Wanting to Be Seen

My mom picks me up early from school for my runway gig at the Boynton Beach Mall. I'm twelve. It’s 2001. I attend John Casablanca’s, a modeling school where groups of girls ages five to twenty-five meet once a week. We discuss make-up, runway walks, and other pressing issues in fashion. Today, I have been chosen to model for Wet Seal, a clothing store that markets to wannabe slutty teenagers. I cannot express how lucky I feel to be alive, to be whisked away from my prep school grounds. My mom brings me a bottle of water and sliced turkey in a Ziploc bag. As we drive, she tells me how proud she is, how maybe next year we’ll be in Paris for fashion week, how I'm so beautiful and anything is possible for beautiful people. I look at myself in the sun visor mirror. I have braces and stray hairs between my eyebrows. My eyes are almond shaped. My nose is too big. But aren’t mothers always right? Isn’t everything we tell ourselves just a lie? Isn’t it best to let someone else decide?

At Wet Seal, I am fitted for my “runway look.” I'm wearing a stretchy, neon tank top and a pleated leather skirt. Chunky plastic bracelets clank up and down my arms when I move. There is no makeup artist or hair stylist. I tie my hair back in a ponytail and hope for the best. Another model, an eighteen-year-old from West Palm Beach, wears her hair in a side ponytail and urges me to do the same. All the other girls apply makeup in mini compact mirrors. I hadn't realized I’d have to do my own face for the day. “If I have time, I’ll do yours too,” says the same girl who showed me the ponytail move. She lines her lips with a mauve pencil and fills them in with purple. 

A woman dressed in a day suit appears. Wet Seal’s stock room is in the back of the store, cluttered with half-unpacked boxes of merchandise and posters of real models. She says she needs one girl to model for her store, Talbots. I close my eyes and pray for God to make me invisible.

“You!” she says, and I know she’s pointing at me. “I’ll get you fitted for a suit. We need to showcase our spring line.” 

“I'm not sure I’ll fit into anything,” I say, trying desperately to save myself. “I'm a size zero.”

“We have petites.” 

I change out of my outfit and into my regular clothes. Goodbye neon top. Farewell lovely bangles. My mom never let me shop at Wet Seal  in real life. She said the clothes were cheap, though I knew what she really meant. Even so, I didn't want to be the type of girl who wore Talbots. But maybe it was time I accepted it; I’d never rock a pleather skirt from Wet Seal. I’d never French kiss a boy against a locker at my prep school. I’d be left out of the circle of “cool” girls forever.    

I follow the woman a few stores down to Talbots. She takes me back into her stockroom and finds a grey suit, lavender shirt, and beige tights. “No one’s worn them, don't worry,” she says. I put on the black patent leather pair of heels I brought, the only pair I have. I look at myself in the full-length mirror. I never get what I want, I think. I don't know anyone here, but it’s still embarrassing to model for Talbots. To model for Wet Seal was to be one of the trendy girls with tube tops and lipstick. I wanted to feel alive.

It’s mostly old people and sales associates from other stores who attend the fashion show. And my mom, of course. I walk to bad pop music while the Wet Seal girls pass me on the runway. They smile and high-five each other, plastic bangles bouncing. No one understands why a twelve-year-old is wearing a day-suit. But I’ve saved the day for the Talbot’s lady. “You could swing your arms a bit more when you walk,” she says later. The other girls get to keep their fashion show outfits while I change back into my regular clothes. “You can keep the tights,” the saleslady offers. 

I graduate from John Casablanca’s  a few months later, but never get booked for anything. I go to sleep away camp that summer. The girls in my bunk make fun of me for bringing my makeup kit outside to get the natural light. I know that I’m a Summer, wearing navy, olive, and nude to enhance my features. I hold things up against my skin in the mirror. I wish someone else was in there, looking back.

