by Lulu Pratt
The other models barely even noticed, and so much the better. I was embarrassed that, no matter how many times I told Chrissy ‘no,’ she never seemed to listen. It was like I was some sort of inanimate object whose words and feelings had no bearing on reality. It made me feel… invisible. Which is not something that I often felt.
“Lunchtime,” I hollered. I needed a break from this relentless slog. The music was promptly turned off, and some PA wheeled out a tray of salad and sparkling water while the models wrapped themselves in customized pink robes, their names embroidered across the back.
I set my camera down on the nearby desk, and turned on my booted heel, heading to my office of sorts. Years in the industry had taught me that, when there was food on set, it was going to be ‘model food.’ That is, food so watery and small that a hamster would be affronted by the offer. I’d become accustomed to bringing my own burger and fries, eating it out of sight of the models so as to not rub it in their faces.
Should’ve known I’d be accosted by Chrissy. What was I, an amateur? She darted in front of me like a skinny hyena, a big, leering grin on her face, her robe left open as if to tempt me. She curled a finger in one of my long locks of black hair, and I jerked back. Her face went cold, and she dropped the hand.
“Jesus, you’re touchy,” she scowled, before flipping open a silver ring on her finger, revealing a secret compartment.
I replied in a low voice, “No, I just don’t want to be touched.”
“Want some?” she asked coyly as she dipped a nail into the ring, lifted it to her nose, and snorted a small bump of coke.
“Fuck off,” I muttered, pushing past her and striding to my dressing room.
“What, you too good for me?” she laughed.
Yes, I thought to myself.
I’d told her a number of times I was clean, that I wouldn’t touch drugs – not information I usually volunteer, as it seemed to me that most of the fashion world is high at any given moment, but she wouldn’t stop hounding me about doing some rails with her, so I’d had to tell her the truth, hoping it’d be effective. Once again, I was invisible. The more I said I was drug-free, the more she offered me drugs.
I could hear her stomp a bare foot behind me, but I didn’t turn around to look, choosing rather to beeline for my dressing room. Damn models, I thought grimly. Fucking Chrissy.
I had a dirty mouth at the best of times, but my mind? Now that’s an absolute cesspool of sailor’s language.
After escaping Chrissy, I made it the five doors down to my space, walking inside and slamming the door behind me.
“Free at last,” I said under my breath as I grabbed a remote from a side table and clicked on my sound system. “Paradise City” began to blare through the room, and I yanked off my leather jacket, tossing it on the plaid couch which was taken from straight off the street. No matter how posh my industry was, I wasn’t above thrifting free shit.
I got a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and wondered if I wasn’t looking a bit old, bit past my prime. I was only twenty-seven, sure, but life wears you down. My signature black mane, which ran in pools down to my shoulders, was offset by the silver of my multitude of earrings and the silver eyebrow piercing that caught the light whenever my face made an expression. Was I getting too old for bullshit like Chrissy? I thought the answer might be a resounding ‘yes.’
Maybe I wasn’t old in any real sense of the word, but I was getting to the age where you have to either pursue your passions or relegate yourself to a life of drudgery. And of course, in theory, these shoots were my passion – I had the best of everything, human and object alike, at my disposal. But that wasn’t enough. I was hungry. Hungry for something more stimulating than the three same poses from the three same girls in almost the same three outfits. Regency wasn’t exactly known for its diversified design, or for its diversified models, for that matter.
I’d just placed my feet up on the counter and cracked open a Diet Coke when there was a knock at the door.
“Can I come in?”
“Always, Janice,” I bellowed back. “Why do you even ask?”
The door moved about an inch and my assistant’s eyes gazed through the crack. “You sure?”
With a sigh, I clambered out of my chair and moved across the room to my door, which I flung open. On the other side stood Janice in her usual cardigan and matching brooch.
“What are you doing, standing on ceremony for me?” I said with a grin.
She cracked a smile, replying, “It’s called being polite, Finn. Oughta teach you a thing or two.”
