The Luckiest Girls Read online

  “Umm…I see my leg?”

  “Cellulite. You see cellulite. See how lumpy the back of your thigh is? And here, do you see that little roll at the top of your hip?”

  My heart sinks to the pit of my stomach. I thought these would be some of my best pictures.

  “I don’t think you’ll be able to use any of these,” Marilyn sighs.

  “I’m shooting another test on Friday,” I say, struggling to keep my voice from breaking. “I promise those will be better. I’ve lost about three pounds since last week.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Marilyn says. “We need to start seeing some results from you, Campbell, before we can even think about sending you to any of the magazines or top photographers.”

  I hold back my tears until I exit the building. Why can’t Marilyn get off my ass? The only thing that’s keeping me going is that Sophia’s coming. I can’t talk to any of the other girls about how scared I am about not working. They don’t give a damn. I never thought I could be so lonely in a house full of other girls.

  It’s hard to believe that Sophia and I both started out with the same agency in Atlanta. We met at a fashion show at Saks last year, and I made her laugh so hard with my mimicking of the other girls that she almost peed in her Oscar de la Renta. We hit it off immediately, even though she went to a private school in Atlanta and I went to public school in Fayetteville. Now her face is all over Italian Vogue, French Elle, and dozens of other magazines, and she even has an international ad campaign for Guess Jeans. I’ll admit I’ve had some major pangs of jealousy when I read her tweets about being dressed by Giorgio Armani and dancing with the crown prince of Dubai while I’ve been dragging my butt around the city trying to get work, but of course I’m happy for her. But it’s time for things to start happening for me too, now. I’m running out of money. Sarah, my booker, told me that I need a new comp card, and it’ll cost $500. If I don’t start getting some real work, I’m seriously scared that Gigi won’t keep me.

  One thing’s for sure, though. I am not going back home. I would rather clean bathrooms at McDonald’s and sleep in the subway than go home.

  I’ve been sitting in the lobby of Flair Fashions catalog for forty minutes now, waiting for the art director, and she still isn’t back from her lunch meeting even though I was told to come between one and one-thirty and it’s now one-forty five. The receptionist said that she should be here any minute, but that was half an hour ago. Now I have to call the agency and tell them that I’m running late for my casting for a skin care commercial at two o’clock.

  “They’re only admitting people until two-thirty,” says Sarah, “and they want to make a decision today, so you really should try to make it. We can reschedule Flair.”

  The casting is all the way on the other side of town, and when I get outside it’s raining and there are no taxis so I walk to the subway and when I finally arrive my clothes are wet, my hair is stringy and my makeup is running down my face in black rivulets. There are a handful of girls ahead of me. When they finally call me in, I hear the casting director murmur, “Oh, great, another blonde,” so now I know he’s looking for a brunette, so why am I even here?

  Next I have a casting for Siren Swimsuits — this one is down in TriBeCa, so it’s back into the rain and the subway — and at the studio there’s a gaggle of models waiting their turn to try on a bikini. When each girl comes out from the changing area (which is just a small screen in the corner of the room) she stands in front of a panel of people at the front of the room taking notes while all the other girls are right there, in the same room, watching as the clients discuss the girls’ bodies among themselves in front of everyone else. Even if the top edge of the bikini wasn’t digging into my hips I can tell by the quick, dismissive way they say “okay-thank-you-next” that my body is all wrong for this job.

  I try to avoid the smug looks of the other girls as I leave the studio. What a rotten, miserable day, I think while I wait for the elevator, and then someone calls, “Excuse me, miss?” and I turn around.

  “My name’s Luigi,” he says, “I saw you at the casting.” I don’t remember him but there were several people who I didn’t meet. “I work with a division of the Siren Swimsuit company called Aqua Bella, a smaller, newer company, and we’re looking for models for a campaign, but we can’t pay the agency fees so I’m asking girls if they’d be interested in doing some modeling work outside of the agency. Would you be interested? It pays five hundred dollars for two or three hours of shooting.”

