The Look (6 page)

Ava blushes and puts a hand to her shoulder-length curls. We follow Simon through the door at the back, into a large, open-plan office, where about twenty men and women look around to stare at us. It’s as if our invisibility shields have
suddenly disappeared. In modeling, you obviously have to know the right people, and I suppose that means people like Simon.

The only ones to ignore us now are a blonde-haired woman sitting at a large desk in the far corner of the room, and the slim-backed boy sitting opposite her, leaning forward intently. They seem to be busy arguing about something. Everyone else is openly staring at us. I am a walking bundle of nerves.

“Frankie!”

Simon grins across at a pixie-haired girl with a patchwork of Polaroid pictures arranged in neat rows on the wall behind her. She looks up from her computer and grins back. She doesn’t look much older than Ava, but even though her desk is the messiest I’ve ever seen and you can only just see her above all the paperwork, she somehow seems more organized than we’ll ever be. Perhaps it’s because she’s on the phone, talking fluently in some language that isn’t French while simultaneously typing, fast, on her computer keyboard. Perhaps it’s because she can do this and also flirt with Simon, making funny faces and batting her eyelashes at him.

She puts the phone down. “Two secs.” She smiles, flicking her eyes back to her screen. “Just e-mailing Milan. Nightmare. There. We’re done. Who’s this?”

She eyes me up and down and I can feel everyone else do the same. Frankie’s eyes come to rest on my pale spaghetti legs. Oh, why couldn’t I have worn cutoffs, like Ava? Why did I have to pick today to wear my trusty hiking shorts? Perfect for visiting old battlefield sites with Dad. Less perfect in a roomful of designer T-shirts and skinny jeans.

“It’s Tambourine Girl,” Simon explains. “Remember I told you about her? What do we think?”

Frankie tips her head to one side, half-closes her eyes, and nods. “We think interesting. Nice bone structure. Unusual features. How old are you, er …?”

“Ted. Ted Trout.”

“
Seriously?
Anyway — how old?”

“Fifteen and a half,” I mutter.

“And a half! You’re so sweet! And so you want to be a model?”

“I’m not sure,” I say, which is a polite lie for “No — frankly I would rather be a skydiver.” I look to Ava for reassurance, but she’s distracted by a large photo of a guy in skimpy underpants next to the door where we came in.

“How about we take some pictures and see what you’ve got?”

How about we
don’t
? This was all so much easier when it was just about filling in a form. But Frankie has poked around under her paperwork and is holding a Polaroid camera like Simon’s, ready to go.

I suppose now that I’m here, we might as well get this over with. Actually, it should be educational for her. Just wait till she sees how terrible I look in pictures — even the simplest snapshots. Then she can have a good old laugh and Ava and I, and my shorts, can all go home and recover in private.

Ava tears her eyes away from the guy in his underpants and squeezes my arm excitedly. By now, luckily, most of the office people have lost interest in me and are watching the whispered argument going on at the desk in the corner. Frankie gets up and leads us through to a smaller room next door. It has a row
of filing cabinets at one end and a white screen next to some freestanding spotlights at the other. She checks out my shorts and gray tank top.

“That’s fine. You’ll do, angel,” she decides. “No makeup, which is great. Just stand over there, would you?”

By “over there,” she means in front of the screen, with lights shining at me. Please not. I stay rooted to the spot.

“Go on,” Ava whispers. “It’s fine, trust me. You just have to stand there.”

That’s easy for her to say. What if I’m supposed to pose and pout like those models in all the pictures? What if other people poke their heads around the door and start watching? What if I self-combust with humiliation?

She gives me a gentle shove, and I somehow shuffle over to the screen and wait while Frankie fiddles with a shiny, round silver reflector attached to another stand. Luckily, Simon followed us in and Frankie’s too busy chatting with him to pay me much attention.

“He’s on his final warning at school. He’s driving her insane. He’s supposed to be in these study periods, but he won’t go because he says he ‘needs visual stimulation.’”

Simon laughs. “Cheeky so-and-so.”

“So she brought him into the office today to keep an eye on him. But he keeps using office phones to call this friend of his in Tasmania. He’s a nightmare. Total nightmare. Last week he ran up fifty pounds on her cab account to visit the White Cube gallery.”

“Is that the boy talking to the woman at the big desk?” Ava interrupts. My sister has no shame.

“Yeah,” Frankie laughs. “She’s Cassandra. She owns this place. And he’s her son. Total nightmare. We pretend not to listen, but of course you can hear every word.” She looks up at me. “There you go. I think we’re ready. Relax! Think gorgeous, OK?”

