“No. The, uh, the other thing.”
“Oh. Nah, she doesn’t smoke and she doesn’t even drink much. Claudie used to do a bump now and then, but she stopped.” Our eyes met in the mirror like they did before. “Listen, Allee, I don’t have a problem. It’s recreational, or if I need a boost for work, like now, or if I need to stay awake at night or not eat before a bathing suit casting. I take it as needed. Like a medicine. You get what I’m saying?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, just recreational, I get it.”
“Good. So you don’t have to be like that, all judgmental and crap. It’s not like you didn’t know. A smart chick like you, you musta picked up on it by now.”
The smart chick had no idea. And it had been going on right under my nose. No pun intended.
Whoever it was better go away. It was bad enough that some idiot was knocking at the door on a Sunday morning. I was in Summer’s bunk on top of her pink comforter with a magazine sticking to my face. I didn’t have the strength to climb up to my own. O dear, sweet, loving Hangover Gods, make that knocking stop. I needed more sleep.
Good, Claudette was getting it. The door opened, letting in a shaft of light, or an ice pick stabbing my head, I wasn’t sure which. Claudette answered it and said, “Allee, for you,” and went back to her bunk. The door was open, but I couldn’t see who it was. It better not be my parents. They were always asking when they could come down and visit. What if they decided to surprise me? I popped up jack-in-the-box style, banged my head on the top bunk, squinted toward the light, stumbled over shoes and clothes toward the door.
Whew. It was Lola, our next-door neighbor. She was a plus-size model who worked all the time. Today she was in her signature Salvation Army look—a patchwork skirt, woven top, and those Pocahontas moccasin lace-up boots that tree huggers wear when not in Birkenstocks. Anyone else would have looked homeless in those clothes, but pretty Lola could totally pull it off. Think larger-size Olsen twin.
“Allee, what happened to you? You look like the girl from The Exorcist. Or maybe The Ring.” A distorted, alienlike image of myself in her sunglasses squinted back at me: scraggly, tangled hair; pale skin; dark circles; long, shapeless T-shirt; unexplained scrapes on my knees. “So, which is it? Were you, like, possessed by the devil, or did you just crawl out of a well?”
I couldn’t even answer her. My head was pounding.
“Cool.” She handed me a package. “Sorry, I forgot to give this to you. It got delivered to me by mistake.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking the package from her.
“Peace out.” She went back to her apartment.
I opened it. It was a minidress, royal blue, stretchy, with an intricate crisscross of panels and tiny diamond-shaped cutouts all over it. The inside of the dress was emerald green. I thought it might be reversible. Under more tissue paper (by the way, tissue paper is really loud when you have a hangover), there was a skin-colored slip—I guess to show through the cutouts and give the illusion of nudity. It was incredible.
I read the card. I made this for you. It’s my design. It’s reversible. And thanks for the necklace. The beads match my eyes. Love, Sabrina.
The Fluff made this? And designed it herself? It looked like a top-designer dress from one of the high-end boutiques around here, not like a ninth grader from Cape Comet made it.
Someone had to have helped her. Except my mother didn’t know how to sew. And Sabrina wouldn’t write a lie on the card.
She made this, she really did.
Maybe I’d have to rethink calling her The Fluff.
Because some definite brain activity had gone into the making of this.
There was a group of guy models standing around in their underwear in the conference room. I could see them through the glass wall, all in identical tighty-whities. Miguel was Polaroiding them. Each one was more ripped than the next. I’d never seen so many six-pack abs in one room. Or tight buns. “Fruit of the Loom casting,” said Tina, a men’s booker, answering my curiosity.
Dimitri, hot as ever with a dark tan and scruffy face, was leaning out the back window yelling into his cell phone. “Do you hear this sound?!” He dropped a stack of some girl’s comps into the alley. Some of them flew off into the wind. “That is the sound of your composite cards hitting the pavement, you putana vlakas.” Okay, I didn’t know what a putana vlakas was, but it had to be bad. “You take a booking behind my back, direct, without going through me? This is how you repay me after everything I’ve done for you? Listen. Here goes your book.” He dropped a portfolio out the window. A homeless lady put it into her shopping cart.
