Plus

by Veronica Chambers

  “Well, guess again, girl,” Leslie said.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Someone put out an underground video of the same song. Black and white. Not so flattering of you. I think it’s got to be the guys in the band, but the record company is claiming total innocence.”

  “Is it going to be on MTV?”

  “No, thank God. But it’s on youtube.com.”

  “Okay, Les. I’ll check it out.”

  I went over to my computer and typed the URL in. There I was on the front page, a really unflattering shot of me trying to eat that wretched potato salad. The video was called The Picture Won’t Fit in the Frame.

  It was grainy, black and white, but definitely me. Someone had filmed every time I had something to eat, then they’d spliced it together as one giant food fest. The grand finale? Me, falling flat on my face after eating that horse tranquilizer. Instead of the last chorus of the song, there was a girl’s voice singing, “Food coma, food coma, food coma,” until there was this electronica crescendo and a fuzzy fade-out.

  My phone rang. I checked the number. It was my dad.

  “Honey, I need to talk to you.” He sounded awful.

  “What’s wrong, Dad? Are you okay? Is Mom okay?”

  A million thoughts ran through my head. Had my mother been in a car accident? Did my father have cancer? Did my mother have cancer? What could be so wrong?

  “We’re okay,” Dad said, but his voice said different.

  “You’re lying to me, Dad,” I said. “I’m getting on a flight first thing in the morning; I’ll be in Philly by the afternoon.”

  “Bee, you don’t have to do that.”

  “Well, I will, unless you tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I don’t know how to say this,” Dad said. “I just never thought I’d ever have to worry about something like this.”

  My heart was beating so fast. I couldn’t bear the thought of something bad happening to him. Or my mom. But especially my dad.

  “Dad, just tell me,” I said in the most mature, grown-up voice I could manage.

  “Bee, are you on heroin?”

  What?

  “Bee, are you there?”

  “I’m here, Dad.”

  “I need you to be straight with me. Are you using heroin?”

  “Dad. Where would you get an idea like that?”

  “This guy at my office showed me your music video on You Tube.”

  Did I mention that my dad is a scientist? And that all of his co-workers are geeky science nerds? Of course, they spend their downtime trolling websites like You Tube.

  “Dad, that’s a bootleg video that the guys in the band put out as a joke. The real video is on MTV. It’s really pretty. I’ll get a DVD made for you.”

  “But why did you allow them to photograph you eating like that? And then at the end, you just passed out.”

  So I told him the whole story.

  “I worry about you, Bee. This business you’re in sounds dangerous. What if Zo hadn’t been there?”

  “Every business has its ups and downs,” I said. “I can handle it, Dad. Nine times out of ten, everything is on the up-and-up and completely professional. It’s just that there are a lot of jerks in modeling. I’m learning how to put them in their place.”

  I thought about how I’d turned down Garrett that night in London when he just expected that I’d go to bed with him because he’s the lead singer of some stupid boy band. Guess again, boy.

  “Bee, ever since you started this modeling thing, we hardly ever see you. What do you say your mother and I drive into the city on Sunday and take you out to dinner? I just need to see you, make sure my baby girl is okay.”

  “I would love that, Dad. Dinner would be really nice.”

  22

  Begin the Bee-grime

  When I got back to New York, Leslie called me into a meeting at her office. I was terrified that she was going to drop me from the agency’s roster. When I arrived, she didn’t greet me with the fashion kiss on both cheeks that

  I was used to. In fact, she never got up from behind her desk.

  I sat down on one of the chairs in front of her, and she said, “Look, Bee, I’m going to get right to the point. I’ve been doing some investigating as to why the Guess Again Girl guys would pull such an awful prank on you.”

  “And?” My palms were sweaty, and I tried discreetly to wipe them off on my skirt.

  “Apparently Garrett, the lead singer, had insisted on directing the video himself. His version starred another model. Guess who?”

  “Savannah Hughes?”

