The man laughed and sauntered off, and she pushed into the first open storefront she could find. After, she told no one. If she told her mom, her mom would blame her dad. If she told her dad, he’d want to find the guy and kill him, or—maybe worse, maybe more likely—he wouldn’t do anything at all.
When she turned fourteen, modeling scouts began to call the house. There was one who saw her in the city one weekend and wouldn’t quit until she agreed to a test shoot. Elisabeth didn’t want to go, but her mom insisted: “This is your time, Liza-Belle! You have to take advantage of every moment.” She said this with such conviction that Elisabeth wondered when her time would be over, and what would happen then?
At the studio, the stylists swarmed around her. Sitting still under the lights, she watched in the mirror as the hairstylist back-brushed her hair and wound it on hot rollers. The makeup girl spun her away from the mirror. “Keep your eyes closed, sweetie,” she said. “This stuff is, like, industrial.” Elisabeth obeyed. A machine growled to life and spit cold flecks of makeup over her forehead and eyelids and cheeks, her chin and her neck. “Once this foundation sets, it won’t come off unless you scrub like crazy—you’ll have to take off, like, three or four layers of skin.” The other stylists laughed. “Relax, I was only kidding.”
Eventually her skin was thick and poreless, eyelids glittered and heavy with lash glue, lips gummy and red. The stylists removed her robe and stood her in front of a silver clothes rack in nude thong underwear and five-inch platform heels. They never stopped talking. They told her she was gorgeous, so lucky. So young. “I’d kill for your thighs,” one confided. “Fourteen, fuck, it’s so unfair.”
The photographer posed her on a white backdrop. In head-to-toe black he hunched, aimed his huge lens at her head. He never stopped talking. He said, “Put your shoulders back, honey, stand up straight, honey, give me your sexy look, look like you want this. Now smile. Not like that. Like you mean it, honey. Like you almost didn’t want to but I was just so funny. Natural, sweetheart. Be yourself.”
Elisabeth tilted on the five-inch heels and her limbs angled everywhere and the corners of her mouth trembled when she tried to hold the smile.
He kept telling her to close her eyes, then open them. “Look down, then look up. Don’t stare, honey, no, don’t squint.”
When they got the photographer’s proofs, the girl in the pictures did not even look like her.
Her dad didn’t like them. He said, “Look at her, Heather, she’s miserable.”
Her mom yanked the proof sheet out of his hands. “Don’t touch it, you’re getting your oily fingerprints all over. Anyway, that’s how she’s supposed to look.”
Elisabeth didn’t want to listen to them fight, or to argue her side: she’d already decided never to set foot in front of a camera again. She went to her bedroom and shut the door. Back then the walls were plain, the furniture white, the bedspread a lime-green stripe she’d picked out herself. Settling at her desk, she opened her MacBook and plugged in her earbuds. She could click around on Facebook, scan through random pictures, but this would only leave her hollow, wanting more. What she needed in times like this was actual escape. She clicked over to YouTube.
She liked the videos of a spiritual healer who performed deep chakra cleansings with no tools but his just-washed hands: he placed one hand at the base of the patient’s spine, the other at the location of each chakra, a spinning disk of energy and light that hovered in the air several inches from the skin. Then he circled his hand to spin the chakra faster, sloughing off the toxic residue the patient had accumulated through the simple act of living. The idea was to cleanse the patient’s energy fields in order to fix what had gone wrong inside. People said it was a hoax, but Elisabeth wanted to believe it. The concept was simple, complete: spin out the bad stuff, and the rest of the body would heal itself.
She liked this idea of healing. She could be a surgeon, maybe: she wasn’t sure about the med school part, but could see herself slicing into a body, in search of the source of the pain. She would specialize in heart surgery: crack the sternum to open the bones, reveal the jumping, fist-sized muscle, meaty and red. She loved that this human machine could be opened, examined. Could be held in the palm of a hand. Revealed, repaired, even replaced, encased in its jewel box of bone and sewn closed, and the person’s whole life would be different. All her old problems would cease to exist.
—
Now it was happening, Saturday night: Elisabeth’s house was full. Kids crowded the deck and the kitchen. Her mom’s easel, paints, and brushes were stowed away; alcohol cluttered the counters instead. To Elisabeth’s surprise, many had brought their own racks of beer or handles of vodka. Still, Nick commandeered the cases of hard lemonade and Red Tail Ale that her three hundred dollars had paid for and sold the bottles one by one, pocketing the cash.
He opened one for Elisabeth. She drank and the bitterness coated her tongue. Wincing, she tried to pass it back.