Wanted: Girls, 18–25 yrs, 5’7” & Up

Week One

Right away we recognize them, the other girls. They stand in the hotel lobby, thin hands curled against the necks of their shirts. They stand out amongst the crowd of curious tourists, short and khaki clad, and old, all of them, older than us. We are all supposed to be different—different races, different proportions—but our sameness shines in the look we share. Hunger—and not just because we want to become models and so don’t eat anymore, except for one girl, Tara, one of the tallest among us at an even six feet, a former athlete, and only eighteen. She stands in the middle of the room swaying from one hip to another, unable to sit still for long.

Tara eats a bagel. This distracts us from the new girls, the comparisons we’re doing in our head. Our nerves are already sizzling. We want to be models, but we’re not yet used to being on display. All of the girls watch each other. Each love handle and heavy arm and pimple is cataloged, sorted, stored for later. Some girls, like shy Heather, sit with their hands curved around their waists, as if their thin arms are shields they can hide behind. We’re especially kind to these girls. We already know they won’t make it far.

Quinn watches Tara with eyelids that tremble instead of blink. She lost forty pounds before coming here. She told us this as we were waiting and will tell the camera again later. We all gasped, as if forty pounds is so much to lose, because to us it is. We cannot imagine having that much extra weight on our bodies. We think of it in reality show terms, the weight loss shows we all watch anthropologically, the loafs of yellow gelatin made to mimic fat that trainers pile on the contestants before making them run stairs. The contestants always cry when the fat is taken away. The trainers tell the camera this is relief. “Don’t you feel so much better not carrying that around anymore?” they shout in the contestants’ flushed, sweating faces. “Can you believe you used to be that heavy all the time?”

Quinn’s collarbone is sharp. Her skin is so thin we can see her pulse flickering darkly.

Quinn is one to watch. She’s studied fashion magazines, can reel off lists of designer names. Her wanting, it is different than ours. It scares us. Her eyes shine as she talks to distract herself from the smell of Tara’s food. “The only thing I worry about now is my nose,” she says, curving her index finger over it and turning her profile so we can admire the flaw. It arcs, beak-like. “And maybe my age.” Quinn is twenty-two. Old for a model.

The producers group us like chickens, walking our perimeter and clapping their hands until we are clustered satisfactorily. They stand before us in jeans and oversized t-shirts, their soft, short bodies so different from ours. A producer named Kathy introduces herself. Her red hair is overdyed to burgundy, the ends crisply split. She tells us they are going to take us out of the hotel so they can film us arriving together. We’re already good at listening. When we come running in the lobby, we scream like they told us to. We spot the black eye of the camera lens and angle our bodies towards it. In the glass windows we see reflections of ourselves, and it is easy then to imagine the way the camera watches us, the way soon millions of people will watch us. It is very exciting. 

We meet the host—a former model, more beautiful in person than we expected but not as tall. Some of us are taller. It makes us uncomfortable, this difference. She doesn’t like it either and makes us re-shoot the meeting, this time after we’ve changed into flats. “We know this isn’t like you think it is from TV,” the producers tell us. “But this is what it takes. Now, come on. Smile, scream. Give us energy!” Energy is something they’re always asking for. We’re tired. Most of us haven’t eaten in hours, since we got off the plane and arrived here. But our wanting is an eclipse. When the host enters again we all scream as if it is the first time. We jump up and down. Some of us cry, again.

“Try to cry during your one-on-one’s,” the producers tell us. “She likes that.” They tell us to think of an identifying story. This is how Heather becomes the poor girl trying for glamour, Nina the young mother trying to have a better life for her son, Jessica the short girl (only five seven, poor thing) trying to make it as a high fashion model and prove her family wrong.

We are narrowed down to ten. The unchosen girls huddle together and cry. We watch. It is difficult to feel anything for them. We’re already in such different places. One of the girls comes to hug Quinn goodbye and Quinn pretends not to notice, though earlier they held hands as they waited for their names to be called. Quinn faces towards us, towards the producers. Her chin is high. Her eyes are hard. Her nose, the judges told her, won’t be a problem at all. In fact, they liked it. They listed other models with the same kind of nose. They said it makes her more interesting.

We have our first photo shoot. They dress us in makeup and pull our hair into arranged shapes. It’s wonderful, this—it’s what we’ve wanted, dreamed about in our beds at night in our small houses in our small towns back home. The photo shoot is halfway underwater. It’s so cold our bones draw the pain into our bodies like a syringe. “This is what real models have to deal with,” the photographer, also a judge, shouts as we clamp our jaws together to keep from shivering; we don’t want to blur our photos. Pretty blond Claire is the only one who cries.

