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I should be cleaning.

I should be looking for a job.

I should be working on a fourth script for the children’s show that has yet to pay me for the first three.

But instead, I am searching for a pornstar named Bianca.

I have not shared space with Bianca in 20 years, but I distinctly remember the details of her striking face; mud-colored eyes, always sparkling under fluorescent lighting, cupid’s bow lips—full in the middle, thin at the corners—a dainty, unassuming nose.

On top of her conventionally attractive face, Bianca had a muscular, and somehow slender, gymnast’s body. On meet days, she’d parade her iliac crests around the school like they were some sort of genetic trophy. Her hiked-up leotard and rolled-down sweatpants drew stares from everyone, including me.

Unlike Bianca, I was a miserable, corpulent asshole. At 14, I only had three settings: infatuation, sadness, and rage. If I wasn’t falling in love or crying, then I was screaming at someone. I had the face of a child, the tits of a stepmom, and the generational misery of a Soviet Jew.

As soon as Bianca breezed into homeroom, looking captivating in a pair of abominable low-rise jeans,1 I vowed to never look her in the eye, lest I disintegrate into jealousy. I avoided Bianca so methodically, that 7 months into freshman year, I still didn’t know her name. She was just the pretty, well-liked gymnast who was always sitting on top of her desk, gossiping with the other pretty, well-liked girls.

One unexceptional morning, Bianca and I were exiting homeroom at the same time. As we funneled through the doorway she said, “C’ya, Marina.” Just like that. C’ya, Marina. “Oh, bye,” I mumbled back, but she was already halfway down the hall, laughing with her tall, blond twin friends.

That day, I learned Bianca’s name and her friends’ names. Then I learned the names of the people in all of my classes, and most of the people outside of them. When I got to college, there were even more names to learn; I began writing new ones in the margins of my notebooks. I became so good at memorizing names, that I’d sometimes pretend I had forgotten a person’s name (usually a boy) so as not to make them uncomfortable. When I graduated from college and clawed my way into New York, I began learning more names than I could fit into my notebooks; I started typing them into my phone. I wanted everyone to feel seen in my presence, the same way Bianca had made me feel seen in hers.

Despite her heavy hand in restructuring the way I interact with intimidatingly attractive people, Bianca and I never became friends. I actually don’t think we ever even spoke after she said my name that one time.

Throughout high school, I continued simmering in my infatuation-sadness-rage and Bianca continued being a well-liked gymnast…until she got injured. Her muscular, and somehow slender, gymnast’s body stopped working in the way it once had, abruptly ending her career as a gymnast. Everyone, including me, stopped paying attention to her.

Before I graduated, I heard rumors that Bianca was addicted to pain pills and hanging with the burnouts. (I’d also heard a rumor that she was Shakira’s second cousin. I believed both.2) Who knows if any of that is true, suburban gossip—especially the Jewish kind—tends to be apocryphal. What I do know to be true, is that at 21 years old, Bianca (who went by a different name in high school) began going by Bianca, filming herself doing various sexual acts, and posting that footage on the Internet.

I know this is true because when that apocryphal gossip reached me in 2010, I found Bianca’s webpage almost immediately. There she was arching, cooing, laughing. There she was choking, gagging, gasping. There she was.

I searched her face for deeper insight into her feelings. I watched her mascara-muddled eyes through the screen but they kept flicking toward the camera before rolling into the back of her head, obscuring any messaging other than the acute awareness that she was being filmed. I clicked out of the window and all the pop-ups.

When I told my dad that one of my former classmates had become a pornstar his eyebrows knitted together, “I don’t understand, you went to a Jewish high school.” His response was so funny to me. Was he saying that Jews shouldn’t be pornstars or that porn stars can’t be Jews?

Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t find Bianca anywhere on the Internet after that day in 2010. I tried different combinations of her porn name (which disappointingly did not consist of her first pet’s name plus the street she grew up on) and her government name. Nothing. It almost felt as if she never existed to begin with.

