The youth culture camp in Västerås had been one of those Scandinavian experiments in creative optimism—a week-long gathering of young artists, circus performers, and musicians from across Northern Europe and the UK, housed in a converted textile factory on the edge of Lake Mälaren. The building smelled of sawdust and latex paint, and every surface was covered in someone's attempt at a mural. It was the kind of place where you could be fifthteen and feel, for a few suspended days, like the world had been designed specifically for you.

I'd noticed her on the first morning. Not because she was beautiful—though she was, in that fierce, unfinished way that made you want to keep looking—but because she was drawing on the back of a cereal box with a seriousness that suggested the fate of nations depended on it. She was sitting cross-legged on the factory floor, her breakfast untouched, her eyes locked on the cardboard as her hand moved in quick, certain strokes.

"That's a very committed relationship with a cereal box," I'd said, because I was fifthteen and thought that counted as charm.

She'd looked up, and I remember the exact quality of her gaze—sharp, assessing, and slightly amused, as if she'd already decided I was ridiculous but was willing to see where it went.

"It's the only surface with the right texture," she'd said. "The sketchbooks they gave us are too smooth. The charcoal slides. This has grain."

We spent the next three days inseparable. We painted side by side in the big studio, our canvases facing each other so we could steal glances at what the other was making. We watched the circus workshops in the courtyard—the acrobats and the fire performers—and she'd sketched them in real time, her hand moving so fast it was like she was conducting the movement rather than recording it. At night, we sat on the dock with our feet in the lake, the water black and cold as iron, and talked about everything—art, family, the specific loneliness of being a person who saw the world slightly sideways.

She told me about Greenwich. About the "performances." About the way her mother's house felt like a museum where she was the least interesting exhibit. She didn't tell me about the others—not then. She told me about the "foggy days," the mornings where she'd wake up and the hours before felt like they belonged to someone else. I didn't understand. I filed it away as artistic temperament. I was fifteen. I didn't know what I didn't know.