The first judging is almost nice. They tell Tara that they love her dark skin and dreads, they love Quinn’s nose, they love Heather completely—her shyness but mostly her look, her boxy jaw and big eyes, her thin thin body. Molly, the plus-sized girl, makes it through. This surprises us, but we all love Molly. She is our mascot, our pet. It’s easy to smile when her name is called.

Claire and Jessica are in the bottom two. We expect Claire to go home because of her tears, but it’s Jessica. “Too short,” one of the judges says, the other former model, the drunk one.

We do not cry for Jessica. We barely look at her when she leaves. Already she is somewhere else, and we are here.

#

Week Two

We learn to walk on the runway. It is what we’re most excited for, that moment we imagine all eyes will be on us. Quinn’s walk is awful. The runway coach points out her flaws. He gets up and mimics it for our amusement, kicking his feet like a showgirl. The cruelty of this leaves us breathless with laughter. Quinn smiles, muscles flexing down her neck. She knows we are watching her face, and that the camera is watching, all of us—and everyone back home—waiting for her to break, as if it will be that easy.

Tara’s walk is the best. She has the best  body, too, other than Heather—both have long legs, no thighs, angular shoulders. At the end of the runway, Tara poses too long and the runway coach scolds her. “Don’t be arrogant.” [Tara says, “Oh, sorry.”] The next thing the camera sees is Tara tensing her jaw, obviously annoyed. We don’t remember her doing that at the time, but when we watch the show back later we imagine it must be the truth. The coach was right. Arrogant.

They take us to our house for the first time. It is sprawling, bigger even than it appears on TV. We run around the colorful space. Quinn takes a bed next to Heather but away from Tara, whom she hasn’t forgiven for overshadowing her on the catwalk. Heather starts to cry when she sees the shower. “I’ve never lived in a place like this,” she says in the confessional booth. The producers ask her to elaborate. She lives in a trailer at home in Kansas. [She talks about her yard, the garden, the plans she and her mom have to paint the whole kitchen yellow.] They leave the parts where she talks about the size, how she has to share a bedroom with her younger sister. They leave the part where she cries, even though Heather cries all the time, about everything. She’s been in tears since she got here. [“It’s just overwhelming. This house. These girls. The producers, and filming. All of it.”]

We have to be naked during our photo shoot. We stand still as someone strips our shirts, baring our nipples. All of us are so  young. Tara and Heather are both virgins. [The men and women around set watch them strip. They stand and smoke, almost bored, their eyes never leaving the girls as they stretch, pose.] They cry. Nina, the young mother, is so nervous she throws up. Someone pushes her by the shoulder blades, but like a dog afraid of linoleum, her legs stiffen and she refuses to budge. [“I can’t do it. I mean, maybe if you could make the set more private? I just don’t get why there are so many people here. And I don’t know. I don’t…I mean, besides—“] “I have a son.”

At judging the host says she respects Nina’s decision, but they send her home anyway. Tara is the other at the bottom, despite her walk. “Time for someone to learn some humility,” the host says before passing Tara her picture. This makes Tara cry. The producers were right. The host loves it.

#

Week Three

There is fighting in the house. Quinn accuses Tara of stealing her things. Scarfs have gone missing, and Quinn’s diet food—the granola bars, the 100-calorie bags of popcorn, the green tea packets. “She’s ___ lying,” Quinn hisses in the confessional booth. She is so hungry. Her diet is built on routine. She eats the same thing for breakfast and the same thing for dinner and snacks on the same food every day. This is how she avoids counting calories, which Kathy said she can’t do anymore; it leaves a bad impression. Quinn has a calorie book that she hides underneath her mattress. She takes it out only late at night when the cameras can’t see, holding it unread in the dark like a childhood stuffed animal. Without the book and without her standard food she panics. She eats a pint of ice cream. [She throws up in the bathroom.] “___ ___,” she calls Tara, her eyes aimed towards the wall-mounted cameras that watch us at all times. The producers have to bleep everything she says, but they love it. [Kathy tells her, in front of everyone, what a good job she’s doing. “Remember, we want you to be authentic. Some of you aren’t showing your true selves to the camera. This is TV, don’t forget.”]

We try harder to be our true selves. We’re all on edge, hungry and stressed, tired, home-sick. Lynn, who doesn’t particularly want to be a model but wants to be on TV, hogs the phone. She spends hours a day dialing her boyfriend back home. “Where the ___ are you?” she whispers into the receiver, to his voicemail. [“I need you. I need to talk to someone. I—fuck, it’s not normal here. I don’t feel like I know myself anymore.”] “Please, Paul. Call me back? Please?”