  “Bingo. I haven’t seen it, but apparently it consisted of them drunkenly pub crawling all over London. It was black and white and out of focus and the label deemed it unusable. Enter a new director who chooses a new model.”

  “Me.”

  “Savannah put the guys up to the bootleg video because she feels like you’re all over her turf.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do,” Leslie said. “It’s a cutthroat business. This is where it gets nasty. But we don’t have any proof that she’s behind this, and she’s technically not the one who drugged you.”

  I’d gone from feeling nervous to being mad. What was it going to take to put Savannah Hughes in her place?

  “So why’d you call me in here, Les?”

  “Just to let you know what I’d learned and to advise you to be careful.”

  “That’s it?” I was really angry now. “The video is being downloaded like a thousand times a minute on You Tube. My own father thinks I’m on drugs!”

  Leslie sighed. “The video makes you look like a druggie. Which in our business is not uncommon. But you’ve been caught on film. I hate to tell you this, but we’ve actually had a few clients cancel bookings over it.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Ride it out,” Leslie said. “I need you to be über-professional at all of your bookings. Be early. Be friendly. Don’t take too many trips to the bathroom—that’s bound to promote gossip. And do your best not to get a cold. If you start sniffling, the rumor will explode.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “As a matter of fact, just to make sure you don’t get sick, I want you to see my herbalist and my acupuncturist. Stop and see Caroline on your way out and she’ll make sure that they take you this afternoon, tomorrow morning at the latest.”

  “So I try not to get sick, but what if the bootleg video sticks?”

  “The record company is releasing the real video in two weeks,” Leslie said. “I hear that it is absolutely stunning. Hopefully, it will go to number one on TRL and everyone will forget about the bootleg.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  Leslie’s smile was forced, and she looked uncomfortable. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there, Bee.”

  “No, I want to know now. Worse-case scenario.”

  “If something big doesn’t hit, then, well, it’s been nice working with you.”

  She looked at her watch. “Don’t you have a shoot this afternoon?”

  I did.

  “So we’re done here.”

  She picked up the phone and started dialing I felt the same way I did when Brian broke up with me the first time. Like I was being dumped by someone I really, really liked and I had no idea why. I stopped at Caroline’s office to get the number of the herbalist and the acupuncturist, then I walked out into the street. It was one of those inappropriately sunny days when the beauty of the day seems to mock your own inner misery.

  That afternoon, I had a shoot out in the Hamptons. Andy and Syreeta were on the shoot too, so we all rode out together in a Town Car. It was fun, we had a picnic basket from Zabar’s, and the two-hour ride went by in no time. But when we got to the beach house where we were supposed to do the shoot, we found out that the stylists had pulled the wrong sizes. Nothing fit, and not just because I’d had a bagel and a chocolate chip muff
in that morning. The stylists had pulled a size ten. I’m a twelve to fourteen.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked the photographer. His name was Marc, and we’d worked together before. He was really sweet, and I felt really comfortable with him.

  “Well, it’s Saturday, so all the showrooms are closed; we can’t pull new clothes,” Marc said. “Can you just try stuff on? Maybe some of it is cut a little loose.”

  Callie, the stylist, was, by the way, completely unrepentant. “Size ten is a plus size,” she kept saying to anyone who would listen.

  I tried everything on, and it was an exercise in humiliation. Three tops fit, which was some sort of small miracle. But I couldn’t get any of the dresses over my hips.

  “We’ll just have to cut them at the seams and clamp them at the back,” Marc said. “We’ll shoot you head-on and no motion shots.”

  “On the beach?” I asked. “But won’t people be out there?”

  “We’ll put up a scrim to protect you,” Marc said.

  In the end, in order to get a photo of me with the ocean in the background, Marc needed to pull the scrim, which is kind of like a thin curtain. This meant anyone walking on the beach could see that from the front, the dresses looked perfectly fine. From the back, they were split wide open and clamped, with cold metal clips, to my bra and panties. I was so embarrassed. It was really hard to pose.

