The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(52)

But he acted like there was nothing wrong, he saw her there and he didn’t say Excuse me and he didn’t leave. He told her to hurry, her mother wanted her, it was time to toast the marshmallows. She didn’t answer. She thought that if she didn’t break her silence this thing would not be real, this thing so small it almost didn’t happen.

During middle school, the greater world began to pursue her more aggressively, and in response she clung more stubbornly to her policy of silence.

There was the time her dad took her to visit the properties he owned in the city’s Sunset District. When he had to meet with a tenant, she went to get a soda at the convenience store he promised was just around the corner.

The store was nowhere. There was no store. She was wandering the sidewalks, counting blocks and squinting at street signs, when a strange voice lapped the back of her neck.

“Your back is real straight,” the voice said. “You work out?”

She glanced over her shoulder. The man was skinny and short and wore a tank top: thin white cotton over scarred white skin. He was loping along like a wounded deer and staring at her and sliding his tongue over his teeth. “Where you work out at?” he said. “Around here?”

“No,” she whispered. She closed her elbows around her ribs and hurried, but the man caught up to her and now they were side by side.

They walked for a few seconds more, the man considering something.

“You’re cute,” he said finally. His eyes ran down, up. “Very cute.”

Sweat broke out on her palms and under her arms. The smell of her own orange-flower perfume released from her skin, and she willed it back like a scream he must not hear. She scanned the street for a store or restaurant to duck into, but there were only more and more stucco houses, windows latticed and barred. “I have a boyfriend,” she said finally, quietly. When she reached Taraval Street, she turned.

The man turned too. “He’s a lucky guy. Very lucky.”

Her throat felt strangled. Her breath too loud. Her T-shirt shrugged up in the heat and she could not move her arms to pull it down. She tried not to look like she was hurrying.

“You could be more lucky, though,” the man said, showing crowded yellow teeth. He reached, and pinched the bare flesh at her hip.

She jumped. A small yelp escaped. But she couldn’t speak. There was a tingling behind her nose and tears in her eyes.

The man laughed and sauntered off, and she pushed into the first open storefront she could find. After, she told no one. If she told her mom, her mom would blame her dad. If she told her dad, he’d want to find the guy and kill him, or—maybe worse, maybe more likely—he wouldn’t do anything at all.

When she turned fourteen, modeling scouts began to call the house. There was one who saw her in the city one weekend and wouldn’t quit until she agreed to a test shoot. Elisabeth didn’t want to go, but her mom insisted: “This is your time, Liza-Belle! You have to take advantage of every moment.” She said this with such conviction that Elisabeth wondered when her time would be over, and what would happen then?

At the studio, the stylists swarmed around her. Sitting still under the lights, she watched in the mirror as the hairstylist back-brushed her hair and wound it on hot rollers. The makeup girl spun her away from the mirror. “Keep your eyes closed, sweetie,” she said. “This stuff is, like, industrial.” Elisabeth obeyed. A machine growled to life and spit cold flecks of makeup over her forehead and eyelids and cheeks, her chin and her neck. “Once this foundation sets, it won’t come off unless you scrub like crazy—you’ll have to take off, like, three or four layers of skin.” The other stylists laughed. “Relax, I was only kidding.”

Eventually her skin was thick and poreless, eyelids glittered and heavy with lash glue, lips gummy and red. The stylists removed her robe and stood her in front of a silver clothes rack in nude thong underwear and five-inch platform heels. They never stopped talking. They told her she was gorgeous, so lucky. So young. “I’d kill for your thighs,” one confided. “Fourteen, fuck, it’s so unfair.”

The photographer posed her on a white backdrop. In head-to-toe black he hunched, aimed his huge lens at her head. He never stopped talking. He said, “Put your shoulders back, honey, stand up straight, honey, give me your sexy look, look like you want this. Now smile. Not like that. Like you mean it, honey. Like you almost didn’t want to but I was just so funny. Natural, sweetheart. Be yourself.”

Elisabeth tilted on the five-inch heels and her limbs angled everywhere and the corners of her mouth trembled when she tried to hold the smile.

He kept telling her to close her eyes, then open them. “Look down, then look up. Don’t stare, honey, no, don’t squint.”

When they got the photographer’s proofs, the girl in the pictures did not even look like her.

Her dad didn’t like them. He said, “Look at her, Heather, she’s miserable.”

Her mom yanked the proof sheet out of his hands. “Don’t touch it, you’re getting your oily fingerprints all over. Anyway, that’s how she’s supposed to look.”

Elisabeth didn’t want to listen to them fight, or to argue her side: she’d already decided never to set foot in front of a camera again. She went to her bedroom and shut the door. Back then the walls were plain, the furniture white, the bedspread a lime-green stripe she’d picked out herself. Settling at her desk, she opened her MacBook and plugged in her earbuds. She could click around on Facebook, scan through random pictures, but this would only leave her hollow, wanting more. What she needed in times like this was actual escape. She clicked over to YouTube.