Simon hands her the camera and she takes the first picture.

Of course. Cassandra Spoke. I remember the silky hair from the
Marie Claire
article.

“It’s since Sheherezade, isn’t it?” Simon asks. “She messed him up big-time.”

“You wouldn’t believe,” Frankie agrees.
Click.
“Don’t get involved with the girls. Rule One.”

She throws her head back and laughs as if it’s the stupidest rule ever invented — or at least the one least likely to be obeyed.

Which girls? Who’s Sheherezade?

“There you go, angel. All done,” Frankie says to me. “Let’s see what we’ve got, shall we?”

But how can we be all done? I haven’t posed or stuck my chest out or anything. I just stood there while she chatted with Simon and moved around, taking pictures from a couple of different angles. I thought she was testing the camera.

“Done?”

“Yep,” Frankie says, as she and Simon examine the Polaroids. Ava crowds in, too. “And they’re not bad. I’ve taken worse.”

“Really?”

She laughs at my surprise. “See for yourself.”

The photos are very plain — just my face and top half — but compared with Ava’s efforts at home, they’re mini-masterpieces. It’s amazing what a white background and some decent lighting can do.

“So, can you walk for me?”

I must have misheard her. I thought she said “walk.” Of course I can walk. But when she explains it to me, it’s worse than I could possibly have imagined. It
is
walking, but it’s across the office next door, in front of the twenty staring people.

“I — I don’t think so,” I stutter.

“Don’t be silly,” Frankie says with a hint of a sigh. I suppose she must be used to people who can talk in foreign languages while typing and flirting. I found “just standing there” enough of a challenge. “It’s walking. Up and down. It’ll only take a moment.”

Ava does her pleading face. Simon smiles encouragingly. I’m still about to say no, but when he opens the door back into the main office, I realize that everyone is still mesmerized by what’s going on between Cassandra Spoke and Nightmare Boy. Frankie nods in their direction and, without thinking, I set off. I’m curious to get a clearer view of him and see what all the fuss is about. It’s quite nice to have an excuse to go closer, actually.

Nightmare Boy is sitting hunched over, with his back to me, so all I can see is rumpled hair, a faded pink T-shirt, paint-spattered jeans, and dirty sneakers with holes in them. His voice is a low, insistent growl, but he must hear me approaching, because he stops talking to scowl at me. Black-rimmed glasses. His mother’s blue eyes. Pale face. Cute lips. Nice hair. I
wish
I wasn’t wearing hiking shorts.

As I near the desk, Cassandra looks up, too. Oh my goodness. The über-agent of über-agents is staring straight at me. I turn around quickly and head in the opposite direction.

Back where I started, Frankie grins. “Cute walk,” she says cheerfully. “It’s coltish. Don’t lose it.”

I promise not to, and breathe a sigh of relief. The ordeal is over. There are no further humiliations they can put me through.

But it turns out that yes, there
are
more humiliations.

“We just need to measure you now,” Frankie says, rummaging in her desk and pulling out a tape measure. She wraps it around my nonexistent chest and calls out my measurements to a guy three desks away, so that everyone can hear them.

Ava giggles. I glare at her. She had better be grateful for this. Buzz Lightyear has now paled into insignificance in the catalog of mortifying moments she has subjected me to.

Frankie has a quick muted conversation with Simon before taking us over to her desk and laying my Polaroids out on top of the general mess. I’m just relieved I don’t have Snoopy on my head in these pictures. I must remember to ask Ava to delete the ones on her phone.

“Well, you’ve definitely got something,” Frankie says. “And if you end up working with us, you’ll have such a good time. We’re a close family at Model City.”

I glance across at Cassandra and her son. Really?

“But before we make any decisions we need to do a test shoot,” Frankie goes on. “I’ve got one coming up soon that might work for you.”

Ava grins, but suddenly I’m experiencing my second cold flush, and it’s no more fun than the first one.

I can’t believe we fell for it.

Here we were, assuming that they were the real thing, and they were just a bunch of scammers after all. I must say, they
disguised it brilliantly, but how much money is it going to take to get out of here? I did google “modeling scams” like Ava suggested, and they said the scammers can be very persistent. They keep telling you that you have to spend more and more …

“The test shoot — how much would it cost?” I whisper.

Frankie looks at me quizzically, then smiles. “Oh, it doesn’t cost you anything. We know photographers who need shots for their portfolio, same as you. They don’t charge, and you don’t. See? When you get a proper job, the client pays us and
we
pay
you
, minus our commission, of course. Don’t worry, angel, we’ll look after you. We’re totally legit. It’s why we’d need parental approval, by the way. Your parents are OK with you doing it, are they?”