About once a year for a decade, I’d lazily type Bianca XXXXX into my incognito tab and fruitlessly search the image results for her face. Lately, however, I’ve been thinking of Bianca daily, searching for her just as much. Songs remind me of her. Strangers remind me of her. Podcasts remind me of her. Not just her, but everyone I grew up with. I seem to be in a state of arrested development. Round and round I go, dragged back to a life I’ve spent two decades growing out of.

Every time someone unloads a gun into a crowd (there have been over 173 mass shootings in the two months since my cousin was obliterated in one) my scab gets torn open and I start bleeding again. I keep reaching toward old comforts to use as a tourniquet.3 Thinking about Bianca, her popularity, and my lack of it, is one of those old comforts.

My least favorite part of grief is that it’s boring. Unstimulating. I have no desire to do anything other than mope, which I’ve gotten quite good at (Soviet Jew, remember?). I bide my time fixated on the past, filled with its cool kids, their secrets, successes, failures, cupid’s bow smiles, and iliac crests. At least it’s familiar here.

Last Wednesday, I found Bianca. As it turns out, I’d been messing up her name (again) and that’s why she wasn’t showing up in my feeds. Those muddy eyes stared back at me as I leaned closer to read the details of her profile, which comprised of a few short sentences neatly organized under buttons encouraging me to “Become a Fan” and/ or “Send a Tip.”

The most recent video was posted 9 months ago. It has 27,800 views. (My most recent video is from 5 months ago. It has 698 views.) This means Bianca has been a working pornographic actor for 13 years. I’ve never committed to anything for 13 years, let alone something so acrobatic.

Once more, I find myself searching her face for insight into her feelings. It is a foolish pursuit. I know. But I can’t help it. I keep mining her profiles to learn more about the adult version of this teenage girl I once kind of sort of knew. My shoulders hunch over the keyboard and I click on a photo gallery. Is this an escape or imprisonment? Does the pleasure help with the pain? Are you really Shakira’s second cousin? It’s like I’m in high school again; there’s Bianca soaking in the spotlight of the Internet, while I peevishly lurk in the shadows.

If I am to believe what Bianca’s written on her numerous profiles; she identifies as a Goddess, who is happily married to, and often collaborates with, a fellow pornstar, she loves her job as a fetish artist, and most importantly: she does not chat for free.

Bianca’s life is none of my business. Additionally, I have not earned the privilege of getting to know her. (But for $9.99 a month or $101.90 a year, I could.) Still, I feel connected to her.

Maybe it’s because we both have an intimate relationship with the power of attention. I love how attention feels warm on my body. I’ve seen how easy it is to acquire through titillation, trauma, and controversy. Bianca knows all this because she had access to attention from a young age, I know all this because I didn’t.

Bianca and I have both been working different, but equally absurd, angles of the Attention Economy for the better part of a decade. But Bianca seems to be flourishing, while I’m floundering. Unlike Bianca, I chat for free. Not only do I chat for free, but I write for free, and I post for free. I spend my evenings staring dead-eyed into the computer; begrudgingly exposing my deepest vulnerabilities to an anonymous audience of inboxes, hoping that someone can give me something that lasts a little longer than momentary warmth.

I, too, want to be the kind of woman who demands people value her time. I, too, want to make enough money off my art to pay my bills. I, too, want to have the confidence to unironically call myself a Goddess.

Hopefully, I’ll sell something soon. Then, I could afford to speak with Bianca. It’d be nice to ask her a few of the questions that have been running circles through my mind: Do you really love your job? Do you keep in touch with anyone from high school? How do you know your self-worth?

At the very least, I’d like to be able to afford to tell her that I added three names to my Notes App this week; there’s Ralph who owns the coffee shop down the street, Hya up in Lake Arrowhead, and you, Bianca, who I won’t ever forget again.