Miguel came out of the conference room and handed the camera to another booker. “Your turn.” He kissed me hello. “Hooee, I don’t know about you, but I need some cold water. Did you see Frederico? That’s a whole lotta man. And Tex? Ay, mi madre, everything really is bigger in Texas, you know what I’m saying?” I did see Tex. I knew what he was saying.
“Any castings for me?” I asked.
He sat down at his desk, chugged a bottle of water. “Let’s pull up your chart.” He started typing, concentrating on his computer screen.
Dimitri was still yelling into his cell. “When I found you, you were nobody. You were a sandwich girl at Subway. Sto Diavolo!”
“Sandwich artist,” said Miguel, looking up at Dimitri. “They prefer to be called sandwich artists. I worked there in high school.” Dimitri shot Miguel a murderous look. God, he was sexy.
Miguel touched the hem of my skirt. “Is that a Betsey?” he asked.
“Nope. A Catherine Malandrino. Got it at SoBe Thrifty.”
“Ssshh, people will hear you. Don’t be a bargain blabber. Except with me, of course. Hmph. Thought it was a Betsey.”
Kate marched up to Miguel’s desk. “Hey, Hobbit.”
“May I help you?” Miguel asked sweetly.
“Did you put Allee on first option for Kohl’s without checking with me first?”
“So what if I did?” Miguel said. “It’s three days, a lot of money.”
“My client wants her for the same days.”
“It wasn’t in the computer. Give your client a second option. We’ve got her first.”
“She’s commercial, on our board. You’re supposed to check with our division first before accepting any options.”
“Too bad.”
“Come on, mate. Let me have her.”
He flicked his hand at her. “Dis-missed.”
Her nostrils flared. “This would never happen at an agency in England.”
“Buh-bye.”
“That’s the problem with you people. You have no manners!” She marched away.
“We have no manners?” Miguel called after her. “You people eat fish out of a newspaper!”
“Piss off!” she called back. “And don’t ever put Allee on option for your bloody clients without checking with me or Momma first!”
Wow. They were fighting over me.
Brynn wanted to try on the dress that Sabrina had made me. Summer wanted to try it on. Claudette wanted to leave out the slip and try it on. I didn’t let them. She’d made it just for me.
My thank-you note to her was pretty simple. Thanks for the dress. You’re a genius.
Watching Momma and Kate on the phone was like watching a tennis match. I was waiting for Momma to get off the phone and give me my booking information. “They’re looking for a Caucasian family of four,” Momma’s cigarette voice growled to whoever was on the phone. “Good-looking but not model types. Image Box Studio. For fifteen hundred.”
“Pam, you were booked for a series regular, but they replaced you with someone younger,” Kate explained into her headset.
“It’s a cold reading,” Momma said. “And talent are coming from Orlando. It’ll probably be packed.”
“Don’t cry, love. I heard the story lines are so weak they’re going to pull the plug on it anyway.”
Momma hung up.
“Allee. You’re booked for Hershey’s Kisses. Direct. It’s print. You have to kiss.”
“Kiss what?”
“Dunno,” Kate said, hanging up. “A guy. Another agency booked him, so we don’t know who he is.”
“Some models don’t do kissing, sweetie,” Momma says. “Are you okay with it?”
“Um…he doesn’t have a cold or anything, does he?”
Momma’s laugh sounded like a hacking cough. “Not that I know of, sweetie,” she said.
Hmmm. I hadn’t been kissed in a long time. But I needed more info. Ever since the Uta Scholes editorial, I had asked more questions. We discussed my no-tongue policy for kissing strangers. A policy I’d just made up this second. I was hoping Momma hadn’t heard about my little make-out session with that guy at the Delano. We discussed the rate, the photographer, and if I’d have to show any skin.
I wanted to know what I was getting into before I accepted a booking. I was a much wiser Alice now.
