“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” she says with a sigh so heavy it could register on the Richter scale.
“Anyway, you can cover the rent this month, right?” I ask her. “I can apply for unemployment when I get home tonight, but that might take a few weeks to get to my account.”
Silence.
“You there?” I ask after a moment.
A sniffle.
“Oh, no,” I say.
“Yeah,” she replies.
“They laid you off too?”
Sarah sighs.
“Yup. And I was going to use my paycheck to cover my rent and my car note and insurance until I can get unemployment, too. But if we’re both this… destitute!… we’re in big trouble.”
“Oh, God,” I mutter. “We’re gonna have to move back home.”
“I know,” she says. “Fuck, why is this happening?”
She can’t see me, but I shake my head when I’m unable to conjure an answer to such an existential question.
“At least your parents like you,” I say, not meaning it to sound as bitter as it does. I quickly follow up by saying, “Sorry, that wasn’t fair.”
“No, it’s true, though,” she tells me. “I’m so sorry, Britt.”
I shrug my shoulders, knowing that she still can’t see me.
I wish she could, though, because that would mean she’d be here, and she’d be able to hug me. And I could hug her back. And we could cry together about this miserable, leaky boat we’ve just found ourselves in.
“I guess I should… fuck… I guess I should call my dad,” I say instead.
And with that we get off the phone, with Sarah agreeing that she’s going to have to call her mom, as well.
I stare at my phone for a minute before calling, trying to prepare myself. I’ll need to gauge just how drunk he is so that I know how to break the news to him.
Not that it will matter. The day I moved out— which was the day after I graduated high school, mind you— he told me I’d never make it on my own. He threw in some drunken slurs about how much he hates women, because they always leave him.
Well, I can’t say I blame them. I tried to leave “him,” aka, my house, too, but now that this has happened, I realize I haven’t made it very far, and that I’ll have to go home with my tail between my legs.
When I left home, I’d been forced to walk away without retaliating or saying anything in my defense. I know it wouldn’t have made a difference if I had, though, anyway.
He’s been so lost in alcohol and sometimes even cocaine that he doesn’t have any awareness of how his words affect me or anyone else. Those words are the same reason his business has been so much on the decline.
His bitterness toward women got so undisguisable after a while that he started treating the models he worked with like shit, talking to them like they were garbage, and one-by-one they walked away, some with less than what they had when they came to him.
I’ve always been a good kid, both before and after moving out. His addictions scared me away from drugs and alcohol altogether, and I’ve always been a hard-worker and a proficient student.
But he’s never seen any of that. He was so disappointed to have a daughter that didn’t look like the women he’d surrounded himself with all throughout his career and a wife who chose herself over his abuse that he lost any sort of filter he might have ever been capable of utilizing.
With a pit of dread forming in the bottom of my stomach, I light my cigarette, take a deep inhale of the cancerous smoke, and dial his number.
It’s the last thing I want to do, but it’s also the only option available to me.
I don’t have any other choice.
Chapter Two - Simon
“Okay, ladies! That’s a wrap for today,” my best friend and business partner, Tony, tells the models on the soundstage as he claps his hands in the air.
Tony and I have been best friends since we were six years old and growing up across the cul-de-sac from one another. And back then when we were growing up, we couldn’t have been any different.
I was the shy artistic kid with an eye for aesthetic and Tony was the kid constantly trying to make a buck, whether it be selling lemonade at the end of our street or mowing lawns that he’d convinced our neighbors were just a quarter of an inch higher than the Home Owners’ Association allowed it to be.
Still, we remained resolute to our friendship, and it wasn’t until much later that we discovered that despite our vastly different vocational callings, we did share a common passion for one thing.
Women.
So right out of business school and art school, respectively, we came back together and opened our company, a joint modeling agency and photography studio called Picture Perfect. We really got ahead though in the mid-2000s when we started focusing on models who reflected real women and plus-sized models just as the rest of the world was beginning to discover how unattractive flat chests and butts and exposed rib cages actually were.