The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [37]
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