The Luckiest Girls Read online

  I really want to hear the rest of this story because holy cow, but then Margo appears in the doorway.

  “Jane, Gigi is on her way,” Margo says, motioning me to join her. “Please wait for her in the living room.” She brings me to the second floor living room and leaves me there.

  The room is something straight out of Architectural Digest (literally, I mean it was actually featured in Architectural Digest a few years ago) with a thirteen-foot ceiling, dove-grey walls and white plaster moldings. A nineteenth-century French landscape oil painting hangs over the fireplace, and photographs in silver frames adorn the end tables. I wander the room, getting a feel for my new home. There’s the photo of Gigi taken by Annie Leibowitz for Vanity Fair, and another one of Gigi on the cover of Vogue. And there, almost hidden behind another frame, is a black-and-white picture of a young girl on a swing. My mother, Victoria.

  I pick up the frame and examine the picture closely. I’ve always thought I looked like Dad, with the same grey-blue eyes and wide mouth. But in this picture I can see how much of my mother there is in me. I have her eyebrows, straight and dark, and her hair, pulled back in a ponytail, reveals the same forehead and hairline as mine.

  Just as I lean forward to replace the frame Gigi strides into the room, and with a start I straighten up and drop the picture. With a crash it knocks over the other pictures on the table, and as I scramble to set everything upright again I see that the glass on my mother’s picture has cracked.

  “Jane,” Gigi says. “Well.”

  She’s dressed in a cape and tall black boots, and her hair is snow white, cut in a chic bob, curling under at the ends and showing off her long neck. You can see immediately why Gigi once used to be a model in her own right, before she left her agency taking a handful of their models with her, and opened up her own agency to become the best agent in the business. I meet her in the center of the room, still clutching my mother’s picture. I feel like I should hug Gigi, but we never hugged any of the previous times we met, and now I don’t know what to do. When I saw her at Dad’s funeral we barely spoke to each other. Gigi places her hands on my upper arms and gives me a small squeeze which doesn’t quite pass for a hug and kisses the air above each cheek. She takes the picture out of my hands and places it on a side table without giving it a glance.

  “Come, sit down,” she says as she removes her cape and places it on the sofa beside her. She wears a pencil skirt and a black cashmere sweater and she sits with her ankles crossed, her back straight. I catch myself doing the same thing, squirming and crossing and uncrossing my ankles until she places a hand firmly on my knee, and I stop instantly.

  “Have you found your room? Are you comfortable?” she asks. I assure her I am. “Good. We have a lot of catching up to do, but unfortunately this is a very busy time for me. I have to go right out again after dinner.”

  If the disappointment shows on my face, Gigi doesn’t notice.

  “You’ll start school on Monday. You’re very lucky that they’re able to take you. Egleston has a long waiting list, but your grades are excellent and your teachers sent very good recommendations. Fortunately you’re a bright girl.” At least there’s that. The unspoken thought hangs in the air.

  “I’ve never transferred to a new school before. I’m a little nervous.”

  “It’s just for a few months, anyway, until the end of the semester.”

  “You mean I’ll go to a different school in the fall?”

  Gigi takes a breath.

  “We don’t need to decide anything right away,” she continues. “But everything has happened so fast. I think we should view this as a trial period for both of us.”

  I feel the floor rock beneath me.

  “I thought I was coming to live with you permanently,” I say. “I thought that you had custody of me now.”

  “I do. I am responsible for all the decisions regarding your education and upbringing. One of those decisions is whether you wouldn’t be better suited going to boarding school. After all, I’m very busy running the agency and I travel constantly…”

  Gigi’s words turn into a dull roar in my head. This isn’t my new home, I realize. This is a pit stop, on the way to God knows where.

  “Now, dinner will be served in twenty minutes so please change,” Gigi says with an air of finality.

  “Change what?” I say, feebly.

  “Your clothes, dear,” Gigi sighs. “No one wants to look at you in a grubby t-shirt and jeans at the dinner table.”

