see into any of the windows. “So, I guess I have dark hair, and I’m a girl?”

“Woman,” the voice says.

“I’m sorry?” I ask.

“You’re a woman. You shouldn’t describe yourself as a girl if you are an adult woman.”

“Oh, right. Sorry,” I say. I have been called a girl by some men before and felt diminutive—shrunken down, patronized. But I’ve never been told off for calling myself a girl. It feels strange, like the person is saying that I contain both someone who is sexist and someone else who is a victim of sexism. Now, I think for the first time about what I see myself as. I don’t exactly see myself as a woman yet. I still look pretty young after all, probably around eighteen—that one year in life when you are actually genuinely between being a girl and a woman. But, I suppose the strange thing is that I’ll look this age for the rest of my life, until I’m in my hundreds and two hundreds and beyond. For this reason, I also don’t entirely feel like a girl.

“Okay, so I can see you outside,” the voice says. For a moment, I worry about how scruffy my clothes are. But the voice doesn’t mention it. “Green top?”

“Yes, that’s me,” I say, looking up. But none of the windows have people behind them.

“Wave at me?”

“Okay,” I say, and I wave in the general direction of the building and the line goes dead and the door emits a loud buzz. It’s open. I go through.

The light inside is dim; there are strings of yellow lightbulbs hanging in the corridor. There are stacks of chairs near the entrance, bags of ice cubes that look like they’ve begun to melt, and, to my left as I walk in, a wooden puppet theater painted with red, green, and yellow stripes.

“Hi, excuse me,” I say to a woman who’s carrying a large box. She turns around to look at me. I’m surprised to see that the whites of her eyes are pink. She looks like she has recently been crying. She has a red nose, and her skin is blotchy.

“Hi,” she says. “I’m sorry—” and then she rushes off behind a large, red velvet curtain farther down the corridor.