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It was funny to get these wacko instructions; it was kind of a mix between playing Simon says and being a life-size Ken and Barbie.

The good news was that Dexter was much happier with my smile. “Big improvement in the face,” he said when we stopped for a lunch break. “It’s a very sly, knowing smile. I really like it.”

It was a long day, from six a.m. until sunset. I must’ve changed clothes thirty times. And after every meal, Syreeta had me wash my face so she could do my makeup completely from scratch. “We don’t want you to get drag rot, girlfriend.” I went back to the villa exhausted. But I would not, could not, with good conscience call it work.

On the last day of shooting, Giovanna told me to sleep during the day. It was a night shoot, and we would work until three or four o’clock in the morning. The car picked me up at four p.m. We drove to another, smaller villa on the lake. Giovanna said it belonged to Giorgio Armani, who sometimes rented it out. I was surprised when I got there to find it was packed with people. Maybe fifty people were there in addition to our usual dirty dozen.

“Extras,” Giovanna said dismissively. “We are shooting a dinner party.”

“That’s a lot of people to have over to dinner,” I said.

“This is how we do it in Italy,” Giovanna said.

The clothes for this shoot were fancier, honest-to-goodness ball gowns with long, poofy skirts. Andy said, “We’re going the whole
principessa
route,” and he put extensions in my hair so that I’d have curls going down my back.

I had a new “boyfriend” for this shoot, Marco. Although I received the same set of instructions: Marco was gay. He thought I was very beautiful. Touch him anywhere.

I kept thinking about Brian during the shoot. How I wished we were still together. How cool it would’ve been to take this amazing trip with him. How I wished instead of caressing Marco’s extremely well-sculpted biceps my arms were wrapped around Brian.

It was the last setup of the evening when I heard what sounded like gunshots. Dexter explained that we were all to go to the shutters, open them, and walk through the balcony doors onto the lawn. So we did. And when I looked up, I saw fireworks.

“Just like that, Bee,” Dexter said, circling me as his assistants flashed strobes and bright lights in my face. “Look surprised. Look up at the sky as if you can’t believe what you are seeing. That’s very good. Excellent.”

He showed me the images on his laptop, and there were a couple that were so good, I could hardly believe they were of me.

“These are the pictures I’ve been trying to get for three whole days. Look at those eyes,” Dexter said.
“That
is the face of a supe. You can’t manufacture that kind of magic. You look like a modern-day Alice in Wonderland.”

It wasn’t hard to smile at the camera, like a girl who’d wandered into a fairy tale. I was at a villa, on the lake, in Italy, wearing a one-of-a-kind hand-painted ball gown. I was surrounded by beautiful people, I was being fed the most amazing food, and the sky was exploding with color. The awe Dexter saw in my face was absolutely and categorically real.

10

Bee in Hives

After
I got back from Italy, I went in for a meeting with Leslie Chesterfield. I don’t know why, but I half expected her to get up and kiss me on both cheeks, like all the modeling people I’d met in Italy. But she wasn’t in a kissy-kissy mood.

In front of her, there was a big stack of photographs; all of them were of me. I was kinda stoked. I mean, she must’ve called me in to congratulate me for rocking the house on the Italy shoot, right? Didn’t the photographer say that the last shots were perfect?

But when I went to her office, she said, “You’ve got to do better than this, Bee. There are a few shots here that are nothing short of amazing. But there are a lot of shots that look like they were taken for your yearbook. You’ve got to learn how to connect with the camera. A really great model knows how to bring something fresh to every frame.”

Leslie’s office was all white: white desk, white bookcases, white plush chairs, with funky pieces of sea coral on the bookshelves that matched the reddish orange telephone and rug. It had a cool kind of aquarium feel the last time I’d been in, to sign my contract, but now, I couldn’t help but see the ocean theme as a sign that I was sunk.

To the left of Leslie’s desk was a flat-screen TV that was connected to her laptop. Every time she clicked her mouse pad, a picture of me came up.

It was a little embarrassing. One after another, a dozen shots of me on the bike came up on the screen. Every single picture looked like a medical photograph of someone being prepped for a tonsillectomy. The last shot was really pretty. I had a nice smile, and I didn’t look gigantic in the clothes. I just looked like a curvy girl out for a bike ride on a perfect spring day.

