Almost 5'4". Isobella Jade
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Название: Almost 5'4"
Автор: Isobella Jade
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007357352
isbn:
A piece of my heart caved in as I sat down at my iMac computer in my single dorm room to email my coach. I typed in the words, ‘I quit.’
Despite the hurt involved in making the decision, I immediately felt lighter and excited about the unknown future to come. That four-letter word – QUIT – was a new kind of freedom, one I had never felt before. Overnight, my scholarship was gone, but I did stay at NYIT. I stayed out of loyalty. The school gave me a chance.
Running had served me well and now, without it, I didn’t know who I was or what I stood for. Since seventh grade, running was my religion; there wasn’t anything to believe in anymore. I badly needed something to live for or at least to make me feel strong again. I needed to make myself over. I had just abandoned the one thing that had kept me safe. Now, I needed to create a new goal.
I joined a sorority and did the usual college campus drinking and partying till 4 A.M. It was great not to have to sneak around in case my coach or someone from the team caught me. Over time, not running felt normal and I could just be myself. I made it through my first year without gaining the typical freshman fifteen pounds from beer and cheese doodles. I still looked like my skinny, old runner self.
One day, I invited my friend Audrey to my dorm. I gave her my mini photo album from high school to look at, while I flipped through TV channels.
‘You know you could model,’ she said, looking up at me.
‘You think?’
‘You look like an Abercrombie model.’
Was she serious? She looked more like a model than me. She had long curly hair, and she was lean, with perfect proportions. At twenty-two, she was so much more mature. Most of all, she was tall. For the next ten minutes, I looked over the photos with her and she pointed to the ones she liked best.
Flicking through the pictures it dawned on me that I had always been posing, always making a face, a little sneaky show-off face, no matter who was in the shot: someone’s sick cat, a childhood friend, or a boy I was taking to the prom. Every photo was of me modeling before I knew what modeling was. I loved to pose, to be seen, to show off, and it started when I had a hunger to feel affection from a male, when I had a hunger to be seen, desired, wanted. When my father chose alcohol over his family.
Back home for the summer, without a father figure, scholarship, or any semblance of a plan, I felt cramped and struggled to breathe. Being home was a reminder of how much I had tried to get out in the first place. The tension was building again with each helping of my mother’s deep-fried bullshit.
The more I thought about my situation the more that conversation with Audrey came to mind. The idea that I could make it as a model wouldn’t go away. I remembered her words as my mother handed me a second helping of chilli. I pushed the bowl away as if it were poison. It hit me right there and then, that a plain, hopeless girl from Syracuse with no connections or knowledge of the modeling world should give it a try.
I did the only thing I could think of. I opened Google and attacked it – typing in any modeling word that came to mind. The first results of my search showed two things: a lot of skin and tall women.
That moment could have ruined everything, and it almost did. My fingers hesitated over the keyboard as I scrolled through shots of long-legged gorgeous Giraffes (my nickname for the impossibly tall, skinny beauties that would from now on be my competition). My heart rate went up when the blond smiled at me. She was naked except for the tiniest G-string I had ever seen. She stared at me and whispered, ‘You don’t have a chance.’ I continued through the whole page, my eyebrows furrowed with doubt. I would never be as beautiful as them. There was nothing at all in that dusty basement to give me hope. I almost allowed my life to slink back to greasy fried chicken, potato skins and suburban shopping malls. Almost, but not quite.
I didn’t tell Danny, my boyfriend, about my modeling ideas or that I was thinking about the possibility of making it a career. I wasn’t ready to share my dreams with him just yet. Instead, I asked my friend Joel to help me. I met him at his house, out back by the swing set.
Even though we were old enough to break it, Joel and I swung, while his little sister Angela played in the grass with their snotty, snorting bulldog that I hated to touch.
‘Joel…um, would you do me a favor?’
I had known him since I was sixteen. Back then he was one of my only friends with a driving license, so he had done me many favors over the years. Now, as we sat and talked, he looked at me with his sad brown eyes.
‘Could you take me to meet a photographer in Fayetteville?’ I asked him slowly, as I took a deep fast swing and my shoe flung off.
Fayetteville was about twenty minutes from my hometown, and it would take Joel another twenty to get to my house from his, so it would be about a forty-minute drive for him. It was a longer favor than usual.
‘Sure, what’s it for?’
I wasn’t sure how to respond. I really had a photo shoot but saying I was just going to meet a photographer sounded safer.
Only a couple of days before, I had discovered a free modeling website called Onemodelplace.com. It asked the models to place ‘five images to show your look.’ I didn’t know what my look was, and I didn’t have any recent ones to put on there, so I uploaded one of the photos from high school.
In less than a week, I already had a shoot with a photographer scheduled.
The site allowed photographers to mingle with models. It was interesting to browse all the other models’ posted photos and to receive comments. It was intriguing and I thought to myself, I’m just as attractive as them.
After a few hours, I heard back from a photographer via email. For the next few days, I waited to be contacted by more photographers. They would tell me what they were interested in shooting, and how much they would pay. I didn’t care about the money, or if it was a TFP, which I learned stood for Time For Print. This meant that even if I didn’t get paid, the photographer would give me a CD of images in exchange for my time. It sounded like a good deal to me.
You could find every kind of woman on the website from younger, soft-skinned, seventeen-year-old girls pushing together nonexistent cleavage, to older women in their forties who had stretch marks and yellow-stained teeth, and who posed in their lingerie. Some started with their senior class photo, like me. A few even included their friends in the photos, posing cheek to cheek or with cigarettes in their mouths giving a sly ‘don’t fuck with us’ look. Most showed skin. The shots weren’t about high-end clothing or make-up but about the amount of flesh you revealed. The more nudity, the more hits and clicks and comments you received. That should have warned me about the sort of ‘work’ I could expect to find.
Anyone could set up a page for free. There wasn’t any webmaster saying, ‘You’re not pretty enough.’ Any person with a photo to upload could do it. It was a new world to me, a world I planned on keeping a secret, a world of СКАЧАТЬ