The only connection with the outside was the mail, which was delivered usually -- but not always -- once a week. This day, there was a letter from her mother, who enclosed a letter from the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N. J.

"Dear Amy," it read, "The purpose of this letter is to explain to you why your portfolio is being returned to you without one of your original works. Because of the exemplary quality of your work, the missing piece has been selected for . . . this year's AP Studio Art student exhibit."

Amy's work -- a moody pastel drawing of an underground alleyway in Mexico City -- was one of just 30 pieces chosen from more than 100,000 submitted to the testing service's Advance Placement program.

Amy was flabbergasted.

"I didn't even know there was a contest, much less an exhibit," said Amy, a freshman at UC San Diego, who graduated from Piedmont High School last year. "I just sent them a portfolio because I wanted some AP credit."

She didn't do much celebrating. "There was nobody to celebrate with. Nobody there knew me as an artist; I was the girl who lays the cement floors. Besides, there was no electricity, so there was no night life. You went to sleep when the sun went down. So I looked up at the sky, thrust up my fist, and said, 'Yessss!'"

Now that she's back, she still hasn't seen the traveling exhibit, which was shown first in New York, then in New Jersey, and currently in Knoxville, Tenn.

Amy first started drawing when she took an art class during her freshman year at Piedmont High. But she never thought she was any good at it until junior year, when one of her works was selected to be hung at Gaylord's Cafe on Piedmont Avenue.

"That's when I started making art outside of school," she said.

Her winning drawing had no title. "None of them do. If I have to call them anything, I call them something generic, like 'the one with George in it' or 'the one with the guy standing next to the garbage can.' "

Her subjects range from portraits to cityscapes, but all her works are really about the same thing: the creative process itself, she says.

Like the great French Impressionist Edgar Degas -- who also used pastels -- Amy is constantly striving to achieve the unachievable: using color instead of line to depict shape and volume.

It's an esoteric game she plays with herself, one she knows she will never win, because she's chasing a standard of perfection.

"But I'm having a lot of fun trying," she said.

Not surprisingly, she's her own worst critic.

"I can't stand to look at my early work," she said, shuddering at the thought. "The nicest thing I can say is that they're, uh, 'primitive.'"