  “All I have are T-shirts and jeans.”

  One of Gigi’s eyebrows glides up her forehead.

  “Show me your clothes,” she says. She marches up the stairs and into my room as I follow. Gigi opens my closet, but there’s not much of mine in there, just my fleece jacket and a couple of plaid and denim shirts. Gigi rifles through my dresser and sighs.

  “Wear this,” she says, taking the denim shirt off the hanger and handing it to me. “Tomorrow you’re going shopping.”

  * * *

  The Art of Dining

  Nowhere else are your upbringing and social intelligence more evident than at the dinner table. An attractive, articulate and well-mannered dinner guest brightens the table like a bouquet of flowers. Be mindful of how you eat, what you eat, how you speak and what you speak about, whether you are at a formal dinner party or a casual lunch for two. — From Living a Model Life: Beauty and Style Tips from Gigi Towers by Gigi Towers.

  * * *

  Betty, the cook, is Irish and large and scowls a lot, and all the girls are scared to death of her. Everything she cooks is from a list of low-fat, low-carb, low-calorie meals, developed by a dietician at a famous spa in California. Gigi is a maniac for good manners. The girls sit at the table with their napkins on their laps and their elbows at their sides, taking tiny careful bites as though we’re having dinner at Buckingham Palace. It’s a big change from how I typically ate at home, which was usually by myself and in front of the television, and consisted of my own culinary masterpieces like microwave pancakes slathered with Nutella or canned tomato soup with goldfish crackers. Tonight Betty has made a poached salmon with baby potatoes around the sides, and a quivering gelatinous dome with little green flecks floating around in it.

  “Herb-infused vegetable aspic,” Betty growls as I give her a quizzical look when the dish comes my way. I don’t know what kind of herbs are in there but when Betty isn’t infusing them in aspic she must be smoking them if she thinks this stuff is food.

  I’m a little worried that my table etiquette isn’t up to par and that I’ll accidentally use the wrong fork or something, but nobody pays me much attention. Gigi sets the tone of conversation, changing the subject if it bores her (“Nobody cares what you dreamed last night, Campbell. Such stories are only interesting to the person telling them,” which shuts Campbell up for the rest of dinner). Gigi is just telling the girls about the politics of who sits where at the Fashion Week shows, when her eye falls on Campbell’s plate. She stops talking in mid-sentence, heaves a big dramatic sigh, and rolls her eyes to the ceiling.

  “Tell me that is not a potato on your plate,” she says to the ceiling.

  Campbell stares wide-eyed at her own plate. The tiny offending potato gleams like a pebble beside her salmon.

  Gigi covers her eyes with a slim, manicured hand. “I know that there is no possible way that a potato would be on your plate,” she continues, “because I know that you know that you have five pounds to lose before next week. So, when I look again, I know that potato will be gone.”

  Campbell quickly picks up the potato and plops it onto Maya’s plate, who snatches it and tries to hide it under her napkin, but it rolls away from her across the table, and if there is anything that will make Gigi more angry than an errant potato on a plate it is a potato rolling across a mahogany table. Just before she uncovers her eyes I grab the potato and pop it into my mouth. I feel like a cat with a canary in its mouth, and Gigi rolls her eyes while the girls look anxious. />
  It’s so ridiculous, this panic over a potato the size of a marble, that I can’t stifle a burst of laughter. Unfortunately this causes the potato to shoot out of my mouth with an audible POP and land in Ling’s aspic. Everyone stares at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, covering my mouth with my hands. I struggle to control my laughter, but the exhaustion, the grief, and the loneliness that I’ve been carrying for two weeks are finally too much for me, and with a sob my laughter dissolves into tears as I push my chair from the table and rush upstairs to my room.

  2

  Maya

  What, by the gods of all things dorky and pitiful, have we here? What is this, an orphan? Not just any orphan, mind you, but one with Gigi’s stamp on her sad little forehead. Look at her mirroring Gigi’s table manners, all wide-eyed and shy, it’s just heartbreaking. I can compete with any one of these girls for Gigi’s attention, but a granddaughter? Gigi hasn’t even said one word to me about my booking for W Magazine! It’s like I’m invisible. It’s like I’m…Campbell or somebody.

