Jackson came to Shoreditch the same year as the matcha lattes, and I wasted away my first quarter-life crisis sipping overpriced coffee on his couch, pretending to listen to his latest creative breakthrough as I focused my attention on the wall behind me: row upon row of exposed brick. “Art is happening here,” he would say from somewhere in the flat (though I could never tell where; the ceilings were so high that the whole place echoed like a parking garage). “If I want to say something important, this is the place to do it.”

As far as I could tell, he was right. I was living on my own for the first time, and I finally understood what people meant when they said London had a pulse. The East End especially, since it was everything my parents hated about the city: loud, young, and filled with art that I could only pretend to understand. I was living further south, where art and good coffee would not arrive for many years. Jackson’s parents must have been helping with his rent, and he was the sort of person I thought I ought to be, so even though we hadn’t really been friends since he moved back to LA in year nine, I called him three weeks after he moved in to rekindle things. 

I met him at some cafe he loved on Brick Lane. He had been frozen in my head from the dinner parties his dad used to host in the biggest house I had ever seen. I was surprised at how much he’d grown since I last saw him. His hair was slightly longer, and it seemed as though he was attempting to grow a beard. He saw me and smiled widely. 

“Sophie! It’s good to see you! How have you been?” 

I gave him a quick hug and then sat on the bench across from him. “I’ve been alright. I’m getting by, but most of my school friends are at Edinburgh now, so it’s been lonely. I’m glad you’re back in the city.” 

“Me too. I’m working on some great stuff. I swear London is my muse.” Art, especially his own, was always the easiest way to get Jackson talking, so I asked him about his latest work and forgot his answers as he said them. 

Two cups of coffee and a reflection on postmodernism later, Jackson checked his watch. “I may have to get going, but we should get a drink tomorrow night after my class. Where are you in school?”

Had his parents not told him? “I’m not right now. I have some things I have to take care of first.” 

He laughed and signaled for the bill. “Shit really? I always thought you’d be the one to go to Cambridge or something. Harvard even, if you could stand all us Americans.” 

“Well, thank you, but that’s not in the cards right now. I am free tomorrow though, if you still want to get a drink with a dropout.” 

Jackson raised his eyebrows. “I’d be honored. You know The Queens Tavern? Let’s meet there at eight.” He insisted on paying for my coffee before I could pretend to object. I hastily reapplied my lipstick while he looked for his wallet.

“The beard suits you.” 

He smiled. “My mom hates it. I knew I missed having you around. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

The Queens Tavern was dark, all oak tables and dim yellow lights. Jackson was enthralled; it seemed as though the novelty of not having to drink stolen liquor in a dorm room had yet to wear off. He ordered round after round with no hesitation, and he leaned closer to me as he talked. He smelled sickly sweet, a mixture of whiskey and cologne that made me feel drunker than I was. 

“You’re smart enough to be in my class, you know.” He was almost shouting. 

“You’re sweet, but I’m not an artist.” 

“So screw art! But do something! I don’t understand where you’re trying to go right now.”

“Well, I don’t understand what you’re doing either. Tell me what you’re learning about.” 

He smiled. “So you are interested!” He passed me another pint. “It’s alright, but the other students are so shallow. All we talk about is color theory and technique. It’s easy to make something pretty. I want to make something real. Something gritty. Something authentic. That’s where the real beauty is.” 

“It’s nice that you’re so sure of what you want to do.” He nodded, but I had stopped listening. My chest tightened. Jackson was only eighteen too. How was it that he had a philosophy, a certainty, and I was so adrift? He started talking about some art movement he thought was overrated and I became very unsure of how to justify my seat across from him. The drinks had made my throat warm and loose, and before I could remember that I had promised myself to not tell anyone else, I interrupted him. 

“I didn’t drop out, really.” 

“What do you mean?” 

Somewhere deep in my brain I already regretted what I was admitting to him. But Jackson always had a way of holding himself that made me wonder what I had done to deserve to be part of his conversation, and I was drunk enough for his approval to be more important than my privacy. 

“I never enrolled. I’m still smart though. I am. I just got sick.”

“Sick how?”

“Anorexia.” I’ve never quite figured out how to say it aloud. I tried to sound nonchalant and matter-of-fact, but the word was awkward and clunky between us. I filled the space as best I could. “It’s more common than you think. Than I thought, even. It’s not that bad, I’m not crazy or anything, I just need to recover before I go to school, and I can’t exactly study when I have appointments every day. But I am still going. I just have to — I am still going.” 

Jackson looked at me with a curiosity and intensity I had not seen all night. “I’ve never met anyone with anorexia before.” He took my hand. “You have always been so beautiful.”

“It’s not really about that,” I tried to interject, but he talked right over me. 

“Seriously, Sophie, you of all people have no reason to worry about your weight. I swear, this is why men can be so horrible, I can’t believe they made you feel fat. You’re not fat.” 

I already wished I hadn’t said anything. “Thank you. I’m going to get another drink.” 

