Page 25 of State of Ruin

The twenty-eighth floor is one huge open-plan photography studio, and it’s buzzing. That Voss has an entire floor of prime Park Avenue real estate given over to its in-house photography feels like the ultimate flex. A woman around my age meets me off the elevator and introduces herself as Cara, checking my name off on her clipboard. The plan, she tells me, is to prep my skin as much as possible before taking the test shots. She leads me through the space, which is divided into multiple sets on one side, mainly set up with white coloramas and huge studio lights, and makeup areas on the other.

I am processed as if I’m a cog in a Swiss watch. These guys are efficient. There are a ton of women here, and, as always, I remind myself not to consider the stats. The probability of making it is always low for a campaign like this: high profile, big budget, and uber-competitive. But the probabilities are misleading. I either have the look they want or I don’t, and there isn’t much I can do about that except to be professional and do my absolute best to give them what they want.

I sit in a line of girls and wait, scrolling on my phone. As per the memo I received, we’re all wearing white crew-neck tees and blue jeans. I have the Kindle app, but I’m too jittery to read. Instagram it is. After a short wait—like I said, they’re efficient—I’m taken to a chair where a stylist briskly combs and styles my hair, parting it in the center and slicking it severely back into a Clean Girl bun. As soon as he’s done, someone else reclines the chair a little and puts a sheet mask on my face. It covers my eyes, but it smells heavenly, so I tell myself to enjoy this brief, free facial using products I could never in a million years afford. I use basic French skincare brands, and, honestly, they’re more than enough. Maman steered us well on that front. Anyways, I tend to get better results from eating clean and staying hydrated than I do from skincare. Maman used to say that if your skin needs more than La Roche-Posay, then you need to take a long, hard look at your lifestyle.

As I sit, I try not to think about the money a booking like this would bring. The exposure. I’m just a regular model, sitting in a makeup chair, waiting for a casting call like I do every other day. Nothing to see here.

The next step is just as impersonal as any other call. It’s only the level of prep that’s unusual: generally, you show up and they snap a few photos. I sit perfectly still while a skincare artist moves through the steps, her movements brisk, fingertips light as she spritzes a hydrating mist before applying eye cream, serum, moisturizer, more mist. The products are decadent, the process is not, and I am not a person but a number on a sheet.

I’m left for a few minutes while the products sink in, turned to face my own reflection in the huge mirror until someone else comes over for skin mapping under a harsh light. Some up-close shots are taken in the chair as I keep my eyes shut. The pores in my T-zone are debated out loud and, it seems, found to pass the test. I’m used to this; only usually it’s your cup size or waist-to-hip ratio that is discussed as if you’re (a) not human and (b) not right there.

“Can we mattify the T-zone just a little?” someone asks, and a triangular pad is pressed oh-so-gently to the offending area. I am not addressed directly until I open my eyes, and one of the experts who’s been tapping and stroking my face gives me a wink.

“I would fucking kill for your skin, girl,” she tells me.

Eventually, I am pronounced ready, and I cross the room to get my shots taken on one of the endless white coloramas. The photographer starts on his tripod and I pose however he asks, staring off dreamily into the distance as if life is a bed of roses when you’re swaddled in Voss skincare products. He takes the camera off the tripod and swoops in close, moving around me as I change up my pose and expression. I’m operating on autopilot now, and it feels easy. I can do this all day long.

Still, there are women on sets either side of me, doing the exact same thing. Who knows if I have even the slightest shot at this?

All I know is, come Wednesday night, I won’t breathe a word about this to Sinclair. My arrangement with him feels icky enough already without my trying to sleep my way to the ad campaign of a lifetime.

When you have a secret and someone goes sniffing, the best you can do is brazen it out. I’m working on instinct here, because an international woman of mystery I am not. More accurately, I’m working on survival instinct. I sold my body to pay down some medical debt is not an admission I can ever make to my family, period.

