The Luckiest Girls

By Nathalie van Walsum Fuson

Thousands of girls apply to join the famous Towers Model Agency every year, but super-agent Gigi Towers selects only a half dozen girls — the very luckiest — to live with her as she develops them for stardom. Enter Jane, Gigi’s plain and orphaned fifteen-year-old granddaughter, who would give anything to trade places with the g

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nathalie van Walsum Fuson
• Release date: May 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733717311

Book preview

1

Jane

I’ve read the Vanity Fair article about Gigi Towers so many times that the pages of my decade-old copy have come loose at the spine. It describes how Gigi made the Towers Agency the most famous modeling agency in the world, and how, of the thousands of girls who apply to join the agency every year, less than one percent make the cut. Of these, Gigi selects a handful of girls — the very luckiest — to live in her house as she grooms them for stardom. The article calls Gigi the young models’ fairy godmother, and it tells how she just loves these girls that she takes under her wings so much, they’re like her babies or something and she would do anything for them. That’s the best part of the article, the absolute punchline, because there is only one teenage girl who can actually claim her as a grandmother and whom she should have some personal interest in, and that’s me. And Gigi is more interested in her cat than she is in me. But then her cat is actually pretty. 

Making a Graceful Entrance

Do not rush into an event but enter gracefully, carrying yourself with poise and confidence. Smile, and introduce yourself with the firm knowledge that, no matter where you are, you have the right to be there and you are exactly where you belong. - From Living a Model Life: Beauty and Style Tips from Gigi Towers by Gigi Towers.

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It’s pouring with icy rain when the taxi cab drops me in front of the brownstone house in Greenwich Village, and by the time I drag my suitcase up the front steps I’m sopping wet, my hair plastered across my face. I ring the doorbell several times before a tall and totally stunning blonde opens it. She stares at me with open-mouthed bewilderment, blinks her saucer-like blue eyes and says, I think you’re at the wrong place. This is Gigi Towers’ house.

I know, I reply, shivering.

She looks at my suitcase in disbelief. Are you one of Gigi’s girls?

Yup. I’m Jane. She’s obviously not going to invite me in so I haul my suitcase into the foyer, no help from her. 

Campbell, who’s that? A pair of long legs descend the stairs, topped by a small-waisted torso and an exquisite face under a curtain of silky straight jet-black hair.

This is Jane. She’s one of the new models.

There’s a short pause. Are you sure about that? the other girl whispers to Campbell out of the side of her mouth.

That’s what she said, Campbell hisses back. 

No, I didn’t, I interject. I said I was one of Gigi’s girls. I am. I’m her granddaughter.

I can read their little minds: How did Gigi produce that? Then the second girl laughs and extends her hand. Hi, Jane. I’m Ling Wei. Please excuse Campbell, she’s an idiot, it’s very sad.

I’m not sure if Ling’s joking or not. Campbell just keeps smiling, so maybe Ling’s right. I wriggle out of my jacket and shake rainwater from my hair like a shaggy dog, and the girls take a step back.

Gigi said you wouldn’t be here until next week, though. Sorry about your dad, Ling adds, wiping water droplets from her shirt.

What about her dad? Campbell asks. 

Ling rolls her eyes and gives Campbell an exasperated look. 

"You know, Steven Archer? The artist who was married to Gigi’s daughter? He DIED, Campbell. Remember when Gigi went to the funeral in Colorado? It was even in the New York Times. Like you ever read the New York Times."

Oh, yeah, he was in a helicopter accident. It crashed into the side of a mountain, right? Campbell catches my eye. Oh…sorry. Welp, I’m late. Hey, did you let your car go? Damn. Now I have to call one.

It takes me a second to find my voice.

Maybe you know where I’m supposed to take my suitcase, I say to Ling, who seems like the smarter one of the pair.

"I don’t know. I guess the single room on the third floor, Ling shrugs. Margo would know. She’s the housekeeper but she’s out. Campbell and Maya are in the third floor double, and Brigitte and Isabel and I are on the fourth floor." 

I proceed to drag my bag upstairs. I was hoping one of them would give me a hand but I wouldn’t want them to break a nail or something. Although Campbell does offer some helpful advice in the form of Be careful not to scuff the walls or Gigi will kill you.

On the third floor there’s a small room to the left, decorated in white and pale blue. I kick off my wet boots and pull some dry clothes out of my suitcase. But right after I’ve changed into a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt I hear the front door slam all the way downstairs and a very agitated voice rising from the stairwell. Stomp stomp stomp, up the stairs come heavy footsteps.