I was barefoot, standing on a rock at the most southern point of the beach, waves crashing and splashing my feet, the ocean churning behind me, my white linen dress blowing out behind me. It was all gooey-sweet and chick-flicky as I bent down, took Nando’s face in my hands, we looked into each other’s eyes, and I got ready to plant a kiss on his full lips. I made my face all wistful and romantic, the way I had practiced in the mirror earlier. And then I pressed my lips against his, and we went at it. He was Brazilian, and I didn’t know what was going on in Brazil, but he sure knew what he was doing.
“No tongue!” Sean shouted. Snap. Snap. It was the same Sean who’d done my first test. When this ad came out, we’d be surrounded by floating Hershey’s Kisses through the magic of computer animation. I was so confident now, more comfortable in front of the camera. I knew my angles, knew to be careful I didn’t give too much chin when a photographer was shooting my face, knew how to stand so my body had the right line. And I believed I was beautiful. I told myself that before every job.
“That’s a wrap!” Sean said, and he high-fived Nando and me. His Rasta assistant with the Jiffy Pop hat lowered the reflector, and the stylist helped me down off the rock. Some tourists were gathered on the sand, watching us. Two of them gave us a few claps, like golf applause. I took a little bow. Nando and I grinned at each other. It was better if he didn’t smile. His teeth looked like Chiclets someone had stepped on. But the rest of him was hot.
“I can’t wait till the ad comes out,” I told him. He nodded, having, I’m sure, no idea what I’d just said. Who cared? He was the living definition of tall, dark, and handsome.
The sun was going down. Seagulls were swooping down to pick up crumbs in the sand. What a great shoot. I got to wear a gorgeous dress. And make out with a gorgeous guy. And make a nice little chunk of money. More and more, I really was Alice, living this wild fantasy.
My portfolio was missing. I’d looked all over the apartment, the agency, even retraced my steps back to the beach where I was watching Summer shoot for Seventeen magazine, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. And I knew I’d had it this morning in my model bag, where I always kept it. I’d just had to go to two print castings looking like a jerk, because going without your book is like showing up barefoot for cross-country tryouts. Even though the clients had already seen my book online, on Finesse’s Web site, it was still really unprofessional to show up without a portfolio. Dimitri would kill me if he found out. I had better find it.
Then yesterday I missed a TV casting for Clearasil because my alarm didn’t go off and no one was here to wake me. Momma was so mad at me, she almost made me cry. She got me in at a later time slot, so I wound up getting put on tape, but one of the things she said was, “We finally get a casting that’s perfect for you because they wanted great skin, and you have great skin, and then you don’t even bother to show up? Allee, sweetie, I thought you were more responsible.”
It was for a national too. Damn.
“Brynn took it,” I told Sabrina on the phone. “I know she did. It’s something she would do.”
“How do you know for sure? I mean, even you can have a brain fart, Allee. Maybe you left it somewhere.”
“Me? No. I am way too organized.”
“What if you accuse this Brynn girl and then she goes ballistic? Like, what if you find it in your car or something?”
“I’d never leave it in my car. The humidity would ruin it. And how about my alarm clock? She must have unset it.”
“You can’t admit that you flaked for once. God, Allee. You are human, you know.”
“I’m telling you, Brynn’s out to get me. She’s all pissy because of how I was ‘all judgmental’ about her using. And I never said anything to her about taking the chicken cutlets from my bag the day of the Dietra booking, too. I’m gonna search her stuff when she’s out tonight.”
“Just be careful.”
Breaking news—Claudette’s portfolio was full of nudes. In one shot, she was stretched out on a cliff with mountains and purple sky in the background, her arms curled above her head, at one with nature. Turn the page and her entire body was painted with reptile scales, and she was lying on her belly in tall grass. There were several tear sheets mixed in with shots of her where her bare body was draped across some guy’s six-pack abs, or wearing nothing but blue skin cream, and even a girl–girl ad for some French perfume. Claudette’s brown skin profiled against the chalk-white girl was like visual electricity.