When she gets out of the booth we scream at her until she cries. “___ selfish bitch,” Quinn says later to Claire, the girl she loves best in the house.

This week we get makeovers. Molly gets highlights. The ends of her hair are scissored into spikes. “To help your face not look so round,” the hairdresser says. Everyone reminds her that she is fat—the host, the judges, the hairdresser, the other girls with their effortful thin bodies. “Work your curves,” the judges tell her after every photo shoot. “Suck it in.” She tries different poses but is never certain how to make her body look the way they want it to. 

Tara’s hair is cut off entirely, shaved badly by a white woman who is not used to dealing with dreads. Tara cries [at the pain of it, the rough way the woman handles her, out of humiliation, because she truly believed the host and judges when they said they loved that about her, her hair, her skin] while looking at herself in the mirror. They take Claire’s hair, too, and bleach what remains a yellow-white, like bad teeth. The host shows up to scold them both for their lack of gratitude. “Look at Heather,” she says. Heather also had her hair bleached and cut to a scruff. She balled Kleenex in her fist and sweated in pain, but for once she didn’t cry. “Some of you really want this, and some of you don’t.” We look at Heather, who is blank-eyed, oddly distant. She looks so different now. Suddenly she is beautiful. This is what we want—this moment when we are suddenly someone else.

At judging they mock our photos. Molly is too fat. Quinn’s nose is too big. Claire and Tara are in the bottom two. Tara’s photo isn’t bad. She is sent home for her behavior at the makeover. The host shakes her head as Tara walks out the door, bald-headed, dazed. The camera hovers close to the host’s face, catching the glimmer in her eyes, the almost-spill of tears. It hurts her to hurt us, to love us this much.

“This isn’t what I was expecting it to be,” Tara says to the camera. Her bags are packed. Her eyes look large in the lens without the hair she wasn’t supposed to mind losing. “I don’t know. I mean…I don’t know.”

#

Week Four

Tara’s leaving scares us. We realize now that being good at modeling isn’t enough. We do not know, yet, what is. We listen to everything the producers say, especially Kathy, whom we see most. 

[“What do you want?” she asks. We gather in the living room. Kathy yells in our faces. We don’t wipe the spittle away. “How much do you want this?” We nod, eyes fixed. There are no words for the way we feel. We have whittled down to only this—this desire we share. Even Lynn has forgotten that there is anything in the world besides modeling.]

Our photo shoot is with live lions. They dress us in furs and gold paint, all except for Molly. They’ve stopped buying clothes in her size. The options they give her make her look like a Target employee. “Make it sexy!” the director yells as Molly straddles a lioness, who swats flies with her tail and watches us with yellow eyes. 

Heather does the best. “How did you do that?” we ask, and she smiles, showing all of her newly whitened teeth. Before the shoot, the director told us we had to learn to conquer our fear. They have stopped telling us that this is what real models have to deal with. “I was too scared thinking that I might die. So I pretended I was already dead,” Heather says. “It helps.” We try it but we are not as successful. Our hearts beat too loudly. Only Heather has a good photo this week.

At judging, Molly goes home. “You’ve lost your spark,” the judges tell her.

“Too fat,” we say, pityingly. 

#

Week Five

[The groping is not entirely sexual. The producers, the hair dressers, the stylists, the interns and judges and host, they see us for our disparate parts—the one with the striking eyes, the one with the long legs, the one with the best (smallest) waist—and just as it is nothing to run your palm over an armchair you admire, it is nothing for them to graze their fingers along our bottoms while they adjust our dresses or brush across the tight knot of our nipples. We say nothing. We are learning.]

Our challenge this week is a fake commercial for toothpaste. We have to come up with our own tagline. Quinn overhears Claire practicing hers and steals it, leaving Claire to flounder, to fail.

“I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to win,” Quinn says to the camera.

Claire goes home. Goodbye, Claire.

#

Week Six

“Give us more,” they shout at our photo shoots. [Kathy shouts it at the house: “More!] We have given so much already. We are not sure what else they want.

We have all lost weight. Our hands look enormous at the ends of our bony arms, a balloon tied to ribbon. Sometimes we lay together in the middle of Heather’s bed and watch the tick of blood through the thinness of her skin. “What do you do?” we ask. “Help us be like you.” We all smoke cigarettes and drink nothing but tea.

Quinn slips up and eats everything in the fridge, all our food. We catch her gnawing on the peel of an orange. We’re grateful to her, but you wouldn’t know it by the things we say, the names we’ve saved up. Her tears don’t move us. Hating her gives us something to do besides stare at our faces in the mirror to find our best angles.