I modeled for a very well-known, very sexy, magazine in 2011. I was twenty-two, new to Los Angeles, and looking for any work that wasn’t what I was doing for Christina. I had found Christina on Craigslist (back when it was more common to find work there) who paid me $120 a week to check her emails, walk her dog, and pick up lunch. Her self-owned company had a name similar to Glitz and Glamor Public Relations. Her last assistant had been a model in the fitness world. Her newest job had taken her to New Zealand to surf and model for Billabong. I coveted the life in her Facebook posts: skydiving, swimming with sharks, white blonde hair, and perfect bikini body. 

I moved to Los Angeles for Alex and knew he could feel it. The love that we shared fluctuated between absolute bliss and sheer uncertainty. There was no way to pretend the love wasn’t everything to me. We spent our dates riding the Ferris Wheel at the Santa Monica Pier, window shopping at the Beverly Center, driving down Melrose with fingers weaving through the thick, summer air. Alex often distanced himself, pulling away just when I needed more. He promised we’d end up together, not yet, but someday. We’d joked we could get married when we turned thirty, but that was eight years away. During our highs, Alex would suggest a trip to Catalina, a day at Disneyland, or some kind of romantic getaway. But when the day came to board the boat, make the drive, pack our bags, he made excuses.

Alex worked in finance for a post-production company where he often attended movie premieres and industry parties. He never invited me because it was always “last minute” or “not my scene.” His roommate was Rihanna’s personal stylist. One time when he ran out of beer, Alex told me Zac Efron must have had the last one the night before. I thought he’d be okay with the modeling, possibly even think it was cool. I had brought up the photo shoot casually, but proudly. He didn’t take it well. We had gone to a bar that night. I wore a new, green dress while he sported a new, blue shirt. We talked about what we might do for the upcoming holiday season and kissed under a streetlamp. When I brought up the gig, he left me in the middle of the street. 

“I can’t believe you,” he yelled before driving away in his black Mustang. “Good luck finding a real  job!” He threw a CD I had made for him out of the window drove back home to Venice. He shut off his phone. I walked home uphill in heels. I sobbed for so long that, by the time I got to my apartment, I thought I’d never cry again. Alex had convinced me not only that we were done as a couple, but that my life was over. I’d ruined it all.

I threw a box of our shared things in the dumpster. It contained a penny flattened on the train tracks on Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach, a fake, red flower from a Disney World hotel, photos of us I had printed and overpaid for at CVS, a Reese’s Cup wrapper from the night Alex asked me to be his girlfriend, his wisdom tooth in a tiny baggie, and so, so many letters. A part of me believed that if he could just see my modeling pictures, he’d understand how harmless they were. If only he could see me smiling in each frame, happy and having a great time. 

In eighth grade, I fell in love with Ben Walker. He said he loved me on a field trip to the Sugar Cane fields. My best friend Amy told me she saw Ben and Tiffany kissing during an assembly. When I confronted him during P.E., he said he didn't love Tiffany anymore. He drew my name on his stomach in permanent marker during English class. He came into the cafeteria and showed everyone. 

“BRITTANY,” it read. I was embarrassed. I felt it was too much. I felt it was not enough.

Tiffany called my house phone crying. I told her I was sorry. It wasn’t my fault: the love, the un-love, the writing on his body. Ben and I had never even kissed. I signed online to AIM and messaged Ben that it was over. He was a cheater and a liar. Ben and Tiffany dated for two years after that.

Years later, Ben emailed me asking if I had done any modeling recently. He had seen an episode where I was filmed during my photo shoot, behind the scenes. You could only watch the episode if you got a certain channel on your TV, and it wasn’t free. In the show, I talk about how I loved to get my hair and makeup done, how the clothes and bikinis were so cute. There was maybe a moment where the edge of my nipple was visible while I switched positions in the chair. “Yes,” I told him, even though my full name appeared on the episode’s information. “I saw your nipple,” Ben wrote back. Ben composed a mass email to everyone we went to high school with, informing them of what I’d done, sending links to the magazine’s photos that were available for free online. Amy, whom I no longer speak to, emailed me to say, “I saw your pics, that's cool.” As if that's all I was now to her, to anyone. I imagined her sitting at her job, or at home holding a baby. I could see her scrolling through emails with tea, laughing at my body in a navy-blue bikini. I didn’t respond to her email. I wondered why she even cared. Maybe she was embarrassed to have known me, to have been my best friend for so long. It didn’t cross my mind that she could be jealous. Years later, she tried to add me on social media. I deleted the request. Maybe she wanted to compare herself to me or perpetuate the lie of who she thought I was. It makes me wonder how a life is supposed to look.