“That one’s pretty good,” I said hopefully.

Leslie clucked and said, “My point exactly. One good shot out of a day’s worth of film. If I were the client, I wouldn’t book you again.”

Doesn’t that sound kinda harsh? Trust me, it sounds worse when you’re hearing it from a rail-thin British woman with a razor-sharp tongue. Out of Leslie’s pursed lips, the words “I wouldn’t book you again” sounded an awful lot like “Off with her head!”

“Day two of the shoot,” she said, putting up a picture on the flat screen of me on the speedboat with the male model, Lucho.

“He was cute,” I said, trying to make conversation. But Leslie didn’t say a word. She was too busy studying the photograph like she was a scientist trying to identify a rare strain of the Ebola virus.

“The smile is better here,” she said. “But what is wrong with your eyes? For heaven’s sake,
why
are you wincing in this photograph?”

The way she said, “For heaven’s sake,
why
are you wincing in this photograph?” had this,
“My God
, not in civilized society!” tone to it. Almost like when you’re on the subway and you see a drunk, homeless guy taking a leak onto the track.

“Well, I think the sun was in my eyes,” I said.

She pulled out a picture of Carolyn Murphy in
Vogue
, holding a surfboard on the beach. “Do you see her eyes?” she asked. “The way they are engaged totally in the camera? Do you know how she achieved this feat of physical prowess?”

I shrugged. “Maybe she wore tinted contacts?”

Leslie looked as if she was about to lose it. Big time. “No, no, no,” she said. “When the sun is in your eyes, you turn your head. You turn your whole body if you have to. Your eyes are your most important tool as a model. They’re more important than your smile. You’ve got to engage the camera with your eyes and then move your body accordingly. I’m going to have to add movement lessons to your schedule.”

Movement lessons? I knew how to move. And what schedule was she talking about? “Do you mean my class schedule?” I asked. “’Cause I can’t; I’m taking eighteen credits as it is.”

“We will discuss your schedule after I’m finished with your portfolio critique,” Leslie said.

You know it sounds all good when some woman walks up to you in Dean and DeLuca and asks you if you want to be a model. Then you get a business-class ticket to Italy and they pay you a bunch of money. But when you come home and you have to sit in an office with said fancy-pants British woman and she puts picture after picture of you up on a big-screen TV to tell you how much you suck, well. It’s like my kindergarten teacher used to say, “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.” I really wished Leslie would stop poking me in the eye.

“What on earth was going on here?” she asked.

I looked at the photo on the screen. I was supposed to put my arms around Lucho’s chest, but there was a big wave of water coming right at us. I was kind of crouching behind him, and all you could see were two scared eyes, my arms holding on for dear life, and some not so flattering shots of my jelly belly.

“Another boat was going by really fast, and I totally got splashed.”

Leslie took out a stainless steel letter opener, and I wondered for a second if she was going to throw it, like a dart, at the screen or at me.

“There are all kinds of problems in this photograph,” she said. “Your eyes are like a dead fish’s. Your jaw, what we can see of it, is clenched. Your arms are locked. And the rolls around your stomach are extremely unattractive.”

Now, I was getting cranky. It was one thing for me to notice my own jelly belly; I didn’t need to sit in this life-size aquarium and let Leslie Chesterfield feed off of me like a shark.

“Fine, then, I guess I should go,” I said, reaching for my fake Louis Vuitton. I looked at my watch. It was two p.m. In an hour, Chela would just be finishing her shift at Balthazar. There was a free basket of pomme frites (that’s French for french fries. Hilarious, right?) and a Coca-Cola with my name on it if I could get out of this torture session and get myself over there.

“Even thin models sometimes have cellulite,” Leslie said. “It’s a fact of female life. But every single model worth her salt learns to pose in a way that accentuates her attributes and masks her flaws.”

At this point, I just wanted to scream, “You try it! You try being a wardrobe-challenged, big-boned beanpole whose absolutely perfect boyfriend just dumped her. I never said I was a model, lady, you did. I can’t mask my flaws because there are too many. I can’t play up my ‘attributes’ because I don’t have any! I just want to go and eat french fries with my best friend in peace!”