  “I’m not supposed to take any work outside of the agency.”

  “Lots of girls do it, you know. This way, we don’t have to pay the agency fee and you don’t have to pay the commission. Everybody wins.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. If the agency found out I was taking work on the side, they could kick me out. But meanwhile I think, five hundred dollars? For a couple of hours of work? “Can I think about it?”

  “Here’s my number,” he says and hands me a card. “We want to shoot tomorrow so let me know soon.” I give him one of my composite cards and promise I’ll let him know by the end of the day.

  I make up my mind on my way home. I really need the money, and it’s only a couple of hours of work, and nobody from the agency needs to know anything about it. I call Luigi and tell him I’ll do it.

  “Great,” Luigi says. He gives me the address and tells me to be there at one o’clock tomorrow afternoon.

  “A package arrived for you,” Margo tells me as I close the front door. “I put it in the kitchen.”

  I find the package addressed to me on the kitchen counter. At the sight of Mom’s handwriting on the address label my heart stops for a second. It’s been more than two months since I left home and I haven’t heard a word from her all this time. I called her almost every day the first week, and I sent her a dozen texts, but she didn’t reply. Finally I decided to wait until she’s ready to reach out to me, however long that will take. Maybe she’s finally ready.

  I run up the stairs to my room, then shut the door behind me. As I tear the package open a jumble of items fall into my lap. The items are trivial, things that only have value to someone who cares about the milestones they represent: A needlepoint sampler I made in fifth grade; my junior prom dress; a photo album my friend Maddie made of us (back when we were still friends); a handful of sports ribbons; and a dozen or so photographs — including one of me at seven dressed for a ballet recital which used to stand in a frame in Mom’s room. There’s no note, just these artifacts of my life which Mom wants out of her house. The message is clear: Now you have nothing to come home for anymore.

  I want to call her, ask her what the hell kind of mother she is, but I know I’ll just get a recording in her sing-song drawl telling me to leave a message. She knows the package arrived today. She must be watching her phone, waiting for me to call just so she can let it ring and ring, knowing how much I need to hear her voice, and not pick up. I won’t do it. I won’t give her the pleasure.

  I’ve known since I was six years old that you don’t want to get on Mom’s wrong side. When Dad left, he didn’t just leave. He disappeared. I mean every trace of him disappeared from the house. Every picture of his, every stitch of clothing, his DVDs, his detective novels, his hunting boots, his tackle box, everything Mom could get hold of she pitched onto the front yard. Then she doused it all with lighter fluid and threw a lit match onto the heap. Flames leapt all over the place while I huddled in the doorway. One of the neighbors called the fire department and the fire truck wailed up to our house right at the same time that Dad’s car came tearing up the street.

  “Oh my god!” He screamed. “You crazy bitch! You fucking lunatic!” He ranted and flailed and would have probably strangled Mom right there if the firemen hadn’t held him back. I think the only reason he didn’t press charges against her for arson or destruction of property is because, if Mom went to jail, he would be stuck taking care of a six-year-old daughter.

  A year later
Dad and his girlfriend moved to Florida, and he promised I could spend my school vacations with them. But the vacation visits never happened.

  “You’re either on my side or his,” Mom said. “You want to spend your vacation with that liar and his whore, that’s your choice.”

  “Daddy said I have to,” I protested. “Because of the custody agreement.”

  “They can’t make you. Not if you don’t want to, and why would you want to? You don’t want to, do you?”

  “I don’t know.” I mean, it was Florida, and I hadn’t seen my dad in almost two years, so yeah, kind of.

  “You want to be with them, then go! I’m not the one who abandoned this family, but go ahead, go live with that cheating bastard. After all the pain your father caused us, by all means, go take their side against me, even though I’ve always done everything for you.”

  “It’s just Christmas vacation…”

  “And what about my Christmas? Did you think of that? No, because you only think about yourself.”

  So I didn’t go. And I didn’t go the vacation after that, or the next one, until he stopped asking me altogether.

