Page 58 of Never Thought I'd End Up Here
“This is going to sound silly, but I feel like a princess,” I admit, touching the delicate silk sash around my waist. “Like, I want to drink from a fancy teacup and then take a bath filled with rose petals and walk very slowly down the stairs where my lover awaits below.”
“You should’ve spoken sooner about the rose petals; Oliver and I collected a whole basket of them at our last hotel room. I’m definitely free to wait below a flight of stairs though,” he says. “I can wait as long as you’d like.”
I roll my eyes, but I’m smiling.
With the swift, determined steps of someone on a mission, Pei Jie leads us out into the night again, glancing behind her shoulder every few seconds to check that I haven’t tripped over the long layers of my skirts or gotten lost in the crowds. Instead of heading in the direction we came from, we walk farther down the street, where the architecture starts to draw inspiration from ancient China, designed with stone carvings and crimson pillars and curved roofs. It’s like existing in two time periods at once. Outside the noodle restaurants and pagoda-style art galleries are the cool white haloes of ring lights, where live-streamers are broadcasting themselves singing or talking animatedly about whatever makeup products they’re holding.
“This spot is good,” Pei Jie declares, fiddling with the lens on her camera as we stop outside a hotel that could pass for a palace. Crimson lanterns tumble from the gold-lit eaves, and scholar’s rocks pose artfully outside the double gates. “You stay where you are.”
The people are more scattered here, most of them also trying to get pretty pictures. A girl a few yards away is attempting to teach her boyfriend how to take photos of her, gesturing with increasing desperation for him to angle the camera higher, until she finally gives up, switches to selfie mode, and turns him into a human phone-stand while she records herself.
“Start walking toward me now,” Pei Jie instructs while Cyrus finds a safe spot behind the camera to watch. “Slowly. Move your left hand a little, like you’re brushing your hair but not actually brushing it. Look over there—you see that lantern on your right, by the door? Keep looking. Lower your shoulder. Your other shoulder. Keep your chin down. Okay, yes, good! Now hold—”
I stumble over some of the instructions at first, partly because it’s been a while since I had to do this, and partly because of my Mandarin skills. But I guess posing is a pretty universal thing, because even if some of her tips sail straight over my head and splatter on the ground behind me, I soon ease into the rhythm of it. I bring my hand to my cheek as if I’m suffering from a toothache, but in a high-fashion way. I tighten my abdominal muscles and arch my back. I wave my broad sleeves in the air and place one foot gracefully in front of the other and look up, look left, look pretty.
A few tourists stop to stare as they pass us, but I don’t get the same self-conscious, ready-to-hide feeling I used to. It’s like my brain has undergone a makeover too, those dark spots of doubt brushed away and replaced by almost obnoxiously optimistic thoughts.Maybe they’re staring because they also think this style suits me. Maybe they’re admiring how the pins glow in my hair. Maybe they too want to experience the thrill of spinning around in traditional robes. Maybe they’re trying to figure out how much a photo shoot like this costs.
“You’re doing such an amazing job,” Pei Jie calls out to me a few dozen different angles later, the camera clicking furiously. “Have you ever modeled before?”
I swallow. “No,” I say, but the lie worms its way down my throat and sharpens its teeth to gnaw at my stomach.
“Well, maybe it’s something you should consider,” she says, lowering the camera to inspect the last couple of photos. “All right, I think we’re finished here. Thank yousomuch for agreeing to this—I can’t wait for you to see how they turn out. We’ll do some retouching and send the final files through to Wang Laoshi—I’ve already added him on WeChat …” She starts going into what I assume to be the technical things, and that’s where my Mandarin fails me and I have to revert to smiling and nodding and hoping that she hasn’t slipped in a question about whether I’d be happy to sell her a vital organ.
But I understand exactly what she says as I turn to go, only because I’ve heard the same words from my friends and relatives before, always meant to be encouraging, to steer me toward the right place in life: “It’d be such a waste if you weren’t a model.”
Before, I would’ve given those words all the weight in the world. I would’ve let myself become convinced that, yes, being a model is the only way for me, if that’s what other people think. But a new, exhilarating thought pushes up in resistance:It’s not for them to decide. Icouldbe a model, but I could be a thousand other things, lead other lives, follow new paths and find my way forward. I can’t know exactly where I’ll end up, but I don’t have to let them choose for me.
I walk without looking back. The farther I go, the lighter I feel.
It takes far less time to remove the elaborate wig and robes than it took to put them on, but most of the evening is already gone when I join Cyrus outside the studio.
The last time I brought a boy along to one of my photo shoots—and only because he’d insisted that he was interested—he had gotten bored and wandered off halfway through. When I went to find him, he’d snuck into some other photo shoot for a lingerie ad, his eyes glued to the models who were older and prettier than I was, as if he’d completely forgotten that I existed. He looked at them the same way he would look at me when he wanted to kiss me, and I was suddenly nauseated that I’d ever let him kiss me at all.
A small part of me had expected Cyrus to grow bored of the photo shoot too, but he’s waiting right there by the door, patient as ever, my purse hanging around his shoulder.
Tenderness blazes through me, warming the empty space between my ribs.
“Thanks for holding my bag,” I tell him, reaching over to take it from him.
“It’s an honor to hold your bag,” he says. “And it’s so light I barely felt it.”
I laugh as we wander over to the quieter parts of the lake, where the lights are dim enough to see the pearlescent shimmer of the moon above us, and the trees are dense enough to drape their leaves around us like curtains. “Okay, you don’t have to pretend. I know that thing’s ridiculously heavy.”
“Iwasstarting to wonder if your hobbies included carrying bricks in your purse.”
“Yeah, those are my only two passions in life,” I agree sarcastically. “Drawing clouds and carrying bricks around.”
But his expression turns thoughtful, as if I’ve just uttered something profound. “You know, you looked happy earlier, doing the photo shoot. It’s none of my business, of course, but I suppose I’m still trying to understand why you gave it up if it was something you loved so much.”
I stop walking. Glance up at him. I can tell that he means it—that he’s really trying, his eyes dark and earnest as they study me. And my lie from earlier scrabbles its way back up, itching inside my throat. “I don’t know if I loved it,” I say slowly. Because was it really love if it ate away at you? If it felt like trying to hold on to a fanged creature while it sucked the blood from your hand? All I know is that I had to let go before it killed me. “It just stopped being worth it.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain, but modeling is different from, like, gardening or knitting,” I say, rubbing my arms. “It’s not this skill that you can separate from yourself. It’syou; you’re the product. It’s your appearance that they’re selling. So when you get criticism, it’s always going to be personal, and it’s very often about things you can’t control: They’ll tell you that you’re not tall enough, or you’re not striking enough, or you stand out too much. I mean, I’ve had someone say straight to my face at an audition that I simply wasn’t attractive.Not even, like, a specific feature. Just everything about me.”
I can feel his eyes on me, and I falter.Am I really doing this?Am I really about to tell him the truth, spit out the hot stone of shame that’s been burning inside me this whole time? It’s my last defense against him. Once I say it, I realize, there’ll be no going back. I’ll have trusted him with everything, and it’ll be entirely up to him what he wishes to do with it. He might like me less after I tell him. He might not understand.
But there’s nobody else in the world I can imagine sharing this with. Nobody else Iwantto confess to, as terrifying as it feels, as high the risk is.