The owner of the magazine, Frank Daniels, invited me over to his home in Beverly Hills. It was during a time when Alex and I were not speaking. I plugged the address into my GPS and followed it up into the hills. Frank’s house was gorgeous with a tropical, jungle-inspired aesthetic. He had an entire room with PR packages of FIJI water, television screens in the bathroom mirror, and so much candy. I opened a package of Cookie Dough Bites while we sat in his computer room. “I Google myself constantly, since the divorce,” he told me. “Those TVs in the bathroom, I did that for her.” I didn't know about the court cases or the stories in the limo. I didn’t know about what happened to the girls, to their bodies, to their spirits. Looking back, there are so many terrible things that could have happened that night. The images in my mind parallel the many other times in my life I’ve been in danger but didn't realize it until later. I’d walked home alone from bars, took rides from strangers, left my drink uncovered, shared marijuana pipes with boys in fraternity houses, met men in their homes. I’d taken all these risks for the same reason: to prove myself into existence, into mattering. 

I still wonder, if Frank had made a move on me, what would I have done? But he never did. I’d been asked to model for the company because I wrote articles for them, dumb articles about what to get your boyfriend for Christmas, what to wear to meet the parents, and how to feel sexy in your own skin. I’d found the job on Craigslist and couldn’t believe the pay: $500 per article. After months, one of the assistants asked if I wanted to meet the owner. While Christina was out of town, I arranged to go over to the office in Culver City. I wore jean shorts and a nice top. It was the first place I’d been to in LA that gave me a little ticket when I parked in their garage and told me to get it validated if I’d be there longer than an hour. When I arrived, Frank was opening up an invitation to Kim Kardashian’s wedding. There was a box of white roses on his desk. When he finally looked up, he said, “You’re too hot to be a writer, why don’t you model for us?” 

The modeling would pay $2,000 for the day, enough to cover a month of my studio apartment’s rent in Westwood, and then some. I drove to Melrose and bought shoes, dresses, and jewelry. I went to the Beverly Center and bought a purple evening gown and purse. That day at the office, I had tried on a bikini for Frank, one that he let me keep afterwards. He agreed to let me be in the magazine. “We don't shoot nude for the magazine, since it’s for college,” he told me. He didn’t gawk at me. He didn’t make me feel uncomfortable. He looked at my body, a little thinner since Alex had stopped talking to me, and nodded in approval. Then it was back to work, back to business, and I was on my way. The shoot was booked. I felt like I had made it. 

The magazine never went to print. The company filed for bankruptcy a month after my photo shoot, along with the claims, the lawsuits, etc. The office relocated to Westwood. I walked over one day from my apartment to pick up a disc of my images from the shoot. “They’ll still go online,” an assistant told me. “And the episode will air in a few weeks.” The office had boxes everywhere and cardboard cutouts of women in bikinis. I wasn’t sure if I had done the right thing, but it was all over anyway. 

The pictures inevitably haunted me when I taught high school in South Florida. I’d been at the school only a month, after completing my creative writing program, when rumors circulated around the faculty. My Advanced Placement Language Arts team neglected me, leaving me out of important emails and meetings. It felt like I was a student back in high school, not an instructor who’d earned my place. There was one teacher in particular who I knew didn’t like me. On my first day, she reproached me for wearing a dress with spaghetti straps, even though I had a cardigan to cover my arms. “Safer to invest in a nice blouse,” she’d told me. It made me self-conscious for the rest of the day. 

