Allie keeps the portfolio under her bed. It looks like a normal photo album. I sit on the edge of her bed, and she places the portfolio in my lap.

I hold it with both hands. "Okay. When is this from?"

"When I was eighteen to twenty three," she says. "Are you going to open it?"

"Okay, okay." The first picture is of Allie in a Polo ad, and she's swimming in brown tweeds. Her lips are huge and red and her face looks airbrushed. Her hair is perfectly messed up and her sweater is perfectly wrinkled. I look up at her to remind myself what she really looks like, but she's not as nice to look at as the picture. I want to take the picture home to study it.

"I was totally hung over when they took that picture," she says.

I want to feel sorry for her. I want to think her lifestyle was terrible, but everything in the Polo ad looks so nice.

I look through the pictures without speaking. Each picture takes me five minutes, and I take fewer and fewer glances back at the real Allie. Until we get to the swimsuit shot. "Oh my god," I say, "You had that body?"

"No. I didn't. I was standing in between two posts and lifting my arms as high as I could, and I twisted my torso to stretch my stomach. Right after that picture, I got a cramp in my back."

"Where are the other swimsuit shots?"

"This is the only one." She tells me she needed more swimsuit shots for her portfolio, so she found a photographer who also needed swimsuit shots in his portfolio, and he took photos of her.

"So where are they?" I ask.

"Would you wait? I'm getting there," she says. She says they went to this island near Tokyo, where she was working, and the guy told her she needed to loosen up, so he gave her a massage and he rubbed his penis against her back until he came. Allie's looking down when she tells me, and if I had ever seen Allie cry I'd worry that she was going to cry now. But Allie never cries. She just yells.

She goes out to her balcony and screams as loud as she can.

Someone yells back from the street, "Shut up, you crazy bitch."