  Oh hell no, not here, not now. Stop it. Stop stop stop. I thought I had it under control but here we go again, a miasma of panic enveloping me. My breath comes in short gasps and I want to bolt outside into the night, and how can they all sit there talking about bullshit when the bottom has dropped out of the world and I’m free falling. Keep my eyes down — you can see it in my eyes when a panic attack comes on, they’re not my own, they’re the eyes of a crazy person — and breathe: in-two-three-four out-two-three-four.

  Those pills Dr. Oberhoff gave me aren’t doing a damn thing. The only thing that keeps me from spinning off the rails when I have an attack is to go through my win-list in my head, which I’ve been silently reciting like a malfunctioning robot since I was nine years old: I’m the best speller in my class, I’m the fastest runner in my grade, I’m the best server on my team, and so on. The list changes every time there’s a new variable, and this week has been full of new variables. With a deep breath (in-two-three-four) I begin: I have more followers than the other girls, I have a better book, I’m skinnier than any of them, I’ve been booked for more shows. Even this Jane creature won’t matter once the shows start. But then I remember that, when Sophia arrives on Friday, I won’t be any of those things. She’ll be the best, and I won’t be anything.

  Then, with a deep, shuddering breath, I remind myself that my pedigree beats all these girls,’ even Sophia’s, and yes, even Jane’s. Don’t think that doesn’t matter; Gigi eats that stuff up. I’ve heard her talk about my parents: “Maya’s father is the first African-American surgeon to win the Nobel Prize in medicine…be sure and let Vogue know so they’ll want to do a profile.” And, “Salma Robinson’s book on women’s rights in the developing world got a great review from Marie Claire. Do they know we represent her daughter?”

  I wonder what Gigi would think if she knew how much my parents despise the modeling industry and everybody in it. A couple of weeks ago, when Mom was in town to speak at the World Conference on Women at the United Nations, she was still fuming at me.

  “If I’d known you’d give up on going to college altogether I would never have let you take a semester off,” she said over lunch at Bilbouquet. “I only let you go to Milan because I thought it would be a unique travel opportunity.”

  I love this “let” bullshit. I turned eighteen in July, so it’s not like I needed anyone’s permission. Anyway, we both know the real reason she let me go to Milan, and it had nothing to do with the travel opportunity.

  “College isn’t going anywhere,” I said. “I can take classes part-time at the New School.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not the same thing at all. You got the highest SAT scores in your class and you have a 3.9 GPA. And now you’re surrounding yourself with girls who don’t have a thought in their heads and who only care about their looks.”

  “You don’t know what goes on in their heads,” I retorted. “And they’re not dummies, either. Brigitte speaks four languages and Ling is an award-winning violinist.”

  “What about college? Do any of them go to college?”

  “No, not right now. Campbell is going for her GED…”

  “How marvelous. Your new best friend is a high school drop-out.”

  “I never said she was my best friend.”

  I didn’t want to talk about my friends with Mom. It doesn’t matter who they are, she’ll find something to criticize. This is a woman who counts Michelle Obama among her best friends. But I had to admit, if only to myself, that she was partly right. Sometimes I feel like I have nothing in common with the other models. Isabel said something so stupid to me the other day: She said, “You’re lucky, because black girls are so in fashion now.” Really, you idiot? I’m lucky? Have you ever heard a client tell your booker that they don’t need to see you because they “already have their black girl,” or arrived at a shoot to have a make-up artist say he hopes you brought your own foundation? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

  “Are you doing this to hurt me?” Mom snipped. That is so Mom: Me, me, me. “We’ve given you a lot of slack since your accident, Maya, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you disgrace us. I don’t care what Dr. Oberhoff said.”