“Then that settles it, come on in.” I turned and walked back to my chair and Janice finally crossed the threshold, closing the door behind her.
Janice had been my assistant for years, before I even first booked Regency. A friend of a friend recommended her to me, and we’ve been working together ever since. Janice is probably my favorite person in the world. She’s about sixty-three years old, though she’d never let you say as much, and she’s the closest thing to a mother I have. Each day she sets her hair in curlers, applies the same shade of red lipstick she has since she was sixteen, and puts on one of her many skirt suit sets, all of which have a special matching brooch. Today’s outfit was a lemon-yellow cardigan and pencil skirt with a bee pinned to the lapel.
“Looking smashing as always,” I told her earnestly as I kicked my boots back up. “How do you do it, lass? What’s your secret?”
She let out a wheezy guffaw at this. “I’m hardly a lass, and my secret is that I couldn’t give a flying flip about fashion.”
Janice had made this clear more than once. She’d worked in the fashion industry as an assistant her whole life – for designers, make-up artists, models and obviously, photographers – but she’d never been cowed or impressed by trends. I think it is what’s allowed her to keep a level head amidst all this superficial nonsense.
“How’s the shoot going?” she inquired. She hates being on set, but often insists that it’s her job. It took a year of me convincing her I’d be fine without her presence before Janice finally cracked and agreed to sit in the break room during shoots. I could tell it still made her feel guilty.
“Shoot’s fine.”
Her red lips pulled back into a partial frown. “That’s not convincing.”
I sighed. She could read me like a damn book. “Well… it’s…” I struggled for words. “Chrissy. It’s Chrissy.”
Janice, who on my life is about as saintly as they come, retorted, “What’d that bitch do this time?”
I smiled with gratification. Janice hated the supermodel almost more than I did, in a fierce, lion mama sort of way. “Offered me coke. Again.”
My lovely, timid assistant just about growled, “Evil. Pure evil.”
I was inclined to agree. Janice was one of the only people in the world who knew about my mother and her battle with addiction, knew how hard it was for me to be so often surrounded by substances. I try not to tell anyone – I’m not looking for pity – but sometimes, it made it challenging to explain why I was so vehement in my ‘no drugs’ policy.
“Shall I beat her up for you?” Janice offered, as simply as if she were offering to bake cookies for a child’s playdate.
I grinned, and leapt up from my seat, enveloping her in a hug. “Oh, not yet. But I’d like to keep that offer on hold.”
She smiled warmly. I think she is the singular person who sees through my bad boy persona to the weird, offbeat guy beneath it.
“Take my seat, please,” I requested, pushing her gently back to my chair.
“I can stand just fine, thank you.”
I rolled my eyes, and joked, “Come on, I know your knee’s been aching. Take a seat, you old bat.”
Reluctantly, Janice plopped down into the chair and pulled out her enormous iPad, on which she ran all my bookings.
“Okay,” she began, “I have you scheduled for tomorrow at one with Gwyneth–”
“Janice,” I interrupte
d, then immediately colored, knowing how much she hated interruptions. “My apologies. But do you think, just this once, you might ask Regency for me, just get on the line with them for a moment, and ask if I could do something a bit more avant-garde for this shoot? It’s really quite dull.”
She knew how antsy these shoots made me, but was also in no position to do anything about it. “Sorry, Finn,” she replied. “I’ve started asking before all of your bookings, like you request, if you can switch it up and do something a little edgier. And they said no. As per usual.”
Well, at least she was trying. That was something.
I appreciated all her efforts, but inside, I could feel I was beginning to boil. If I couldn’t be an artist, couldn’t expand my horizons and my abilities, then what the hell was I still doing here?
It was a question without a satisfying answer.
Chapter 3
POPPY
AS MY PLANE touched down at JFK airport, I was immediately overwhelmed with the sense that I was just a little girl in a very vast, vast world. This was a pretty foreign thought, because given my size – I’m a big, beautiful woman with emphasis on the big – I rarely considered myself ‘little.’