We smirk as the judges point out her rounder stomach and talk about how much retouching her photo needed. But there is a surprise. She stays. No one goes home this week. 

“See?” the judges say. “See how good we are to you?”

When we get home Quinn cries so hard that she vomits, or maybe she vomits until she cries.

#

Week Seven

Sometimes it is nice. Getting ready to have our photo taken, getting our makeup done, wearing nicer dresses than we’ve ever seen in our before lives. We realize—when they twist our bodies into poses that hurt; when Kathy walks through the house spreading crumbs from her sandwich everywhere, the smell, everywhere, eyeing us sideways as if daring us to say anything—that we are being punished for precisely this. For holding these shallow wants.

We are still not talking to Quinn. We hear her on the treadmill almost always, our very own ghost. [She’s fainted twice.] Most nights the rest of us sleep together. There are so few of us left now. We miss the other girls. We think of them like gods; they are not here so they must be myths. We start to believe that we have made them up, that they never existed at all. 

“But who wouldn’t want it?” Heather says. “Who wouldn’t want this? This is what we’ve been told to want, this thing everyone has aimed us towards our whole lives. This is what they told us to reach for. This is the thing we’ve been told we could have.”

We don’t know what to say to her. We nod, dully. We aren’t sure what to think about anything. We listen to Heather, now-beautiful Heather, as she sits up in bed, gathers the blanket around her shoulders like a cape, her eyes bright and glimmering in the dim evening light. She is so beautiful, Heather. Sometimes we wish she would win already, and sometimes we can’t imagine anyone but ourselves winning. We can’t imagine going home. We don’t know what we’ll do. Lynn, who hasn’t called her boyfriend in weeks, says that she won’t go home even if she gets kicked out. “I refuse. I’ll just stay here. I’ll haunt the halls if I have to.” 

Heather’s voice carries through the house. It is the night before judging. We’re all sick at the thought of standing up there one more time, being looked over, rated on everything. We’re sick of studying our faces at all angles and walking back and forth, back and forth, and still being told that we’re no good, our photos are flat, our walks are clunky. How can they be clunky when we are so light now? We are nothing, air-pumped skin, and we are so hungry. Heather is right. Who could help but want this? Why is it wrong, to want?

[Still, the thing with Kathy is unplanned. She is there, suddenly, called by our voices. She holds a meatball sub sandwich in one hand. The smell caries. So much saliva forms under our tongues that it is painful. Quinn follows the drips, or maybe she followed Heather’s voice. She is standing there, watching us or Kathy or nothing, her eyes pink-rimmed and vague, that unfortunate nose swollen from crying. Another splotch of marinara drips and Kathy watches our eyes follow it. She grins. The marinara spreads, widens, or that’s what we think at first. Really it is Kathy, the red wet inside of her, which drizzles out of her prone body after she slumps to the floor. Quinn stands behind her with a jellied knife. She blinks, her eyes in that moment perfectly round. We tell her that it would make a great photo. Shyly, she smiles for the first time in days. Kathy makes a sound. She brings her hands under her chin with effort and tries to push herself up. Her back is dark wet, seeping. The sandwich spilled out of her hand, the two pieces of bread separated. One meatball has a bite taken out of it. It nearly touches Kathy’s lips as she presses them together and breaths out wetly with the effort of pushing herself up. So Quinn stabs her again, to quiet her. The knife slides through her ribcage like she is made of every soft thing, unlike us, blades now, bright and tall. Heather grabs another knife and goes to work on her. We all get a turn. We stick her until she is gone. And then a little bit more. When it is over we roll her up in the rug with effort. “Get that fucking sandwich out of here,” Heather says—our commander. We push the remains of her lunch in the tube of her.

We strain to drag her outside and down the stairs. We don’t know what to do with her at that point. We do not have cars. We do not have money. We have nothing except what the producers have given us. We leave her in the stairwell and run back into the house.]

When the producers find us, we are practicing our catwalks. We are so good now. Finally, we understand. Energy flows through us, photosynthesized; food is something we needed in our before lives—we are better now. We stomp, pose, turn. Our razor hips twitch, dangerous. We are dangerous. We are so beautiful.

The producers walk us to the judging room. [“We know about Kathy,” they say. “Don’t worry about her.”] We understand that there are plenty of Kathy’s. There are not plenty of us. We, what we’ve been made to be, is rare, jeweled. We walk into the judging room. The host, standing on her platform, is crying real tears now. All the judges are. They are so proud of us.

“Finally,” the host says. “Now you want this enough.”

We stand tall, beautiful, sharp—all of us together, winners.