The unwelcome sniffing comes as we prepare dinner. I’m tired from the shoot, and I have to go back into the city in a couple hours for my Alchemy shift, but I’m glad I came home. Glad I took a beat. Dad grabbed Fleur from school and took her back to the shop for a while, and now I’m quartering some sweet potatoes lengthwise for roasting as Dad lays the chicken breasts he’s marinated on a plate and covers them with one of Maman’s many ancient garde-mangers: the cane-and-net domes that protect food from insects and that sit in a colorful, mismatched stack in one of our cupboards, as far away from their Basque origins as she was. It’s stupid, but these little rituals make me happy. There’s some kind of thread that binds us to our pasts, to countries we’ve left and people we’ve buried, and things like the garde-mangers make that thread feel the tiniest bit stronger. It may be three years since Maman—Fleur senior—succumbed to the ovarian cancer that took her too young, but as long as we do stuff like this, she still lives on in our memories, and that’s not nothing.

“Am I going crazy,” my sister wonders out loud as she sits at the kitchen table while Fleur works on her letters, “or did we just pay off a huge chunk of bills? Because it’s definitely not pay day, but I could swear, like, ten grand has come off the bill for the therapy center.”

Dad chuckles. “I’d like to say I snuck down to Atlantic City on my lunch hour and put a few bucks on black, but I can’t take the credit.”

I knew this might come up, and I’m prepared. My sister is sharp as a tack, and she’s also obsessed with how much she owes in medical expenses. Both of those things mean I can’t just pay down nearly half of one chunk of debt and expect it to go unnoticed.

“It was me,” I say airily as I massage the quartered sweet potatoes in olive oil. This family may be poor, but we sure eat well. A diet of processed food won’t do my modeling career or my sister’s healing process any good at all.

Fleur continues to trace the letter d, oblivious, but my dad and my sister both stare at me. It appears further explanation is necessary.

“Rob any banks recently, sunshine?” Dad asks. He cuts the ends off a clove of garlic before peeling off the skin and crushing it expertly under his knife. Kurt and Fleur Ward may have divvied things up more traditionally when we were younger, but you’d better bet the man stepped up big-time when Maman got sick. And would you know? He’s still caring for his girls with every ounce of energy a sixty-three-year-old man can have, even after a day of hard manual labor. That said, the boyish good looks that won over a young French ballerina are still very much in effect.

“Sure,” I say. “I held up a Chase in the city earlier. Very lucrative, as it turns out.”

“Nice job. Any chance you can go back and rob the rest?” He jerks his head toward the kitchen dresser. The dresser in whose drawer lies a lined ledger with his careful tally of our overall debt. The drawer that should come with a health warning: Do Not Open. Can Cause Panic Attacks. I give him a look to show him I am not amused.

“Lees,” Sylvie warns, adopting her childhood nickname for me, “spill.”

I sigh. Here goes. “I had a nice surprise this week. Got some extra royalties from one of the cosmetics brands I did some work for—Halo?” I name an Instagram brand while reminding myself that a good lie doesn’t need too much embellishment.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You got ten grand of ‘surprise’ royalties, just like that? How the hell does that work?”

“It’s, like, an extension,” I say, hoping I can make this sound plausible. “They paid me a day rate and basic royalties up front, but then they were so pleased with the images that they want to use them for print ads, too. That wasn’t in the initial agreement, so they have to pay me extra to use them.”

Dad grins broadly as Sylvie stares at me in shock. “So you’ll be in magazines?”

“And newspapers potentially, yes,” I lie, feeling gross at doubling down on this deception.

“Holy crap! Which ones?” she asks.

“Dunno yet. We’ll have to wait and see. You need to buy up ad space months in advance for the glossies.” This is low-key true, so I hope she buys it—and I also hope she forgets all about this conversation before too long.

She’s quiet for a second, looking down at Fleur’s tiny hand moving her pencil so carefully over her sheet of paper. “Well, that’s incredible,” she says quietly, glancing back up at me. “I mean, ten grand. Honestly, I don’t know how to thank you.”