“Oh, definitely,” Ava chimes in. “They’re really excited. They were just, er, busy today.”

“Fine. Well, you can bring them in when you come and get your test shots. So, how was that?”

I am having an out-of-body experience.

They say they’re “legit,” but they’re talking about signing me up. Did they not notice my legs? Or the unibrow? Or the hair? Or the fact that I’m still in school? Or that I don’t know who Mario Testino is? Or that I’m sitting next to a goddess and they haven’t shown the slightest interest in her? These people clearly have NO IDEA WHAT THEY’RE DOING.

“Ted? Ted? What do you think?”

But I suppose I should be polite. I put on my brightest smile.

“Amazing.”

“W
asn’t that fantastic?” Ava says on the way to the Underground afterward. “Just let me call home.”

“You’re not telling them what we did?” I ask, appalled.

“Of course not. Duh!”

In a serious voice, she explains to Dad that we were badly held up at the hospital, but we’re finally on our way home. She lies so brilliantly and fluently that I’m in total awe of her talent. Then she grins happily at me.

“See? Easy! Frankie loved you!”

“It was horrific!”

“You were great.”

“You should have seen the way that boy looked at me. Like I was a worm.”

“Ignore him. You’re gorgeous, it’s official. Ooh, I must call Jesse.”

She whips her phone back out to tell him the news.

“He’s totally impressed,” she informs me afterward. “He says congratulations.”

“I thought he didn’t like models.”

“He doesn’t like his
girlfriend
to be a model. Sisters can do what they like. Aw, look, smiley face.”

She shows me her phone. Jesse has sent her a bug-eyed picture of himself stretching out both sides of his mouth with his fingers, so all you can see are teeth, gums, and tonsils. He still looks better than I did in those Polaroids. I sigh quietly to myself.

“I’m not doing that test shoot, Ava. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, you are,” she says cheerfully.

I don’t even bother to argue. There are a million reasons why I can’t do it, from not really knowing what a test shoot is, to lack of “parental approval,” to sheer terror at the very idea of it, to — hello? — my whole face and body. But Ava seems so happy right now that I can’t bring myself to list them. I’ll do it later, when her excitement has worn off.

It’s not difficult for us to keep what happened at Model City a secret from Mum.

Monday is what Ava calls “C Day” — the day her chemo starts — and Mum’s totally focused on making sure she’s read all the paperwork, obeyed all the instructions on how to prepare, blown the budget on fresh, organic fruit and vegetables, and got everything ready for making Ava feel comfortable afterward, in case the chemicals make her feel as bad as Nan did, which was so awful that Mum cries whenever she thinks about it.

We spend the rest of the weekend scattered around the flat, with Mum sobbing into a tissue and Ava telling her off about it,
Dad busy trying to fix the gear shifter on his bike (and breaking it beyond repair), and me trying to take up as little space as possible.

If the guidance counselor were to ask me now, I’d say I feel guilty again. Guilty for being so healthy, while my sister has a plastic tube sticking out of her chest. If I could go halves with her and settle on a shared bad bout of chicken pox, or a broken leg each, I would. But nobody asked me. I am not a part of this equation. So I keep quiet and try not to make anybody’s nerves more jangled than they already are.

On Sunday night, we both lie awake long past midnight. I can hear Ava’s breathing, and she can hear mine.

“It’s going to be fine, T,” she says into the darkness, sensing what I’m thinking. I know I should be comforting her, but in the topsy-turvy world we’ve entered, she’s good at trying to comfort me. “People get this all the time. I’ve just got to get through the chemo and I could be clear by December. You heard what Doctor Christodoulou said about me being fit. He’s an expert. He’s treated loads of people way worse than me. We just need to look after Mum and Dad, because they’re really not taking this well.”

No kidding. She seems disappointed by their reaction, but I have to say I can totally see where they’re coming from on this one.

When Monday comes, Mum lets me stay at home while she and Dad take Ava in for her first session. Ava has to sit there for a few hours while the drugs run through her system, then she can come home. I wanted to go, too, but they all said no. So, I
have several hours of daytime TV ahead of me. Not scintillating, but at least I get to miss our French oral exam — which was definitely beyond my powers of concentration today.