But that’s what I was out here. Forget my curves – New York didn’t give a damn about me, not until I made a name in her boroughs. Sure, I was a social media success, but three million followers here is a pittance. Your next-door neighbor has at least five million. I’d never been to the city before, though, so I forced myself to keep an open mind, to not make snap judgments. It wouldn’t be very Christian of me.
I raised my phone camera in the selfie setting and checked my make-up. I’d avoided dryness on the flight through a sheet mask and lots of water, but I’d need to touch up my serum in the car. Yuck, face-touching in a cab? I thought with dismay. Not hygienic.
Turned out, I didn’t need to get my panties in a twist – BeYou had sent me a driver, who was waving a neatly printed sign with my name at the mouth of the arrivals terminal.
BeYou is many things. Primarily, they’re a fashion company. If I’m getting my history right, they started out selling socks at the turn of the last century, somewhere near Albany. Since then, they’ve gotten their fingers in every piece of fashionable pie. They have magazines, a talk show, brand partnerships with fashion lines, the list goes on and on. They’re not so much a company as a behemoth.
And they wanted to work with me. Me!
I’d gotten a call a few weeks back from one of the BeYou bookers, saying that they’d seen my YouTube channel and would be interested in me doing a feature in their BeYouGirl magazine. An offshoot of their original BeYou Magazine, BeYouGirl was the company’s more youthful publication, with its eye on what young adults and teens were wearing, clicking on and liking. They’d asked me to come in and do a magazine feature on how young women can buy all-natural, cruelty-free make-up without breaking the bank. You can imagine how fast I said ‘heck yeah.’
The feature alone made my heart sing, reminding me of when I was a kid, reading BeYouGirl under the covers and hoping someday to see a girl who looked like me striding confidently across those glossy pages. But, on top of the feature, they’d invited me to come on their newly launched talk show. To do what, I had yet to learn, but I was game for just about anything I could participate in fully clothed. Plus, I relished the chance to get all gussied up for my big TV debut.
As I piled into the black sedan with tinted windows, my hands involuntarily brushing on the leather of the seats, I sighed happily. I’m the luckiest woman in the world, I thought to myself. We sped out of the airport, and I rolled down the window to take in my first glimpse of the New York skyline.
After a forty-five minute ride which seemed to pass in the blink of an eye, the driver deposited me on the steps of Fifth Avenue, with promises to drop my bag off at the hotel. He sped off before I could so much as raise a finger in protest, but I didn’t mind. To be honest, it’d probably do me a lick of good to get more suspicious. Given my Southern disposition, I always assume people have the finest of intentions, that a man veering off with my swollen suitcase was just being helpful. ‘One day,’ April had said to me recently, ‘you’re gonna get burned.’
But I couldn’t suspect anyone of doing bad – not today, when my world was so good. I looked up at the black and metal skyscraper, towering over my head like a set of modern Jenga blocks stacked high. On the front, around the thirtieth story and written in steel script, were the words ‘BeYou.’
I’d arrived, in every sense of the word.
Clutching my travel purse, I walked into the building, stopping only briefly to give security my name and get directions to the elevator. Before long, I was in front of the BeYouGirl offices. Around me, like a sea of beautiful fish, flashed editors, photographers, stylists, on and on. They were every color of the rainbow, and wore every color of the rainbow. In my outfit, I felt wholly uncool, like the dowdy aunt at a fabulous Thanksgiving dinner.
“Um, ‘scuse me, miss,” I called out to one of the passing fish, one with rose-pink hair and gold glasses on the bridge of her nose, who was stepping behind the gleaming white front desk. “Do you know where I can find Lauren Totelle?”
The girl stopped and looked at me. “You mean the editor in chief?”
I nodded.
She snorted, and gave me a once-over. “Do you have some kind of appointment? Ms. Totelle doesn’t exactly take walk-ins. This isn’t a tattoo parlor.”
“I’m Poppy… Poppy Reeve.”
Her eyebrows, tinted pink to match her hair, shot up and she immediately moved from behind the desk, her entire demeanor changing.
