My Body(33)
We met at a Japanese restaurant that felt more like it belonged in Las Vegas than in Los Angeles. I told Chloe and Isabella that I was nervous because I’d lost my fake ID. Chloe laughed and reassured me: “You don’t have to worry about anything like that.”
A short man in his midthirties, wearing a black button-down shirt, greeted us at the entrance to a private dining room, kissing Chloe and Isabella. I was surprised—I’d assumed we’d be going out with people closer to our age. He smiled widely and introduced himself to me as “Sacha, Chloe’s friend,” telling me to drink and eat whatever I wanted. Unfamiliar with extensive cocktail lists, I blanked when the waiter came for my order, and asked for a tequila sunrise, a drink I remembered my mother liking. The sweetness of the grenadine made me feel nauseous. As dish after steaming dish theatrically appeared on a long table, underage models trickled in, smiling nervously as Sacha stood up to greet them.
“What do you need, ladies?” he asked every time, signaling to a waiter. He was animated and anxious, unable to sit still.
“What up, Sach!” a woman dressed in chunky heels and a leather jacket hollered as she strutted over to the private dining room. Sacha popped up. “Kim! Gorgeous as always.”
Kim was our age, but it was clear that she was different, confident and at ease, a veteran. She wrapped her arms loosely around Sacha, placing her chin in the crook of his neck, and surveyed the table of quiet young women, assessing us, her gaze jumping from one to the next.
“The guys are almost here,” she whispered, pulling away from him and taking a seat. Not long after that, Sacha announced it was time to leave. The long table was still covered with full plates of food. When I stayed seated, waiting for a check to appear, Isabella whispered to me, “No, no, no. We just go.” Realizing that someone else was paying, I felt a twinge of uneasiness.
Outside, Sacha directed us to several black SUVs and told us to “hop in.” As I climbed in, using one hand to hold down my short dress to keep it from riding up over my ass, I saw several men around the age of forty already in the car. “Hello,” said a big, bald man who appeared too large for his seat. His massive hand sat heavily on the thigh of a petite, pale woman who seemed just a few years older than me. “This is my fiancée,” he said. She waved listlessly. From the back seat, an unshaven, chubby man with a greasy nose called out, “Hi girls, let’s party!”
At the club, the men kept offering us cocaine, which they snorted with their backs to the dance floor. They ordered bottles of alcohol that arrived with sparkling flames, brought by women in black miniskirts and heavy eye makeup. The men grabbed our bodies and fed us shots and sang along to the obnoxious pop music and pumped their fists in the air. Mostly, though, Isabella and I stood around in a booth, barely swaying to the music and not speaking much. I noticed that Chloe was slouched in a corner. At some point the three of us must have managed to leave, because I woke up the next morning in Isabella’s room with a pounding headache to a text: “So much fun last night! It’s Sacha btw, save my number.”
After that, I made a habit of ignoring Sacha’s weekly texts, which were always versions of the same message: “Hiiii babe. Thursday. Big meal at Nobu tonight before we go out! Gonna be sick, roll through.” When I told another model about him, she explained that Sacha was a party promoter.
“He got your number? He’s never going to stop texting you, girl. The rich dudes pay him to wrangle models. They always start the nights off with a big dinner, so that girls who aren’t making much cash come for a free meal.”
The whole situation gave me the creeps, but when Sacha texted me along with Chloe and Isabella about a free trip to Coachella, including tickets to the festival, a place to stay, and a ride out to the desert in a limo bus, I was too excited to turn it down. The three of us pored over the lineup and circled the acts we wanted to see.
Coachella was expensive. Just the year before, I’d driven there with my best friend and spent two nights sleeping in my Nissan with the seats laid flat, parked in a hotel lot where we paid ten dollars each morning to eat cold, spongy eggs from the breakfast buffet. We’d sneaked into the festival and on our way home we found an old Starbucks gift certificate under my front seat that bought us bagels and cream cheese. It had been fun, but now I could be in the VIP section of the beer garden and the front row at the concerts. The prospect made me feel grown-up.
“I mean, if we’re there together it’ll be fine,” Isabella texted me. We figured we could ignore the men while taking advantage of their setup.
We hit gridlock traffic leaving Los Angeles. There were about fifteen of us plus Sacha on the party bus, which was tricked out with purple neon lights and a bar filled with ice and bottles of alcohol. Sacha kept the music loud, walking the length of the aisle refilling drinks and smiling broadly. Eventually, even the most animated girls seemed to tire out. We stared at our phones. A tall model with thick black hair and a nasal voice came and sat next to me.
“So you know the big bald one is, like, a prince, right?” She melted into the seat, her long legs extending across the aisle. She was dressed straight out of the seventies: long skirt, crop top, and stacked bracelets. “His mom is super famous obviously. But yeah, I’ve heard him and his fiancée like to have threesomes.” Grinning, she retied a colorful silk scarf around her forehead. “So they’re, like, always looking for girls for those.”