The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [38]
“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.