Elaborating on her introduction to "Pentimento: A Book of Portraits," Lillian Hellman remarked that the book's title signaled simply her interest in examining, now that the paint had aged, "what was there for [her] once, what is there for [her] now" (p. 3) in terms of the people and events she was about to portray. Here, the author draws on Hellman's sense of pentimento to evoke images of her research and scholarship in adolescent literacy--images of people and ideas that influenced her once and that are there for her still, though often in perceptibly changed forms. Once captured, these images become starting places for a discussion of the present and future of adolescent literacy from her point of view.