One day I got an email requesting my presence at the Principal’s office after lunch. I had to get another teacher to cover my class. Why couldn’t it wait until after school?  When I met the Principal in his office, he had printed out images of me from my photo shoot five years earlier. Twenty-two-year-old me wore the navy-blue bikini, the red underwear with arms crossed over my bare chest, the white lace bra. I felt naked in front of this man who had spoken to me only once in my interview months prior. He wanted to know the whole story of the photos. I asked if I was being fired. He told me no, but they needed to know everything in order to protect me. He wouldn’t tell me who had brought the pictures to his attention, but I knew it was the teacher who hated me. I knew. 

I wanted the money. I wanted to look beautiful. I wanted pictures that I could keep forever and look back on when I got older. I wanted to be cool, to fit in, to belong. I still keep two of the pictures in an album and look at them every so often; the rest are gone to dead laptops and expired webpages. I will someday show them to my husband and tell him the whole story, the same one I told the Principal. I feel no guilt for what I did. I see a girl wanting to be loved. I see a girl who wanted to be seen, even if it meant taking her clothes off and posing for the camera. It was that day on the shoot where I learned from the photographer to, “pretend the lens of the camera is the eye of your lover,” but I didn't have one. Instead, I found my own reflection in the lens, upside down, warped, but still me. And in my head, I repeated, this is for you.

The Principal told me I should hire a lawyer and get the photos removed from the Internet. He didn’t want a news team to show up on campus. He scared me so badly I sat in my car making phone call after phone call to services online. I couldn’t afford a lawyer. But even the services were too expensive, and in the end, I never did anything. I continued to show up to school each day praying that some SWAT team wouldn’t arrive with cameras and lights. They never did. When I quit a few months later to take a job at a performing arts school, a student asked if I was quitting because of the pictures. I couldn’t believe she knew. She explained that most of the students knew but didn’t care. I felt humiliated before I realized the expanse of their grace. They understood better than anyone else that it was a phase of my life, a different time, a different version of me. 

I eventually emailed the company and asked them nicely to remove the photos. They did, but some might still be out there, screen-shared or photo-grabbed. They never prevented me from getting or keeping a job. They never caused any concern for my professional endeavors. They never held me back.

When I Google Alex, the first thing that comes up is the report of his arrest and mug shot. His eyes are red. He looks angry, like he could reach through the screen and strangle me. Alex’s LinkedIn profile shows he’d jumped from job to job. He’d also moved five times. The last time we spoke, we had both been through bad breakups. He had been seeing a girl but was unsure. When he distanced himself, she wrote him a ten-page letter about how horrible he was. When he tried to win her back, she wouldn’t respond. He pulled up a draft of a letter on his phone and read it to me, what he wanted to send to her to get her back. The letter was dramatic and pathetic. I wondered how I could have ever loved someone so unstable. I always felt myself to be the insecure one, unhinged, clinging on to whatever love someone would give me. 

I didn’t tell my mom about the shoot until months later. I remember her making a joke about how cute Frank was. Maybe we could work out as a couple or something. But when I ask her now, she tells me she was scared. She was afraid of dangerous people. “Even if I had said not to go, you wouldn’t have listened,” she tells me now. She’s right. I was stubborn, looking for a way to fill the many voids in my life. When I showed my mom my pictures, she told me my hair had never looked better. 

Sometimes I think back to modeling that suit for Talbots  and wish I could have been more appreciative, more present. I wish I could have rocked that suit like I’d wanted to rock the Wet Seal  outfit. If I could go back to that day at the mall, I’d walk with my hands on my hips, my face up toward the bright lights shining down on the runway.

-Brittany Ackerman

Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and graduated from Florida Atlantic University’s MFA program in Creative Writing. She teaches Archetypal Psychology and American Literature at AMDA College and Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Hollywood, CA. She was the 2017 Nonfiction Award Winner for Red Hen Press, as well as the AWP Intro Journals Project Award Nominee in 2015. Her work has been featured in The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Hobart, Cosmonauts Ave, Fiction Southeast, and more. Her first collection of essays entitled The Perpetual Motion Machine is out now with Red Hen Press, and her debut novel The Brittanys will be published with Vintage in 2021.