We decided to make a pit stop to do a little ketamine before calling the Uber to the club.
“Every time you take K, a horse has to go through surgery awake,” I said to the girls as we piled into the bathroom together. They all stared at me without blinking.
“How do you like Paris?” I asked Ana as I snorted a line off her key.
She sighed. “Paris is dirty. Its people are dirty, disgusting…you feel the stares of the men on your back that are inescapable and it makes you hate them. It is the sweat and the urine in the hot streets and in the metro and it makes you hate that too. When you model…you sit in clothes that would allow your family to pay a year’s rent and you think, can’t you people look outside? Listen to you, speaking of the craftsmanship of fine jewelry or the thread count of a cufflink as people run like rats in the dirty streets, as people starve outside, as the world slowly overheats and suffocates and dies, and here you are discussing fucking sapphires. Bodies packed together like…” She paused. “What is the word? The small fish?”
“Sardines.”
“Yes. Sardines.”
Then she did her line.
“Damn Ana. This is so dark of you,” Malo said, her accent getting thicker as she got more fucked up. She opened her limited-edition black Chanel bag delicately and shook a few tiny pink pills into her palm. “I also have a little 2C.”
We all took some and I called the Uber.
My consciousness flattened into a field of dull electric blue. The deep bass pulsating through the club’s speakers went straight through my chest, but not before taking the time to jar me with every beat. After the drugs hit my system it became difficult to focus on any one thing for very long.
There was a girl with flaming red hair who kissed me deeply on the mouth as I wandered from one dimly lit satin-draped cave of a room into another.
Nearby, Travis Scott moved toward the decks while security cleared people out of his path.
I went home alone, though I don’t remember how I got there.
The next morning I woke up terribly depressed with a familiar acrid taste in my mouth. Every time I blew my nose, bits of pink dribbled out. I wanted to fucking die.
I’ll never drink or take a drug again, God, if you heal me today.
God didn’t heal me.
I watched a screen recording of Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” hoping it would make me feel a little better, but it didn’t fix it. I switched to TikTok.
Then I remembered I had to go to my agency, which made me feel even worse, and I contemplated cancelling. But that would just postpone the inevitable until next week, and next week I would almost certainly do this all over again Saturday night anyway. Better to get it out of the way today.
I cried for a while in the shower against the pink tile as the world’s brightness and saturation dials dimmed. Waves of grief hit me, followed by waves of panic that the grief would never end.
“It’s going to be okay,” I whispered to myself sweetly. “It’ll all be okay.”
Then I threw up into the tub. Luckily it was mostly liquid, pale pink and foamy around the drain. I rinsed it down and tried to parent myself through the comedown, not thinking that a good parent would probably not give her child enough ketamine to knock out an ox.
My comedowns were always terrible. I had been on Prozac for years and it mixed with the drugs and alcohol in fucked up ways as they fought for territory in my serotonin receptors. The obvious solution was to stop.
I couldn’t physically stop. But sobriety frightened me almost as much as the drugs did. As long as I was occupied with the cycle of getting fucked up and nursing myself back to health, I could blame the cycle for everything else. Without it, there would be nothing left between me and whatever was underneath.
Sometimes I thought about my grandfather with the rifle in his mouth and wondered whether certain forms of despair moved through families like eye color.
When I think about killing myself, it’s when existing feels heavy enough to shatter my spine. In my mind’s eye I become a prop apple—beautiful and shining outside, rotten through the porcelain skin. In the darkest hour comes the reprieve: an open field at twilight, the release of blood rushing gladly from the body, and then nothing.
I slipped on the wet tile getting out of the shower, flailing a little. I opened Audible with my damp thumb and played The Power of Now at a random chapter. That would fix it. I was probably just insufficiently present.
The agency office was on Boulevard Malesherbes. The agents sat clustered at communal desks beneath tall windows, clacking away at their laptops while light flooded the room. One wall was covered floor to ceiling with cards displaying the faces of all the girls they represented.
I found mine immediately, just to make sure I was still acceptable to them.
“Darling!”
Now I had to hug everyone in turn.
Two former models in their thirties. Two handsome gay men in tight shirts. A younger woman they kept around because she was close enough in age to connect with us. The owner wasn’t there, but her creepy brother was in the corner typing.
They seemed like they fuck.
“You are booking very well this month,” my main agent, Pierre, told me in English. His shirt was unbuttoned low enough to reveal tattoos and a thin blue chain against his chest.
“Thank you!”
“Yes, we have many opportunities in the coming months. But first we must make sure your body is perfect for show season.”
His eyes widened slightly on the word perfect. The younger woman nodded beside him with grave seriousness.
“Totally understood,” I said.
Pierre looked me up and down.
“I am seeing a little bit of weight here, of course.” He glanced at my thighs. “Maybe tomatoes. Too many nuts. Girls think nuts are healthy but really they are very fattening.”
“That makes sense. No tomatoes.”
He narrowed his eyes like he didn’t believe me, and maybe also like he kind of hated me, though not enough to stop making money off me.
“Let’s see.”
The back room contained filing cabinets and a BMI scale.
They asked me to strip to my underwear.
I stepped onto the machine and gripped the handles while everyone watched the numbers tick upward. Pierre made a disappointed clucking sound when they stopped. The younger woman echoed it softly.
Then Pierre crouched in front of me and wrapped a yellow tape measure around my bare thighs.
For a moment I thought I might vomit directly onto his head.
“You see?” he said. “It is no good. You need to lose quite a bit for show season.”
“I know. I need to be more disciplined.”
We walked back into the main office.
“Babe, we love you,” Pierre said. The others looked up from their computers, sensing it was time to cosign on the project of my anorexia. “You need to tone up. Then you are going to be ready for the season, because big things are coming.”
“I’m fully dedicated to this,” I said enthusiastically, swallowing more nausea.
I decided it was a bad time to mention I was returning to New York in two weeks because my professors were no longer accepting my excuses for missing class. It also seemed like a bad time to ask where the money was for jobs I’d done six months earlier.
“Whatever it takes.”
“You go see Claudia next week,” Pierre said. “She loves you.”
Claudia was a famous casting director who once put her hand on my crotch during drinks. She hadn’t booked me for anything since, so I doubted my outfit would matter much at the casting.
“Totally,” I said.
“Okay baby.”
Everyone stood and hugged me goodbye.
“Do you need more casting cards, darling?” the younger woman asked, gesturing toward the wall.
“Oh, I’m all set.”
“Goodbye darling!” they called after me.
“No tomatoes!”
Outside the agency I threw up bright pink liquid into the gutter beside a parked scooter. For a second it looked almost neon against the Paris pavement. Then it slid toward the sewer grate and disappeared.