I let myself blur the rest of the night, slurring my words a little more than I needed to in order to keep him from asking any more questions. When the pub closed, we made our way to the park and sprawled out on the grass, looking for any excuse not to sober up and go home. Jackson told me about his dad, who was still working for the same tech company that had brought them here when he was thirteen. It seemed to be going well, since his family had just bought a place in Breckenridge (“You have to come out next year! It’s magical. I’ll pay for your ticket and everything.”) and it turns out he wasn’t paying rent at all for his Shoreditch flat. 

“By the way, I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing before,” Jackson said.

“You’re fine.”

“No, I’m serious. You know you can always talk to me, right?” I looked up. I couldn’t remember when he had moved so close to me.

“I do. I just don’t really talk about it with anyone.” 

“Is it like a weight loss thing?”

“A little. It’s not like I think it’s good for me. It’s sort of the opposite. The worse it is, the more I revel in it. Like I want to see how much I can take.” 

“That’s a beautiful way of putting it.” He took my hand, and we fell silent. I closed my eyes, trying my best to ignore the dull grey light of the encroaching sunrise.

I got home at 8am, and I woke up at 11 with a terrible headache and embarrassment that seemed to make me even more nauseous. I shouldn’t have said anything. I always think it will help, and I always regret it the next morning. I combed through my memories of the night, trying to remember how he looked at me when I told him, or at least imagine how he would look at me now. I texted him.

 Hey, I’m really sorry I overshared last night. I swear I’m fine. Please don’t worry about me. 

He responded a few minutes later. 

Don’t be sorry. I’m glad you can tell me things. I promise I was interested. You want to come over today? 

I saw Jackson almost every day that month. He was easy to talk to, and the company of someone my own age was a welcome break from spending time with my family. They meant well, as my therapist kept reminding me, but they were too worried about my health to pretend that everything was still normal. My mother had never adjusted to seeing me eat after I got sick; she watched me pick at meals through swallowed tears and clenched teeth that were more of an interruption than if she just said what she was so afraid to and admitted that she couldn’t look at me anymore. My dad tried his best to talk straight through it, pretending he couldn’t notice my brother’s worried glances and the obscenities I whispered under my breath. Jackson, on the other hand, never shied away from any of it. “You know, that’s what’s real,” he said to me once when I told him about a stressful doctor’s appointment. 

“What do you mean?” 

“What you’re going through, that’s more beautiful, more genuine than anything they could teach me in my classes. I need to capture something like that.” When Jackson said those sorts of things, I was never sure how to respond. If I had been with my Edinburgh friends, I would have laughed. But when I was alone, everything he said felt closer to the truth. It certainly didn’t feel beautiful to me, but I liked his version of it better. 

It helped that he really did seem to think I was pretty. We weren’t dating officially, but I never paid for anything when I was out with him, and we liked to get too drunk on purpose and carry each other back to his bed. He was so smart, and I was so desperate to be anything besides a lost cause. I stopped worrying so much about my recovery. In Jackson’s flat, with his arms and eyes encasing me, it was hard to notice the world outside. I was convinced that he really was going to be famous someday. 

“You are going to change the world,” I told him over and over while he twirled my hair in his finger. 

He laughed. “I have to finish my project first. I’m screwed if I don’t do well on this.” 

“What are you making?”

“I’m still looking for inspiration.” He was quiet for a minute as he stroked the side of my face.  “Have you eaten today?”

I sat up to look at him. “A little. I’ve had a bad day.” 

“Do you wanna talk about it?” I didn’t respond. “Sophie?”

“It’s nothing important, honestly. It’s just this stupid party my Edinburgh friends went to. Of course I knew they would do things without me, but, I don’t know. I just feel so stuck. And like, ashamed somehow.” 

“That you can’t do what they’re doing?” 

“That I can’t just have it under control. It’s like I’m always watching myself, and I can’t bring myself to look away, even as it cuts me open from the inside. It’s ruining my life.” 

He put his arm around me and I buried my face in his chest. “I’m sorry. It shouldn’t have to be this hard. Don’t let that stuff bother you.” He brought my face to his, and kissed me. I wrapped my arms around his neck and allowed him to carry me into the bedroom. 

When we finished, he got dressed quickly. “Take a nap if you want. I have to work on my painting, but let’s order takeout tonight. I’ll let you pick the place.” I curled up under his sheets and went to sleep. I was just as anxious as I was before, but I was getting better at pushing it to the back of my mind. 

For the next few weeks, I barely left Jackson’s flat. He must have found inspiration after all, because he was working for six hours a day on top of his classes. I went from his bed to therapy, which I wasted counting down the minutes until I could go back to my hideout. He would finish work in time for dinner, which we had at the Queen’s Tavern, though it wasn’t dinner as much as it was drinks, with a few plates of chips mixed in. 

Two weeks before his final was due, I let myself into the flat after my doctor’s appointment. “Jackson! Where are you? I need to tell you about what happened today.” I walked towards his studio, which really was a modified guest bedroom. 