  I couldn’t believe she went there! We never talked my “accident.” It’s like my whole family made an unspoken agreement to pretend that part of my life never existed. Under Mom’s pointed gaze, I instinctively placed my hand over the scar on my left wrist and hid my hands under the table.

  Early the previous year I temporarily lost the feeling in my right arm, and it was Dr. Oberhoff who figured out that I was carrying so much stress in my upper back that my vertebrae were cutting off my nerve endings.

  “A girl your age can’t sleep five hours and study eight every day,” Dr. Oberhoff said. “You need flip those numbers around.” Whatever, lady. You don’t keep a straight A average while you’re having your beauty sleep, and in my family, that’s a minimum prerequisite for membership. Dr. Oberhoff made me work with a physical therapist for a while, which helped. But when she suggested that I undergo cognitive therapy, Mom balked.

  “Cognitive therapy is a crutch for people who can’t solve their own problems,” Mom insisted. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  Because that’s the kind of family we are. We’re perfect, and we’re especially perfect at hiding our imperfections. We’ll even hide them from ourselves. Mom never asked me why she kept finding bloodstained wads of tissue in the wastepaper basket, or where the small cuts around my ankles and on my forearms came from. Perhaps she was afraid I would blame them on a broken glass, a neighbor’s kitten or a faulty razor, or worse, that I wouldn’t. Nobody ever asked me why there was a box cutter in the bathroom drawer, but I know that someone found it, because one day it was gone.

  I don’t remember much about my accident. All I know is what everyone told me after I came home from the hospital: that I reached into the dishwasher and accidentally sliced my wrist on the tip of a knife, and my sister Alexandra found me in the kitchen bleeding from a six-inch cut. You’d think someone would have asked why the blood stain on the oak-wood floor was on the other side of the kitchen, nowhere near the dishwasher. Or why I would reach into the dishwasher with my left hand if I’m right handed. Or why I didn’t call for help. But people in my family don’t ask questions that they don’t want to know the answers to.

  And that, ultimately, is why they let me go to Milan after a model scout from the Towers Agency spotted me at a volleyball tournament and invited me to spend a month with their agency in Milan. Because Dr. Oberhoff said a change of setting would be good for me. Because having my body scrutinized every day would make it impossible for me to cut myself and keep it a secret. Because my family finds their problems easier to deal with when they’re on the other side of the world.

  It’s been months since I hurt myself, so something is working. I would point that out to Mom, but Mom never accepted that there was anything wrong with
me to begin with, so I already know that’s a conversation that won’t go anywhere.

  “It must be uproariously funny to you that your mother is a tenured professor of Women’s Studies at Georgetown University, a feminist icon, and you’re making a career out of objectifying your body,” Mom continued.

  “Oh my God, Mom! Not everything I do is about you. Listen to me, okay? For once, please listen." I pressed my fingers to my forehead, exasperated. “I’m happy doing this. Milan was the most exciting time I've ever had. I felt special, like I was a part of something beautiful and important.”

  Mom snorts at the word ‘important,’ but I continue.

  “The designers who work for the big fashion houses, they're real artists. So are the top photographers. Fashion isn’t just about pretty pictures. It has as much relevance as all important art. It reflects social, cultural, even political values. When a model wears a designer’s collection on the runway or in a magazine, then she’s a part of creating trends that resonate all over the world. I want to do this, Mom. I know I’m good at it. I’ve already been booked for my first runway shows, and Gigi wants to send me to Paris in the Spring. Paris! Not as a tourist, not like when we went for Dad’s conference, but to live and work and meet people on my own.”

  “You’re good at many other things too, Maya. Things that require you to use your brain.”

  “I don’t have to prove to anyone that I’m smart. I know how smart I am. I’ll find plenty of ways to use my brain. A lot of models use their success to raise awareness of global issues or to found their own charitable NGOs.”

  “Nowadays everyone with an Instagram account is an activist,’ mom scoffed. “No one will take you seriously unless you’re one of the best.”

  “Well, maybe I will be.”