Becca Ritchie - Hothouse Flower

I glare hard at Emilia. “You need to fucking go.”

Her smile fades. “I’m just joking around, Ryke.” She tosses the pills back to me. I catch it with one hand. “Daisy knows that.”

“I’m not fucking joking.”

I hear Daisy’s voice go hysterical in my fucking ear. “Stop, Ryke, you can’t kick her out. She may sell that info to the press.”

She probably will anyway. I roll my eyes and shake my head. “I’ll drive you home. Just don’t make a big deal about this.” I raise the pills between two fingers to show her what I’m referring to.

“Yeah, sorry.” Her eyes drift to the counter. “Is that her brush?”

Fucking A. “I’ll wait for you in the bedroom.” I don’t care what she does anymore, as long as she’s on her way out in five minutes or less. I sit on the mattress while Emilia combs her hair. “You there, Dais?” I ask her for what feels like the millionth time.

“Yeah, about the pills…I don’t like taking them around Fashion Week. My mom says I gain too much weight when I’m on them. So…don’t be mad.”

If I didn’t tell her to date other fucking guys, I wouldn’t be so concerned right now. My nose flares, and it takes me a moment to answer. “It’s your body. Just be fucking careful.”

“I will,” she says. Silence stretches over the line. “Hey, Ryke?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t fuck her in my bed.”

I grimace. “I would never do that.”

“Just making sure.”

I let out a deep breath. “I miss you.” Fuck me. Why do I say shit like that to her?

Because it’s the truth.

She says, “It’s only been four days.”

“Feels longer than that.”

“Yeah, it does,” she says softly. “So what was your climbing time?”

I almost smile. She remembered that I said I beat my last record. “Two minutes, seventy-three seconds, eighty feet of ascension.”

“I’m proud of you,” she says. “Did you scream, ‘I am a Golden God’ when you reached the top?”

“Only you do that, sweetheart.”

There’s a long pause again, and I can’t keep my smile from filling my whole face.

When she collects herself, she laughs and says, “I did it once, and it wasn’t even a real mountain.”

It was a gym rock wall. And it took her a week to complete the hardest course. By the end, she pumped her fists in the air in triumph and shouted that quote from Almost Famous. The entire gym clapped.

It was really fucking cute.

“Do you feel better?” I ask her. She doesn’t seem as paranoid or fucking antsy.

“When I talk to you, yeah, I do.”

“Then call me. I told you I wouldn’t fucking mind if you did.”

“I didn’t want to bother you…the time difference…”

“I’ll answer your call if it’s at four in the morning or midnight, Dais. It’s just fucking hard for me to call you because I don’t know when you’re on the runway.”

There’s a long drawn out pause, and I can tell she’s trying to find the right words. She settles on these: “Thanks, Ryke.” She says my name with this genuine, heartfelt affection. “I mean it.”

“I know you do.”

“I have to start heading over for hair and makeup. Call you later?”

“I’ll answer.”

For you, I always fucking will.

DAISY CALLOWAY

Stylists and publicists with walky-talkies and headsets dart around the backstage area with crazed eyeballs. Mine aren’t bugged. I rub them, dry from the lack of sleep.

Models swarm the congested backstage, hurrying into their clothes. I sit in another makeup chair while a stylist twists my long blonde locks into an intricate shape of a humongous ribbon. The more hairspray she uses and bobby pins she pokes, the more weight gathers on my head.

When she finishes, I wander over to the racks of clothes and find my garment. It’s nothing more than black hefty fabric, draped to form an indistinguishable bow. Yes, the dress is a giant bow. I am a bow, really, and my hair is also a bow with a ribbon.

I start undressing in order to put the garment on.

“Ladies in the Havindal collection, hurry up!”

Uh-oh. Finding the armholes has proved troublesome, even if I’ve tried the dress on before. Just discovering where to put my head takes ten solid minutes.

I stand beside Christina, who’s not doing much better. She tries to jump into a pair of gray slacks that accompanies a bow-styled blouse, which is hanging on the rack beside her. As she hops into the right leg, the fabric suddenly tears.

“Oh no,” she says with wide eyes, whipping her head from side to side to see if anyone saw. “What do I do?” Her freckled cheeks redden.

The designer, an eccentric skinny lady, inspects each model with a narrowed, judgmental gaze.

“Step out of them,” I tell Christina before she bursts into tears. I flag down the stylist that just did my hair and show her the rip before the designer notices.

“I have a sewing kit at my station. Stay here,” she tells us.

Christina wears a bra and a nude thong. I’m no more dressed. In fact, I don’t have on a bra because my bow-gown has a bit of side-boob. My breast still hurts from Ian mauling my nipple, but I used some concealer to hide the yellowish hickies. It’s not that noticeable, and no one has said anything about it.

People try not to stare as we change, and most of the crew backstage are women. But when I look up, just once, I catch a couple men lingering by the doorway.

One has a camera.

My heart thuds. A camera. I freeze, my limbs crystalizing. They’re not allowed back here. Not with cameras.

Not while we’re changing.

Maybe it’s okay though. No one kicks them out. It’s not like we’re used to being naked. I mean…I haven’t done any nude shoots yet, even though I’m allowed to be topless now that I’m eighteen. I just don’t want the world to see my boobs, high fashion or not.

But what if they’re paparazzi, hoping to snap a quick pic of me for a magazine?