I wanted to say all of that, I really did. But I have this genuine medical condition in which I think up all this great stuff but never have the actual courage to say it.

So what I actually said was a really lame, squeaky, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, Bee,” Leslie said. “Do better or I’ll be forced to drop you from the rosters.”

I could feel my palms getting sweaty. It was one thing if I quit, if I walked out of the door in the pursuit of life, liberty, and french fries. But I really couldn’t handle failure when it was being doled out by an authority figure. Take, for example, physics. I may complain about the absolute inanity of signing up for advanced physics. But even I know that a B is not failing and that if Professor Trotman would cut me just the tiniest bit of slack, I could pull it up to a B+ by the end of the semester.

A week ago, I’d never even thought about modeling. I’d never heard of the Chesterfield Agency, and I had no burning desire to go to Italy. But now that I’d had a taste of it, I couldn’t bear to give it up. I mean, I skipped a year of high school and got into the premed program at an Ivy League university. Certainly,
certainly
, I could learn how to smile so I didn’t look like a horse.

“Are you serious about wanting to be a model?” Leslie asked.

“I’m
very
serious,” I said. And all of a sudden, I really meant it.

“Then I need you to devote yourself to this fully,” Leslie said. “I don’t want to ask you to drop out of college just yet. Although if things go as well as I’m hoping, then we might have to revisit this conversation.”

Yeah, right, I thought. Drop out of college to volunteer in the Sudan? No problem. Drop out of college to be a fashion model? My Peace Corps–loving mom would jujitsu my butt.

“I’ve asked Caroline to print out a copy of your new agenda,” Leslie said, handing me a piece of paper.

I looked at it.

“How’d you get my class schedule?” I asked, dumbfounded at the reach of Leslie’s superpowers.

She looked bored. “I’m your employer. I simply had Caroline call the registrar and request it.”

I raised an eyebrow. I’d been practicing one eyebrow, then another since I was twelve years old, but this was the first time it had really come in handy.

“You can’t just call the registrar’s office at Columbia and request my schedule,” I said. “That’s totally illegal. You could be a stalker or something.”

Leslie gave me her best Dr. Evil smile. “Caroline can be
very
persuasive.”

I was kinda freaked, but I had to keep my eyes on the prize: Become a model. Get Brian back. Become a model. Get Brian back.

Weekly Agenda for Bee Wilson,
Chesterfield Models 12+ Division

Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays

6 a.m. to 7 a.m. Personal trainer, Sistrunk Fitness, Columbus Circle

10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Go-sees/shoots

6 p.m. to 9 p.m. History of Western Music: Middle Ages to the Baroque (arts requirement; I figured I might as well knock it out early.)

Tuesdays, Thursdays
6 a.m. to 7 a.m. Personal trainer
8:15 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. Advanced physics
10:30 a.m. to 11:15 Phys-ed requirement: lap swim
11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Swahili

(Side note: I signed up for Swahili to impress my mother, champion of oppressed people everywhere. Was she impressed? Not really. All she did was give me a lecture about how Swahili is the lingua franca of East Africa and the only African language spoken in the African League of Nations. Do the words “Good job, Bee” mean anything to her? I mean, would it kill her to say
“nzuri”
or something?)

1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. American Modernists
3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Frontiers of Science

I was a little shocked, seeing as Leslie’s “agenda” left me no room at all for studying, eating, or, most important of all, chilaxing.

“But I normally have physics from two p.m. to four on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays,” I said.

Who could possibly expect me to wrap my mind around quantum mechanics at eight in the morning??!???! Leslie Chesterfield, that’s who. I mean, yes, she runs a big, powerful modeling agency. And yes, she knows all of these fancy fashion designers. And yes, she has this perfectly waved chocolate brown hair and always wears the most adorable shoes. But has Leslie Chesterfield ever tried to analyze the Rydberg constant before her first cup of morning coffee? I don’t think so. “We’ve taken the liberty of changing your schedule to accommodate go-sees and shoot days,” Leslie said.