  No matter how nuts I knew she was, it didn’t make sense to me that Dad would leave Mom for another woman, because I thought Mom was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Unlike the mothers of my friends, who wore button-front shirts and cropped chino pants, Mom dressed like a Barbie doll — tight, midriff-baring tops, denim miniskirts, and heels as high as she could walk in. Her hair was big and frosty, she never went anywhere without lipstick, and kept her nails long and polished.

  She wasn’t alone for long. The first one who moved in with us was Dan, who smelled of sawdust and varnish and who took me to breakfast at Waffle House on mornings when Mom couldn’t get out of bed because her head hurt. They smoked cigarettes and listened to music and danced in the living room, and sometimes there was yelling until they’d make up and disappear into the bedroom. Eventually the yelling became more frequent and the making up became less so, and one day Dan and all his things were gone.

  Then there was Eddie who we only saw on weekdays, and I learned later that he had a wife and kids in Atlanta whom he spent his weekends with. Eddie was short and didn’t have all his hair but he brought us presents every time he came over. He gave me a little yellow chick for Easter which died within a week, because what did I know about taking care of a chick. Mom never told him that it was a stupid and thoughtless gift to give to a child, she just wrapped it in a paper towel and tossed it in the trash. But I cried about it for days.

  There was Brian, who was a trainer at a gym and who could lift me over his head like a barbell. He read superhero comic books, and gave me the ones he was finished with. By the time Mom finally met Jack, my stepfather, there had been half a dozen others whose names and faces I don’t remember.

  When Jack arrived I knew he was different. For one thing, Mom stopped smoking. It was as though she never had a reason to stop before, but she would do it for Jack. She also became a decent housekeeper almost overnight. Before Jack, Mom would let the dishes pile up in the sink until we ran out of utensils, and I sometimes pulled dirty clothes out of the hamper so I’d have something to wear to school. But when Jack started coming around, Mom cleaned the house like a maniac, and kept real food in the house like fresh fruit and chicken instead of frozen dinners and boxes of mac ’n’ cheese. She made sure she always had a full face of makeup on from the moment she woke up, just for him. There was no question in my mind: Mom was in love for real this time, and she wasn’t going to let anything come between her and Jack. Especially not a teenage daughter.

  The address for the Aqua Bella swimsuit shoot is a hotel on the Lower East Side. I arrive in photo-ready makeup as Luigi requested, and when I knock on the door of the room Luigi greets me, invites me in and takes my coat. A camera on a tripod and a studio lamp are aimed at a white paper backdrop hung against the wall. Luigi offers me a glass of wine.

  “I’m underage, you know,” I say.

  “You Americans and your bourgeois prudishness,” Luigi laughs. “Here. It’s a nice Pinot Grigio.” I accept and take a sip.

  “Where are the photographer and stylist?” I ask.

  “I’m the photographer,” Luigi says. “And we won’t need a stylist for this job.” He shows me the outfits to be shot which include a black string bikini, a beige macrame bathing suit that is almost completely see-through, and a string top and thong bikini bottom which I decide right then and there that I will not allow Luigi to photograph me in from behind.

  “We’ll start with whichever you feel most comfortable in,” Luigi says. In the bathroom I put on the black bikini and examine myself in front of the mirror. (I’m bigger on top than most models, which isn’t really an asset in fashion, but I like my breasts. Maybe it’s because they came late to the party, when I was sixteen. I was barely a B and wondered whether they’d ever show up, and then I started taking birth control pills and almost overnight they made a dramatic appearance. Suddenly my breasts were a full C and we've been a real team ever since.) The bikini is a bit small on me but when I step out of the bathroom Luigi smiles in approval.

  “Beautiful, wonderful, perfect,” he says. He has me sit on a stool with one knee up, my arm resting on my knee, touching my lips, my hair falling over one shoulder.

  “Lovely,” Luigi says from behind the camera. “So beautiful, so sexy.”

  Luigi guides me into different poses.

  “Arch you back a bit more. Open your legs wider. Part your lips, and relax your eyes, that’s right.”

