I helped her pull out the framed photograph. “Careful,” she murmured. When it was out, I scowled at it.

“How big is this, by the way?”

She gazed at it. “Um, eighteen by… twenty-six, I think.”

“It’s too big.”

“Oh, stop. It is not.”

“I can’t believe you think it’s good.”

“I love it,” she insisted.

I looked at it again for a second and then lost my nerve, trailing my gaze down to the sheet attached to the crate. ‘The Broken Girl by Spencer D’Arcy’.

“Have I mentioned how much I hate that title, by the way?” I mumbled.

“Only forty or fifty times,” Bette said cheerfully, examining the photograph.

“It’s dumb. It makes me seem like a basket-case or something… like I’m broken or-”

“The reference is to the framing,” Bette told me. “It’s as cut-and-dry as that.”

“Well, whatever.” I helped her put the photograph back into the crate and close it. I was glad that Spencer was finally going to get some recognition for his work, but I wasn’t sure how happy I was with having to be involved. If I had known that his second set of me-themed photography was going to actually ever be featured in an exhibit, I probably wouldn’t have let him take the pictures in the first place.

Although, at the time, I was in a very good mindset. Things were happening-I was on staff for L.A. Weekly, an apartment that I could afford all by myself had opened up in Spencer and Kyle’s building, which meant that I got to see them all the time and live by myself, I was moving out of my mother’s place, and I was dating this guy named Max who was normal and totally not-complicated and great in bed.

And a sculptor. Total coincidence, I swear. He was a friend of Spencer’s; I wasn’t like, “Who can I date that could inevitably put me in close proximity with Bette Porter?” I swear.

I convinced myself and everyone around me, at any rate, so all was good.

And Spencer had totally gotten over that whole thing where Bette had given him the cold shoulder on the exhibit at her gallery. He’d even attended the opening. And he was looking toward the future: