The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (12 page)

Hawk face said, “You have to be careful of people offering to do things for you. I learned that the hard way. There was this history teacher at my high school who offered to tutor me, and one day he asks me if I want to see his penis.”

“Did you see it?” said the man with the chapped lips who always wore a Sonny’s Bar-B-Q T-shirt, the guy who usually never said anything.

Hawk face twisted up his mouth in that painful way he had. “I did want to see it, just out of curiosity, but even I knew that he wanted more than me to just look at it. So I said no.”

“You missed your chance,” said Sonny’s Bar-B-Q. “I would have said yes.”

“Gross!” Ava said—yelled, probably. Her voice always came out louder than she meant it to. “Keep it down!” people were always telling her. She flopped over double. That’s it, she told herself. I can’t sit here anymore. And I’m not coming back here, not for anything.

She just didn’t like her own kind. She could understand why typical people avoided people with Asperger’s. They were obnoxious know-it-alls. Just like her brother, Otis. Mean, but true. Maybe girls wouldn’t be so bad, but she’d never been around any Asperger girls. It was depressing to realize that she didn’t fit in here, and she sure didn’t fit in with the so-called typical people. So what was left? Living with her mother for the rest of her life? She’d rather kill herself.

Her mother thought she was going to get into some fancy private college full of snobs and that somehow, miraculously, she was going to fit in and get straight A’s and become a famous scientist. Her mother just couldn’t face facts. She was never going to understand math in a million years. She’d passed her final algebra exam with a C, but no thanks to Nance, who hadn’t actually tutored her at all. No, Nance had advised her to just forget about college and be a full-time model. Models didn’t need a college degree, especially top models.

She was staring down at the floor so hard she saw it, saw a new scuff picture she’d never noticed before, right there between her feet. Maybe she’d even made the picture herself, with her very own flip-flops. It was a picture of her—Ava Eleanor Witherspoon—one arm cocked up behind her head, the other one on her hip. The scuff girl even had long hair like hers. She was posing, the scuff girl, and that was a sign.

* * *

The next Saturday Nance had volunteered to take Ava to the support group, but once they got in the car she said she had a surprise for Ava—they were going to get Ava’s pictures taken instead! Nance had arranged it all.

She agreed with Ava that the support group was a waste of time. “You’ve got more important fish to fry,” Nance told her. “Your mama doesn’t need to know about the pictures, not yet.” Nance drove like a maniac, weaving in and out of lanes, speeding up quickly and then stepping on the brakes. Even Ava, who’d been too afraid to take driver’s ed, knew that you weren’t supposed to drive this way. “When you get famous, she’ll be glad you did what you did!”

“Well,” Ava said, thinking that her mother wouldn’t really be pleased at all if Ava got famous, especially for something as shallow and superficial as modeling, but she wasn’t doing this for her mother, she was doing it for herself. Ava rolled down the passenger side window of Nance’s Ford Taurus and stared at her face in the sideview mirror, at her long dark hair whipping around, her pale skin, her big blue eyes, her full pink lips. Ava felt a sickish kind of excitement bubble up inside her, the kind of excitement she felt when a new obsession was taking her over. Not that she’d totally leave the old ones behind—never Elvis—but a new one always took her over like coming down with a virus and pushed the other ones aside. The virus didn’t hurt, but it created an ache, a need, that might be soothed but never satisfied. It always seemed to start with a picture—a picture she’d seen of an earnest-looking girl on a horse jumping a fence, a noble rescue dog in a field guide, a young Elvis on a train in 1956. This time it was an image of herself.

Ever since she’d decided to try and be America’s next top model, she couldn’t stop staring at herself in any mirror she found herself next to. She spent her time in her room, posing in front of her full-length mirror the way they did, hand on her hip, tilting her head this way and that. Sometimes she thought she looked better than any woman they had on that show, and sometimes all she could see were her flaws—her fat nose, her long neck, her big ears, her flat boobs. Then she’d run out and find her mother somewhere in the house and cry to her mother that she was ugly, hideous, fat; and sometimes she’d hit herself to drive
the point home. Her mother did her best to ignore this behavior, but, Ava could tell, it took everything her mother had not to argue with her or try to soothe her or to keep from telling her to shut up and go away, because if she did any of these things Ava just latched onto her mother’s words and incorporated them into her rant. It was all about trying to draw her mother into her circle of hell. She’d rather there were two miserable people dealing with all her faults than just one person, herself, because she felt so overwhelmed by these feelings she had to push them off onto someone else.

Now though, because Nance thought she was pretty enough to be doing this and had offered to pay for fancy photographs, when she looked at herself she saw a gorgeous model. “I won’t have to take my clothes off, will I?” Ava said to Nance but looking at herself in the mirror. “For the pictures?” On the application form for
America’s Next Top Model
there was a bulleted item that said you had to agree to pose naked. There was no way Ava was going to do that, no matter what they said.

“Oh, good Lord, no, honey,” Nance said. They were downtown now, with real traffic, or what passed for traffic in Tallahassee, and Nance was watching for a certain street. “This is a reputable photographer we’re going to. I asked around at church and got recommendations.” She saw the street she wanted, slammed on her brakes and then, without turning on her blinkers, surged around the corner. Riding with Nance was like being at Wild Adventures. The Crazy Woman Driver ride.

“What does your grandfather like to eat?” Nance asked Ava out of the blue.

Ava couldn’t think, for a while, how to answer this question. “He eats everything we eat,” she finally said.

“I mean, is there anything special he likes? For a treat?”

“Pineapple upside-down cake,” Ava said, because it was her favorite kind of cake.

* * *

The photographer was a man named Danny Boyle, or Danny Boy, something like that. He mostly looked at her through the lens of his camera. He had a nice, freckle-faced assistant girl, Marcy. For the first pose Marcy put lots of makeup on Ava, and Ava had to change into a black shirt with an elastic neckline; when they came out of the dressing room, Mr. Boy pulled the neck of the shirt and her bra straps down off her shoulders. Marcy turned a fan on her so that her hair whipped around and Mr. Boy took a hundred million pictures. Popular music blared from speakers, the same songs that played over and over again on Star 98. Big hot lights shone down on her, but it was okay, because the rest of the room was dark.

“Nice. Nice,” Danny Boy kept saying.

When he said, little to the left, or little to the right, Ava froze up because she always had trouble remembering left from right, but Mr. Boy caught on and just told her to tilt her head toward Nance, who was sitting on one side of the room, or tilt her head toward the exit sign. “You’re a natural,” said Mr. Boy.

Marcy took her back into the dressing room, where there was a lighted mirror like in the dressing rooms you see on TV, and helped Ava change her black shirt for a striped button-down shirt and smoothed her hair into a bun and put fake glasses and pink lipstick on her and took her back out under the lights and sat her at a desk.

Mr. Boy unbuttoned a few of her shirt buttons before he started taking pictures. “The sexy secretary,” he crowed.

Nance clapped when they finished doing the secretary.

Then Marcy made her into a tennis player wearing a visor and swingy skirt, then helped her get into a sundress, curled her hair with a curling thing, and gave her a basket of daisies to swing. Then she gelled Ava’s hair and teased it up and put tons of eye liner on and a ripped T-shirt with chains hanging on it and tight leathery pants. For that pose she got to make angry, fierce faces.

The whole process seemed like it was taking hours. Much longer than support group was supposed to last, but Nance, no doubt, would give her mother some believable lie, and her mother would buy it. Why would Nance be willing to lie about such a thing?

A good question, one she didn’t have an answer to, one that made her uneasy. But she found that she enjoyed posing, pretending she was in front of her mirror in her room, and also enjoyed just sitting there passively in the dressing room while somebody else made her up and fixed her hair and dressed her. It was sort of being like a kid again, all burden of responsibility for how you look removed from your shoulders. Ava kept smiling at herself in the dressing room mirror, and Marcy joked with her about it. Marcy had crooked teeth, but Ava’s were white and straight.

The last pose was supposed to be in a bathing suit, one of hers from home. Marcy took off nearly all of Ava’s makeup and wet down her hair with a spray bottle. But when Ava came out in her one-piece suit and the high-heeled sandals they’d given her, the beach towel draped around her shoulders, Mr. Boy, for the first time that day, took his camera away from his face and frowned.

“Is that the only suit you brought?”

“It’s the only one I have,” Ava said, which wasn’t true, but it was the only suit she’d allow herself to be photographed in.

Mr. Boy bit his fleshy, wormlike lip and studied her with judging eyes. He motioned for Marcy to turn down the music, thank God, that annoying song about the black horse and the cherry tree. Mr. Boy studied her some more, and she felt, for the first time that afternoon, horribly self-conscious.

“You’ll have to take it off. Take the suit off.”

“Right now?” was the only thing Ava could say.

He shook his head, a swath of blondish red hair swinging. “No, dear, go into the back, take off your suit, wrap a towel around you and come back out. We’ll do some nude shots. That suit doesn’t work.”

Her heart started thumping like something just woken up. No. She didn’t want to do this. Did she have to? Of course, she didn’t have to. Her mother had always told her that she didn’t have to do anything involving sex that made her uncomfortable. Taking off her clothes for Mr. Boy had to do with sex, but it was also just playacting at sex, and it had to do with fame and fortune. She didn’t want to do it, not because she had anything against sex and fame and fortune, but because she was ashamed of her naked body, that she was sure wouldn’t measure up.

Ava glanced at Nance for help. “Can I talk to you?”

Nance came over and walked uncertainly out under the big lights, blinking and squinting like a mole rat, her face a hypnotizing surface of crosshatched fine lines. It was all Ava could do not to touch them.

“Should I take off my clothes?” Ava asked her, her face flushing. She towered over Nance in the high heels.

“Absolutely not,” said Nance in a low voice. She pulled on Ava’s arm, trying to get Ava to lean close, but Ava couldn’t help shrinking away. “Just put your clothes back on and let’s get out of here.”

“Okay.” Ava let out a huge breath she didn’t know she was holding.

“You didn’t really want to get on that show anyway,” Nance muttered.

Behind them, Marcy and Mr. Boy were laughing about something. Probably about her.

“What? I do too want to go on it.”

“Well, you have to be willing to pose naked.” Nance shrugged. “And you’re not.”

“Would you do it?”

Nance laughed that barkish laugh. “If I looked like you, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

“Who would see them? The pictures?”

“Just the judges. That’s all.”

“Nobody else?”

Nance grasped her arm again. “Not unless you want them to.” She winked at Ava. Did she really wink?

There was something wrong with Nance. Ava might have a syndrome, but she could tell that there was something off about Nance. The way she’d used reverse psychology on Ava was creepy. Ava had learned about reverse psychology in school. “I don’t trust you,” Ava blurted out.

“Why not?” Nance backed up, with an inscrutable little smile, and Ava knew then that Nance was no Miss Clavel from the Madeline books. Nance, unlike Miss Clavel, didn’t care about something being not right.

“Are we ready?” called Mr. Boy. “Chop-chop.”

Lounging naked in a beach chair and letting Mr. Boy take pictures of her turned out to be the easiest thing she’d done that day. It was easy as soon as she decided to act the same way she’d acted when she’d had sex with that boy from her writing class. He’d taken her to a motel room on Monroe Street, the Prince Murat, and asked her to pose for him on the bed, and she did, and then she let him do things to her that, when added up together, amounted to sex. Most of what he did either hurt her slightly or felt annoying, but it was all over quickly. She didn’t really like the guy, Cesare was his name, but she just wanted to check “lose virginity” off her to-do list, and he just wanted sex, too, so there was a low-stress businesslike feeling to the whole encounter. Plus, her parents would lose it if they knew, which was an added bonus.

“Beautiful, beautiful,” Mr. Boy was crooning, leaning over her and snapping away.

Yes, she was beautiful. “Too bad you aren’t Elvis,” she said to Mr. Boy.

“But I am Elvis,” he said without missing a beat. He curled up his wormy lip, and it didn’t look so bad. “I’m the King, baby.”

Mr. Boy was cool. Ava loosened up even more. She felt her vagina getting slickery and the hot lights felt good and she knew she was enjoying herself, maybe more than she was supposed to.

“Turn toward your friend,” said Mr. Boy.

So she did, and she caught sight of Nance scribbling something in a little notebook. What was she writing? Ava felt herself getting tense again.

“That’s a wrap,” said Mr. Boy.