  By the third outfit — the thong bikini— Luigi wants to change up the background.

  “Let’s move this one to the bed,” he says.

  It strikes me as odd, since a bikini on a bed with a cheap burgundy quilted spread doesn’t make sense, but Luigi is so nonchalant about the request, not even looking at me as he fiddles with the lens of his camera, that I sit on the edge of the bed.

  “You look uncomfortable,” he says. “Lie down and relax.” I lie down on my side, facing him.

  “Put your hand on the inside of your leg. More inside. Higher. Touch your lip.” Then he says, “The top isn’t working for me. Take it off, will you?”

  `At first I’m confused. “What should I put on instead?”

  “Nothing,” he answers.

  I sit up. “Are you kidding?”

  “Don’t worry, you can turn your back to me. It’ll be fine.”

  “I don’t want to do that. I’m wearing a thong.”

  “Don’t be a baby, Campbell.”

  “You never said anything about being topless.”

  “I thought you were a professional. If you want to stop, then we’ll stop, but I’m not paying you for an unfinished job.”

  “I’ve worn every outfit for you! That’s not fair!”

  “What are you going to do?” Luigi shrugs.

  That bastard. There’s nothing I can do and he knows it. I can’t call my booker since I’m not doing this job through the agency, and if I walk out I won’t get paid. I decide to do as he says but to kneel and cover my bottom with my feet. I turn my back to him to remove the top, but even as I’m taking it off he’s clicking the camera.

  “Cooperate, now,” he says. “Let me see your face. That’s right.” Luigi walks around the bed, and no matter how hard I try to cover my breasts or my bottom he’s there with his camera, clicking away.

  “We’re not done until I get my shot, Campbell.”

  I’ve never been so uncomfortable, and I’m almost crying. Luigi sighs and puts down the camera.

  “You’re too stiff,” he says. “You need to loosen up. Like this.” He reaches around my back and places his hands on the inside of my thighs and pulls them apart, and suddenly his arms tighten around me and his fingers slide up the inside of my thighs and onto my pubic area and he squeezes, and I writhe myself out of his arms and leap off the bed.

  “We’re done,” I cry. I run into the bathroom
and quickly change back into my clothes.

  “Campbell, chill out, will you? You got the wrong idea,” Luigi says calmly when I emerge, my coat on and my backpack slung over my shoulder.

  “Like hell I do. Just give me my check,” I reply.

  “You’re flattering yourself. Why don’t you stay a while and we’ll finish the wine?”

  “I don’t think so. Where’s my check?”

  “You don’t need to be so hostile. What’s the rush? Have another drink.” He’s already pouring another glass.

  “I just want my damn check.”

  “Here’s your check,” Luigi says. I reach for the check but he whisks it out of my reach. “Let me have a kiss first. Make up and be friends.”

  I move in to give him a quick peck on the cheek because I need that check, but he grabs me tight and plants a hard kiss right on my mouth, forcing his tongue between my lips, and, gagging, I twist my head so he leaves a nasty wet trail on my cheek. I snatch the check from him and leave, running down the stairs without looking back.

  I get an alert from Chase Manhattan Bank the morning after I deposit the check. The check bounced. It’s drawn on a non-existent account. Fake. Worthless. I call the number Luigi gave me but there’s no reply, just a recording. I leave a message telling him to call me back right away, but even as I speak I have no hope of ever hearing back from him.

  I find the number of the Siren Swimsuit company and, after several attempts, get through to one of their representatives. They tell me they’ve never heard of a Luigi, there’s no division of Siren Swimsuits called Aqua Bella and it’s likely that the man I’m referring to was in the building on unrelated business and happened to see me leave the casting. It’s a total dead end. I’m crying with frustration and anger when I hang up. Anger at Luigi and everyone else in this sordid business but especially anger at my own stupid, ignorant self for being so naive. Far worse than the money is the knowledge that some of the sleaziest pictures I’ve ever taken are floating around somewhere. If they ever turn up, I’m as good as finished with the Towers Agency.