Daisy texts me afterward to say how bad it was. She follows it with a line of question marks and exclamation marks. I’m not sure if these refer to the exam, though, or our phone conversation yesterday, when I told her about Model City. Daisy thinks I’m crazy to follow my sister
anywhere
, but especially into the arms of a model agency. We both agreed that modeling is for anorexic people with no brain cells. Well, Daisy said it and I agreed. A teeny bit of me was hoping she’d be impressed that they liked my Polaroids all the same, but she completely wasn’t. She kept focusing on the “being crazy” part.

I’m engrossed in a program about reintroducing the elm tree to the British countryside when my phone goes again. I assume it will be Mum, or Daisy calling back with more angst about French, but instead it’s a number I don’t recognize.

“Hi, angel,” says a chirpy voice. “It’s Frankie. About that test shoot? We’ve got someone fixed up for next weekend, and maybe you could join her. You don’t have school on Saturday, do you?”

“Er, no, but —”

“Perfect. It’s with Seb Clark. He’s really lovely and gentle. I’ll call you later with the details, but I just wanted you to get it on your calendar, OK? God, sorry, got to go.”

I can hear the sound of another phone ringing in the background, then nothing. If Frankie had stayed on the line I could have explained about not doing the shoot, but I can’t face calling her back. I start trying to figure out the best thing to do, but my
brain isn’t really working today. It’s too distracted by what’s happening at the hospital, and also — thanks to this program — what happened to the elm tree. Over twenty million of them were killed by disease in the last forty years. We need to replant the new ones as fast as we can. Soon the call has slipped from my mind, and I don’t remember it again until Ava gets home and asks me about my day.

Which, if you think about it, is the wrong way around. My day was natural history programs, hers was chemo. But there’s something strange about Ava. Whatever drugs they’ve given her, they’ve had the opposite effect from what I expected. Her eyes still have their dangerous glitter, she’s full of energy, and you’d think she’d just been to a rave — or how she looked when she got back from Glastonbury, anyway.

“How did it go?” I ask.

“Ew, at the time,” she admits, taking a bite out of a banana. “But I feel WONDERFUL now. Mum says it’s the steroids. I don’t care. If it’s going to be like this for the next two weeks, fantastic!”

Are they sure she has cancer? Has she been massively misdiagnosed? Anyway, while Mum gets busy chopping apples, celery, and practically anything else green that isn’t the kitchen door, I tell Ava quietly about the test shoot.

“Fabulous!” she says when I’ve finished. “Perfect! Hey! My sister’s nearly a mod-el! It’s so exci-ting! Go check her o-out!”

She dances round the room as she singsongs. What
did
they put in those steroids?

“I’m not going, remember?” I point out.

“Why?”

She stops dancing and pouts at me.

“Because I don’t want to. Because it’s silly. Because I’d need permission.”

“You
do
want to. It’s a test shoot! How cool is that? Lily Cole had test shoots. So did Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. You’ll be like Heidi Klum.”

Who
are
these people? How does she know about so many of them, when I only know Kate Moss and Claudia Something, who Dad fancies? Why would I want to be like Rosie Huntington-Whiteley anyway? OK, I can imagine how
people
might want to be like them.
Attractive
people. Just not people like me.

“Go on, T,” Ava pleads. “You looked great in those Polaroids. It’s just one morning. You’ll have fun. Think of it as work experience.”

“As what?”

“I dunno. Stylist? Hairdresser? Makeup artist? Designer? You’ll meet loads of new people. It’ll be good for you.”

“Just because you want to be a surf instructor —”

“Cool job, huh? Better than your tree surgeon idea. Or Bob the Builder, I seem to remember. Or Oreo taster.”

“Not necessarily. And I can’t do it anyway,” I say, playing my trump card, “because Mum would kill me.”

“Aha!” Ava exclaims, playing hers. “But she won’t know, will she? Because she’ll be at work on Saturday, in that fabulous green uniform of hers, and Dad’s researching at the library. So the flat will be empty and they’ll assume you’re here, doing homework, or at Daisy’s. And if they ask difficult questions, I’ll cover for you. You know how good I am at lying.”

I do. She inherited all the lying genes, whereas whatever I’m thinking is written all over my face.

“And look, Frankie’s gone to all that trouble, just for you. You can’t let her down now, can you?” She does her pouty face. “I’ll call and pretend to be Mum and tell them that it’s all sorted. I’ll help you get ready. You can tell me all about it. And I’ve just had
chemo
, T. How can you resist me?” Mega-pout.

But this time I’m ready. I pull myself up to my full five feet eleven inches and stare her straight in the eye. “No way ever. Not in a million years. And that’s final.”

She doesn’t say anything back. She just points to the area in her chest where the tubes are, and smiles a wicked smile.