“Just a minute,”  he called back, but I was already at the door. 

He was standing on a spread of newspapers, leaning over a table. I stepped towards him. “Is this your project? Can I finally see it?” I trailed off as my eyes focused on his painting. 

Two thirds of the canvas was filled by a completely naked woman looking over her shoulder into a mirror behind her. One arm was draped across her waist, so that her breasts were pushed together. She was impossibly thin, and where each bone jutted out from her ribcage, her shoulders, her hips, blood dripped down to pool between her legs. She held a knife up to her throat, and she had a slight, knowing smile.

I recognized it instantly. My skull felt as though it was collapsing in on itself, and I felt my fingernails pierce the skin of my palms.

“Is this a joke?’ Jackson looked up, clearly startled. “You never asked me if you could do that.”

“What do you mean?” He put down his paintbrush.

“Is this your way of showing something real? What, was there not enough struggle in your own life as a daddy’s money, starving artist wannabe?”

I was shaking more than I wanted to. But Jackson was perfectly still. “I understand that you’re emotional. But that’s not called for.” His voice was so level that I felt the burning urge to knock him to the ground, hit him over and over until he finally fought back. “This isn’t your expertise, ok? I know you don’t really listen to me when I talk about this stuff, but this painting isn’t about you. She’s blonde. And I was inspired by reading de Beauvoir, trying to understand what she meant when she said women objectify themselves.”

“Yeah, sure. You’re a feminist scholar now?”

He took a deep breath. “I don’t expect you to understand it. I know it’s been a while since you’ve been in school.”

I could have killed him. The less he responded to my anger, the more I raised my voice, until I was shouting across the table. “Jesus, Jackson, do not pull that shit. You were the only person I could talk to about any of this.” I was almost crying now, and each labored breath echoed back to me from across the flat. I grabbed the painting. Jackson started to say something, but I stopped him. “I thought you actually understood, but it’s just some pathetic trauma fetish. You’re not as special as you think you are.” 

He put his hand on my arm. “Please control yourself, Sophie. I’m sorry. But I’m really not sure what you are talking about.” I looked into his eyes. He wasn’t defensive. He just looked confused. I wanted to claw his heart out of his body with my bare hands. 

Instead, I pulled away from him and started towards the door. “Sophie, wait!” I wasn’t sure if he was calling for me or the painting. I didn’t stop to find out, and I held the canvas tight against my side, felt the acrylic stain my jacket as I squeezed down the fire escape. 

I didn’t let myself cry until I was three blocks away. I sank down onto the pavement and leaned against the side of a building. I wanted to call my mother, only I didn’t know how to say that her best friend’s son had done something unforgivable that I couldn’t quite articulate. I didn’t know how to say that I had never felt so lost before, that I was scared, and I didn’t really blame her for any of this, because it’s not like I knew how to look at me either. 

I called a cab back to my flat, and crawled into bed. I kept my phone on all night in case Jackson tried to apologize.

My plan was to wait for him to call me. I had taken his final project, after all. When he called to demand it back, I would be calmer, and I could explain why I felt so violated. I would wait for him to apologize, to admit that I was the girl he was painting after all. “I just wanted to show something meaningful, and I did it the wrong way, and I’m sorry,” he would say. Maybe then I would give the painting back, because he didn’t really deserve to fail his class. He would ask if we could still see each other, and I would say no, that he was a nice guy deep down, but I didn’t want to be with someone who thought so little of me. He would be sad, but he would know it was his fault, and learn his lesson.

Only he never called. The painting still sits in the back of my closet. I don’t know how he did in that class in the end, but he went back to LA at the end of the year, and I saw on his dad’s Facebook that he graduated with honors. The year I finished university, he announced his first art show. The month I got married, some magazine that I never heard of, but that my wife told me is a very big deal, announced that Jackson was the Up-and-Coming Portrait Artist of the Year. A few years later, one of his paintings sold for £10,000. It was a naked woman with an eye between her legs, and two more where her breasts should have been. He wrote a few paragraphs on what it meant to him. I never bothered to — I couldn’t bring myself to read it.  

I’ve tried to write him off as the arrogant ex-boyfriend who is now one of the many contemporary artists I don’t like. But no matter how much I push the memory of him away, I still want him to know that I did go to Cambridge after all, that I have a good job, a good family. I want him to know that I am doing better, that I am nothing like the way he saw me back then. But I don’t know if he still thinks of me, if he’s angry, if he’s proud of himself, if he ever even bothered to regret it. 

And I wonder if he ever fantasizes about knocking on my door the way I fantasize about knocking on his. I wonder how many nights he’s laid in bed wide awake, because he can’t shake the feeling that someone is watching him. I wonder if on those nights he races to the sink, scrubs the paint off his hands until his knuckles bleed. I wonder if he wants to track me down, leave that store in Aspen he opened three months ago to collapse on my front step in tears, begging me to “give it back. I can’t do this. Please, let me have it back.”