“Oh, Ms. Reeve,” she stuttered out, her hands waving wildly, arms stacked with glittering noisy bangles. “So sorry, my bad. We’ve been waiting for you, right this way.”
She gestured that I should follow her, and I kicked my ass into gear, trying to keep up with her lithe legs that were almost as long as I was tall. We rounded one corner, another, another, passing by walls plastered with the covers of past BeYouGirl Magazines, rows and rows of perfect teeth shining out from unwrinkled faces.
We came to a halt in front of the largest set of doors I’d ever seen, and my guide rapped three times at the door with such precision that I almost wondered if it was a code.
“Ms. Totelle, I have a Ms. Reeve here to see you,” she called out, her voice loud enough to pass through any density of surface.
“Send her in,” came the muffled reply.
The girl opened the door and waved me in. I turned to thank her for her help, but she’d already skittered off on those stilt-like legs.
The room she’d dropped me off in was impossibly chic, and stood in stark contrast to the modernity of the outer offices. This was deep-hued, Diana Vreeland-esque with green velvet, leopard-print throws, crystal-cut glassware on a nearby bar cart.
In the middle of it sat a middle-aged woman with hair wrapped in a multi-colored turban. Her red lips met in a thin line, which grew thinner as she examined me. It was Lauren Totelle, the world-famous editor-in-chief of BeYouGirl.
“So you’re Poppy?” she asked, the words drawling.
“Yes’m.”
She held my gaze, and must have accepted the earnestness in my blue eyes because she finally responded, “We liked the first draft you turned in on the feature. You’ll work with one of our designers later to discuss layout of the piece, as well as coordinating beauty shoots. In the meantime, I’m sending you down to the studio on the fifth floor to record the talk show.”
I nodded along with all of her words – none of this was foreign to me, though I did wonder why such a simple message needed to be relayed by one of the most powerful women in fashion.
“Do you have any questions?” she asked, in a tone that informed me I’d better not.
“No, ma’am.”
“Good.” Ms. Totelle looked over my outfit again and inquired, “Do you have a change of clothes?”
I looked down a
t what I was wearing. It was my church dress, just about the nicest thing I owned that wasn’t my debutante gown. It was simple, sure, but so was I. Besides, while I might have had my hooks in the make-up world, I didn’t know diddly-squat about dressing myself.
“Err, no,” I replied, my face coloring. “I just came from the airport.”
She clicked her tongue. “Go see our people on nineteen, ask them for something TV-ready. They might have a thing or two in, ahem, your size.”
Hmph. Some etiquette. This woman talked to me like I oughta be ashamed of my body, when in fact I couldn’t have loved it any more.
“You’re dismissed,” she said, with a wave of her bejeweled hand, her gaze already directed at the huge monitor on her desk.
Almost as soon as I’d entered the room, I was exiting, my head steaming with her disapproval. Nobody, not even Lauren Totelle, could make me feel lesser than.
But I did have a job to do, so as per instructions, I took the elevator to the nineteenth floor, and was deposited in the clothing room, where a helpful team of interns brought me a scant selection of clothes with such efficiency I wondered if they’d been warned far in advance.
“Sorry it’s not much,” one of them whispered, a fellow big girl with flowing hips and a gorgeous ‘fro. “But you’re gonna look gorgeous.”
I smiled at her, touched by these words. “Thanks, sweetie.”
She nodded and ran off to find her co-workers, probably already behind on the next assignment. I went back to the elevators, and took them down to the fifth floor. According to my phone, I had about half an hour ‘til shoot time. Dang, I was already running behind.
An assistant must have recognized me from some call sheet, because she flagged me down and escorted me to a changing room, where she promised she’d grab me when we were a couple minutes before air. I thanked her, and the door slammed shut as she exited.
I looked at the pile of clothes in my hands, which I hadn’t had a chance to do until that moment. I sifted through them quickly – wrap dress, shapeless tunic, athleisure. It was all stretchy and devoid of any personality.