  “Come on, Bee, you’re giving me dead fish eyes,” Marc said.

  I tried to think happy thoughts: Kevin joking with me, salsa dancing with Chela at the Copa, hanging with my Dad at the Franklin Institute in Philly.

  “Much better, Bee. I know this is hard, but focus and we’ll get it done,” Marc said, snapping away.

  I smiled until it physically hurt.

  Then all of a sudden I heard the familiar whir of a camera clicking away, but the sound was coming from the wrong direction. I turned around, and there were five paparazzi, taking photos of my ass.

  Marc and Andy chased them away while Syreeta got me a robe as quick as was humanly possible. Interestingly enough, Callie was the only person who didn’t seem surprised by the ambush. In fact, she was whispering into her cell, a big grin on her face.

  I didn’t have to guess who she was talking to.

  “Hello, Savannah?” I said, grabbing the phone away from Callie.

  “Oh, Bee, darling,” she said. “I’ve been seeing you everywhere. I do mean everywhere. Someone just e-mailed me a picture of your ass in a too small dress. Overexposure is a terrible thing. Didn’t your agent teach you that?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “You’re the one who ought to be watching your back.”

  I tossed the cell phone at Callie and resisted the urge to chuck it at her head. All I needed was to end up in a court-appointed anger management course like Naomi Campbell.

  This completely fabricated feud I was having with Savannah Hughes was going way too far. She’d been a supe as a regular-size model; now she was the princess of plus, thereby proving that sometimes you really do get to have your cake and eat it too. She’d been on the cover of EVERY SINGLE MAJOR WOMEN’S MAGAZINE. I was nothing compared to her. Why she chooses to chugalug the Haterade is beyond me.

  Now my reputation was in the toilet and I was losing work. All because I’d managed to annoy a girl that I’d met exactly once in my entire life. This didn’t even make sense. My whole modeling career had felt like a fairy tale. But I guess that’s the thing about fairy tales: they’re pretend, a dream. Eventually you’ve got to wake up and deal with real life.

  Which is exactly what happened when I came back from the shoot in the Hamptons to find Chela waiting outside the front door of my apartment building. She was dressed in this really cute zigzag knit dress and some leather peep toe shoes. As usual, she looked amazing.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” I said when the Town Car dropped me off. “You’ll never believe what happened to me at my shoot today.”

  I went to give her a huge hug, but she just pushed me away.

  “I saw you on TV last night,” she said.

  “What? More mess about that Guess Again Girl underground video?” I groaned. “It’s like a pimple that just grows and grows until it covers your entire face.”

  But Chela’s eyes had no sympathy. She looked really cold. “I’m not talking about Guess Again Girl. I’m talking about Norah Jones Amped on MTV. I saw you in the front row with Brian, holding hands, and how he was kissing on your neck. The camera was on you two half the time. How could you, Bee? After what he did to you? After what he did to us?”

  I tried to make up a lie. “I got the tickets so last minute, and I ran into him at the library, so I asked him to go. But it’s not what you think. He is a complete jerk. I’m not even speaking to him.”

  “We had a pact, Bee,” Chela said. “And I don’t believe that you even tried to call me. You never call me now that you’re this big-time model. It’s like you forgot how much I believed in you from the very first day. All I can think is your self-esteem must’ve been in the trash to go crawling back to Brian. But my self-esteem is intact, and I don’t need friends like you who don’t appreciate how dope I really am.”

  And on that note, she turned around and left. Which was just as well because I didn’t have a whole lot to say. All I know is that for the first time in a long time, I was lonely. Really lonely.

  I went upstairs and changed into my favorite pink and brown flannel pajamas. They had been a gift from my aunt Zo a few Christmases back, and for a while, they were the only non-global-village clothes I ever owned. Now I had a closet full of designer dresses, shoes, and bags, but I didn’t feel like the glamour puss I thought girls with stuff like that must feel like.

