Clarissa Cornell ordered the Uber with the effortless authority of someone who knows she will be seen arriving. Chelsea to Chinatown: a short (ish) trip. A vehicle arrived that already felt tired of being a vehicle. They folded themselves into the backseat, Clarissa in the middle (of course), Mei to the left, Duncan to the right an accidental triptych. The car smelled like a past life: stale upholstery, something sweet and rotting underneath. Clarissa tried to hold her breath, as if that might preserve her.

Duncan was already scrolling.
“Wait,” he said,
“These are iconic.”

He turned the screen toward them. The gallery dinner, if you could call it that, a performance of proximity more than anything now flattened into images. Brutal images. Wrong angles, wrong timing, faces caught mid-transition between versions of themselves.

Mei recoiled first.
“Duncan, these are horrible. What the fuck?”
He laughed, genuinely.
“What do you mean? People love them. It’s funny.”

Funny. The word landed incorrectly.

Clarissa felt it physically, a drop in her stomach, like missing a step in the dark. Heat rose to her face. She couldn’t hold her breath anymore. The car, the images, the proximity, it was all collapsing into something unmanageable. She needed air, or control, or a version of herself that wasn’t already circulating.

“You posted these?”
Mei snapped, sharper now.
“Are you insane? Have you never heard of approve-before-post?”

Clarissa said nothing, but aligned herself silently with Mei’s outrage. Duncan wasn’t famous, not exactly, but he was worse circulated. Followed. Approved by the exact people who decided things. Mei’s boss followed him. Her gallerist followed him. Curators, editors, boys who pretended not to care, all of them followed Duncan. He moved through it lightly, as if untouched by consequence. A male privilege she assumed.Mei reached for his phone. He pulled it back, smiling, already bored of the conflict. Instead, he opened Spotify, connecting to the car’s Bluetooth with a small, decisive gesture. A new Lana Del Rey song began to spill into the already compromised air.

Clarissa stared straight ahead, fixing on the windscreen like it might stabilize her. The city slid by in fragments: light, reflection, frames, movement. She tried to reconstruct herself from the inside out, but all she could access was the exterior. The image.

Why did she look like that?
Was she really that ugly?

She loved beauty. She believed in it with the seriousness of religion. She just didn’t believe in the version of herself that happened accidentally.

She had rules.
Strict rules.
Very strict rules.
A doctrine, really.

No Tube if there might be a crush, the lighting was punitive, the noise destabilizing. Buses only under duress, and always seated on the left side so her good side could exist in case it was needed. No dinners, only drinks, she would not be witnessed chewing in the early stages of desire. Only dim lighting, never those aggressive, interrogative spotlights tiktok calls homophobic. No sleeping over. Not until the face could be controlled. Not until the narrative was stable.

She knew the term body dysmorphia but it felt redundant.
Who didn’t experience themselves this way?
Who wasn’t constantly negotiating between the self and its documentation?

Maybe Duncan.

Mei lunged again, trying to grab the phone. Clarissa snapped back into the present just as Duncan deflected, suddenly defensive.

“Why does it matter so much to you?”
he said.
“It’s just disappearing images. No one looks that closely. It’s a vibe.”

A vibe.

Clarissa almost laughed. Her entire consciousness was structured around looking closely. A forensic gaze, endlessly scanning: coolness, beauty, novelty, impact. She consumed images like evidence. She produced herself accordingly. Sometimes she caught herself watching herself performing, adjusting, even when no one was there. It was disorienting. It was constant. Mei shifted tactics, her tone cooling into something more surgical. She questioned why he needed the images at all. What were they for to prop up his coolness at costs of ruin her and Clarissa?

Outside, the city kept moving: shops, houses, people slipping past in a continuous update cycle. Each moment replacing the last, each image a bid for relevance, for memory, for something like permanence.

But what if the car went the wrong way?
What if people hated her?
What if the wrong image was the one that stayed?

They were one block away.

The night was supposed to continue: another party, another apartment with a minor claim to cultural history (something about Frances Ha, vaguely important). It would be full of the same people, differently arranged, more druggy. Clarissa realized, with sudden clarity, that she needed something to cut through the feeling, something immediate, chemical, fun. Coke, ideally. Distance from Duncan, definitely.

He had taken the wrong picture at the wrong time.
And now it existed.

If only there were a doctrine for this? something formal, enforceable. A work-approved social protocol. It would simplify everything. Clarissa manifested a business approved socialite doctrine. Because people love beauty.

like

Painterly Beauty.
Blurry Beauty.
Fresh-skin Beauty.
Personalised Beauty.
Dramatic Beauty. 
Effortless Beauty.
Non Binary Beauty. 
Composed Beauty.
Frat House Beuaty. 
Legacy Beautyuty.
Perfect-timing Beauty.
Historical Beauty.
Sexy Beauty.
Classic Beauty.
Hunk Beauty.
Abstract Beauty. 
Manic-Pixie-Dream Girl Beauty.
Nerd Beauty.
Navel-gazing Beauty.
Mature Beauty. 
Adolescent Beauty.
American Beauty.
Natural Beauty.
Big Tits Beauty.
Gamine Beauty.
French Beauty.
Looks Maxxing Beauty. 
Korean Beauty.
Sublime Beauty.
Black Beauty.
Controversial Beauty. 
Instagram Face Beauty. 
Kawaii Beauty.
Soft Boy Beauty. 
Brutal Beauty.
Authentic Beauty.
Surgical Beauty.
Dasha Beauty.
Model Beauty.
Famous Beauty.
Ugly Beauty.
Slavic Doll Beauty.
Latinx Beauty.
Twink Beauty.
Girl Next door Beauty.
Androgenous Beauty. 
Basic Beauty.
Rockstar Beauty.
Expanded Beauty.
Ultra contemporary Beauty.
Artistic Beauty.
Alchemic Beauty.
Ironic Beauty.
Modernist Beauty.
Big Dick Beuaty. 
Victorian Beauty.
Failing Beauty. 
Vulgar Beuaty. 
Dark Akademia Beauty. 

And somewhere, buried in the web, a version of Clarissa that did not consent, but would be consumed anyway.