That’s not okay. I glance at Christina, whose fifteen and innocent and new. She’s me three years ago. Nausea roils inside my belly. My skin pricks cold, and I instinctively step in front of Christina. If they’re snapping photos because of me, I don’t want her to be caught in the background. I block her from the men that have breached what I always thought was a “sanctuary”—a line between the onlookers and the models. I guess there is no line. Everyone sees all of me.

I don’t like feeling this gross.

Christina fumbles with her blouse, her eyes glassing as she believes her runway has ended with the torn pants.

I’ve already wrangled my dress and put it on. “Here let me.” I help her into the blouse that has many loops and detached fabric pieces. I keep glancing over my shoulder at the guys, my ass in direct view of their lenses.

The camera clicks.

There’s an actual flash.

They have a picture of me. Not naked, but there are a couple other girls still dressing. It’s a picture they didn’t ask for, one they didn’t get permission to take. Maybe a year ago, I wouldn’t have noticed this. Maybe I would have just shrugged it off. Now I just want to scream at the photographers, but the backstage commotion tugs my mind in several directions.

“Twenty minutes!” a woman with a clipboard yells. “Models, line up. Line up!”

Just as Christina pulls her brown hair through the collar of her blouse, the stylist arrives with the mended pants.

I feel the hot lens on my body again. Clicking.

The stylist fixes my hair that I messed when I was putting on the gown, the heavy fabric an extra ten pounds on my body.

“Those guys,” I say, her hands quickly fixing a loose strand by my face, “they’re not allowed to be in here.”

“Who?” She glances around, but she doesn’t see what I do. They’re right there. Not even twenty feet away, snapping pictures of all of the models, not just me. My heart is racing. They’re probably just going to write an article about Fashion Week with some backstage pictures. It’s okay.

But it doesn’t feel that way. I am worth less than the clothes I wear. I have always known this. A dress is treated with more humanity and kindness than I ever am. One of my shoots, I was told to stand in a swimming pool for four hours without a break.

It was thirty degrees outside.

The pool wasn’t heated.

And I was fourteen.

The gown, though, that was the first priority. “Don’t drop the dress, Daisy. Whatever you do, it can’t touch the water.”

Then why the hell did the photographer want to do a photo shoot in the pool, in the middle of winter?

It was one bad experience out of many. I was lucky that my mom was around, supervising, but she disappeared to network, to schmooze most of the time. Sometimes her presence really didn’t make much of a difference.

I am dazed, exhausted and hollow by the time the designer reaches me. She scrutinizes the fabric on my body, the way the dress hangs and hugs in unison.

“No,” she suddenly says.

“What?” My shoulders drop, my stomach gurgling—the sound incredibly audible. “What’s wrong?”

“Everything!” the designer shouts at me. I flinch. “You gained weight since last I saw you.”

“I didn’t,” I say. My pulse kicks up another notch. I didn’t. I know I didn’t.

“We can measure her,” the stylist suggests.

“This is wrong,” the designer touches the sleeve. “This is not on you right.” She tries to adjust the gown, but it looks right to me. I don’t see how my head is supposed to go where she’s pointing. That’s not how I wore it in the fitting.

“No, no, no.” The designer pinches my slender waistline and then her hands fall to my ass. She stretches the fabric down and then squeezes my butt. “This is too tight. Her thighs, too fat.”

I try to grin and bear it, the designer’s hands going wherever she pleases, in places that I would prefer her not to touch.

I haven’t eaten real food in days. I don’t see how I could have gained anything other than hunger. The designer just dislikes me. I must have offended her somehow.

“I want another model,” she declares. “Get her ready, the hair, the makeup. Now.”

My eyes grow big. “Wait, please, let me fix this. Don’t pull me out of the show.” I’ve walked more than one runway this week, but being fired from even a single job will displease my mom.

“The dress looks hideous on you,” she says. The models in the line watch the designer berate me with more insults. “You’re overweight. I don’t even know why others are booking you.”

Christina’s mouth has permanently fallen open.

I take each word with a blank face, but my eyes begin to burn as I hold back more emotion. “So there’s nothing I can—”

And then the designer physically pries the dress from my body. It’s all I can do to not teeter off my heels. She strips me bare. No bra. Just a nude thong. In two quick moments, I stand naked in a room of now fully-clothed people. The cold nips my arms and legs, but the embarrassment is hot on my neck.

The designer focuses on a new model. Blonde. Tall. Wiry.

The exact same size as me.

The nice stylist combs the new model’s hair. I’m alone, and no one’s going to tell me what to do, where to go, or even give me a robe to cover myself with.

When I turn, I meet the intense gaze of the camera. Click, flash. Click, flash.

It’s in this moment—eighteen, being photographed bare and nude without consent—that I feel violated by my own career. I could be fifteen right now, okay with this, told that this is what’s supposed to happen. I could be fourteen. But what difference does it make now that I’m eighteen? I’m just more aware. I see the wrongness, and the blow strikes harder and hurts greater.

I spend the next ten minutes trying to find my clothes, passing people with my arms over my chest. Trying not to cry. But tears build, and the hurt of the whole situation weighs on my chest like a brick drifting to the bottom of the ocean.

I don’t want to be here anymore.

I just want to go home.

RYKE MEADOWS

I take off my helmet in the parking lot, switching off the ignition on my bike, and I notice Sully’s forest-green Jeep parked by the Information Center. I dial his number, quickly putting on my climbing shoes and tying my chalk bag around my waist.