  I called Ollie’s and ordered a bowl of wonton soup for dinner, and I was really surprised to see that my old pal, Dewei, was the delivery guy.

  “Long time no see, Bee,” he said. “I heard you’re a famous model now. My cousin says you have a billboard in Times Square.”

  “Yeah, something like that,” I mumbled.

  “Well, I haven’t seen the billboard, but I told my cousin, Bee doesn’t order takeout every night anymore. She’s got a life,” he said.

  I paid for the order and gave him a twenty-dollar tip.

  “You’re not ordering every day is bad for business but good for Bee,” Dewei said. “Maybe you order every once in a while. Like tonight. For old times’ sake.”

  “Yep, old times’ sake,” I said as I locked the door behind Dewei.

  I took the takeout container into the kitchen and put it in the blue and white Chinese bowl that Chela had bought for me as a gift from Pearl River market.

  “If you’re going to eat takeout, then at least put it in a nice bowl,” she had said. “Food tastes better when it’s not eaten out of cardboard and plastic foam.”

  And she was right. I crawled into bed and flipped on Turner Classic Movies. Believe it or not, they were playing Flashdance. I thought, Maybe my life hasn’t all gone to hell in a handbasket, like my aunt Zo always said. But despite the fact that Jennifer Beals was dancing like a “maniac, maniac on the floor,” I sensed that things weren’t going to go as well for me.

  It was like when I was a kid and my father used to take me to this bowling alley in Philly that had really old video games. I loved to play Mrs. Pacman, and sometimes, I could make one quarter last for hours. But inevitably, there came a point when my luck ran out, and I always hated the moment when that bright blue message came on-screen: Game Over. Could I have really lost my modeling career and my best friend in one fell swoop just like that? Was it really game over?

  23

  Plan Bee

  Except for going to class and stopping by the student union for smoothies or falafel, I pretty much spent the next few days in my pajamas watching movies. To Catch a Thief came on, and I finally got what the Bond Number 9 director meant when she wanted me to portray a Hitchcock blonde. But every time I watched Grace Kelly drive aroun
d the Italian Riviera in that super-cute car, all I could think about was Brian and how he’d smashed up the car and finished off the job of ruining my life that Savannah Hughes had started.

  I called the Chesterfield Agency to see if they had any bookings for me, but Leslie didn’t even get on the phone. Her managing director, Caroline, basically gave me a polite version of “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” Which, as you can imagine, really sucked.

  I was really, really tempted to ease the pain by sticking my face into a barrel of Häagan-Dazs. I got up and made myself a cup of green tea, which I ate with exactly two Fig Newtons. Brian was wrong. I was not fat. I had the potential to be fat, and if I skipped one more session with my trainer, Jenisa, then it would be a slippery slope. But I planned to pick up with her on Monday. Even if I didn’t get any more modeling gigs. I liked the girl I saw every time I took a taxi through Times Square (I have to admit, I always requested that route, no matter where I was going). I was a curvaceous babe, and I had every intention of staying that way.

  That said, I really, really didn’t want to go out. But that Friday night, Prageeta and her fiancé, Hanif, were hosting an engagement party at the Mandarin Oriental hotel near Central Park. I called my aunt Zo to see if she wanted to go with me, but she had a show. I was tempted to call Chela, but I didn’t want her to think I was using her. So I decided to go by myself. I’d make a quick appearance, say hello to the Baby Phat girls, then be back at home, and in my pj’s, by the 11 p.m. movie, which I happened to know was going to be Mystic Pizza, which kinda rocks.

  The party was a masked ball, so after my last class, I stopped at a costume shop on Broadway and got a kitty-eye mask and glued a hot pink bindi to the center of it. I was wearing a white tank top with a glittery design and a long hot pink skirt and glittery sandals. Prageeta is always saying, “Pink is the navy blue of India,” so I figured I’d fit in just fine.

  I took a cab to the hotel lobby, where two men in tuxedos were holding clipboards. I gave them my name, and they ushered me in.