I wanted to say she was exploiting herself with these naked pictures, but they weren’t really offensive or disgusting, not like the porn magazines Jake and Scott had brought to school once. These shots reminded me of my art textbook. They glorified the female body, the same way artists had glorified it since the beginning of time, with artistic imagery. One photo was a version of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, with Claudette rising out of a shell.
So her ticket must have been her sex appeal, or sensuality or whatever, but more than that, it was her attitude. She was all about freedom, and it showed in every picture of her long body. I glanced up at her sitting next to me on the futon, engrossed in her paperback of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. It was nice to have another reader in the apartment. Claudette and the countess in that story were a lot alike, now that I thought about it. They both kinda pushed boundaries of what was socially acceptable. Claudette was so into the story she didn’t even notice I was going through her book.
“Hey, y’all,” Summer said, coming through the door in her workout clothes. Her smile was fully charged. If modeling didn’t work out for Summer, she could get a job at Disney World on one of those parade floats, smiling and waving to crowds.
She kicked off her sneakers, sat on her magazine-covered bed, and started sewing up a hole in a pair of tights. Another one of her cheap habits. Never mind that she was planning to wear those tights with a pair of Sergio Rossi boots she’d bought in Bal Harbour at the half-off, bargain price of five hundred dollars. Hel-lo, Summer, you could buy a kajillion pairs of tights.
“Why didn’t you ever go back to college?” I asked Claudette. “Why model? You’re smart, you love literature. Is it the money?”
She closed her book, drew her knees under her chin. “No, it’s not the money. I’m not even making that much yet, or I wouldn’t be living here with you guys. I haven’t worked in over two weeks.”
“So why then?”
“I love to read, but I also love how beautiful I feel when I’m posing. I love seeing myself in pictures. I love doing the runway shows in Milan every summer, traveling to Paris, Athens, all over. But mostly, and this is the main reason, I love being able to express myself any way I want. This life’s an adventure and I’m all for living it. By my rules.” She sounded almost angry. I figured she was thinking about her father. He probably didn’t think much of her naked adventure. She’d only talked to me about him that one time, at the Uta Scholes shoot, and never again. And she never talked about the rest of her family. I didn’t even know if she had an
y. Summer was like that too. Not like Brynn, who was always talking about her “Ma.”
Claudette went back to her book. Brynn’s portfolio was on the coffee table. Time to look for her ticket. Her book was so her. It wasn’t packed with smiley bathing suit pictures like Summer’s or sexy artistic shots like Claudette’s. Brynn was rock climbing in a black cat suit à la Lara Croft. She was a boxer, seminude and glistening with sweat. She was riding a motorcycle, waterskiing. Kissing a guy under an umbrella with ferocious intensity. The only one that rubbed me wrong was the picture of her sitting on her knees, topless, looking up at a man in a business suit.
“Hey, who said you could look at my book?” Brynn asked, walking out of her room. I knew she’d been late to a job this morning. Dimitri had left a furious message telling her to get her act together.
I closed her book. “Sorry.”
She’d been snorting. I knew the signs now, the sniffing, the swiping at her nose, the jerky movements and blinking. And her mega-bitch mood. I never knew what to expect from her. Some days she was completely nasty and looking for a fight, other days she was almost semi-nice. “No, no, g’head,” she said, crossing her arms. “Tell me. Now that you’ve looked at it, what do you think?”
“I love your whole book, except for this last one.”
“Why?”
“The way he’s looking down at you on the floor. It’s like ‘good little doggy’ with that look on his face.”
“That’s his problem. What about my face?” Sniff. Sniff. “Huh? What about my face?”
“Your face looks great,” said Summer.
“Yeah, you look amazing,” I agreed. “But that’s not the point. Images like these marginalize women.”
“What’d she say?” Brynn asked, blinking at Summer.
“Somethin’ ’bout margarine,” Summer answered.
“She means,” said Claudette, looking up from her book, “that the picture degrades all women.”
Braless in Wonderland Page 15