"Ah mon dieu! shrieks  a stocky middle-aged woman whom I assume is Margo, and who stands in the doorway staring at me with, I kid you not, terror, clutching her chest. You are TOO EARLY! It is not possible!"

Of course it’s possible because here I am but I am not about to argue with this woman who is now clapping her hands at my suitcase like it’s a misbehaving dog or something. 

"Non. Do not unpack. This room is for Sophia Thompson," she snaps.

Even I know who Sophia Thompson is. She’s on the cover of this month’s Seventeen Magazine with a story about her career’s meteoric rise. I hate that expression, meteoric rise. Meteors fall. Everybody knows that.

As I shove things back into my suitcase she starts jabbing at her cell phone. Oh, what to tell Gigi? She turns away, speaking in rapid French, then silence as she listens. "Oui, one moment," she says, and thrusts the phone toward me.  

Hello? I say.

You are a week early, says a cold, clearly pissed-off voice. The house is full, Sophia is arriving on Friday, and Isabel doesn’t leave until next week. I don’t know why you aren’t in Denver where you’re supposed to be, but as it turns out Brigitte just got a booking in Miami so there’s a bed available. We’ll put you there for now.

It takes me a full minute to realize who I’m speaking with.

Is this Gigi?

Of course this is Gigi. I wasn’t expecting you until next week or I would have sent a car for you at the airport.

A car. How thoughtful. I thought a living breathing grandmother meeting me at the airport would have been nice, but now I realize maybe not.

Oh, hey, Gigi, it’s so nice to hear your voice, I say, giving myself huge props for keeping my sarcasm in check. I’ve really been looking forward to this. The last time was a little uncomfortable, what with the funeral and all…

I don’t have time for this, Jane. Three of my models are double booked, two of my bookers have the flu, I’m leaving for Los Angeles tomorrow night, and New York Fashion Week is right around the corner. You couldn’t have arrived at a worse time. I thought you were staying with your father’s girlfriend until next week.

Gigi doesn’t even refer to Dad’s girlfriend by name, which is Melissa. Melissa is a dancer. Actually, she’s a waitress who teaches belly-dancing on the side. She and I were never close, but we tolerated each other for Dad’s sake. I think we resented each other because we always competed for Dad’s attention.  Well, we both lost that battle. Dad only loved one thing in the world, and that was painting. He painted obsessively, gripped by painting binges that lasted for days from which he emerged so physically and emotionally drained that he slept like the dead afterwards, leaving me and Melissa to tiptoe around each other like a pair of territorial cats. After the funeral, when I overheard Melissa on the phone saying that she couldn’t wait till I was gone so she could get on with healing her life, I decided to split.  I didn’t warn Gigi that I was coming earlier because I was terrified that she would tell me not to, so I changed my ticket myself and got on the next plane to New York.  I desperately want to tell Gigi all these things, but when the realization hits me that I’m speaking with my only living relative left in the world, a huge lump forms in my throat and I don’t trust myself to answer without my voice breaking. I hand the phone back to Margo. 

"Oui, oui, hokay, says Margo. She gets off the phone. The fourth floor," she says, pointing to the stairs.  She tries to help me with my suitcase, but I block her with my body and keep my back to her. I am not going to let these bitches see me cry.

I stash my suitcase in a corner of the small single bedroom decorated with yellow chintz curtains and matching bedspread, while navigating around Brigitte, this six-foot-tall blonde Viking who just emerged from the shower and stands totally naked rummaging through the closet and moaning that she doesn’t know what to pack for Miami since she only has winter clothes.

All you need is a toothbrush, Ling says. You won’t be dressed half the time anyway.

No kidding. Brigitte walks around the fourth floor hall naked, she brushes her teeth naked, and when I try to put my clothes in one of the drawers she stands naked, one hand propped on the dresser, blocking me.

Are you looking at my boobs? she asks me. Her breasts are at my eye level so it’s a bit hard not to look at them, especially because the view anywhere else is no less awkward.

Do you want me to? I answer.

Aren’t they nice? Do you want to touch them?

Not at all, thank you.

GOD, Brigitte, yells Isabel, a dark-haired Brazilian girl with bottle-green eyes. SHUT UP about your damn BOOBS already!

Seriously, adds Ling from Isabel’s room. Nobody cares! Ignore her, Jane. 

Brigitte smiles at me and moves aside. I roll my eyes to show her I’m not impressed.  She flops naked on her bed, which is now technically my bed. I take my toiletries to the bathroom where I root through the cabinet, pushing aside a mountain of beauty products to find a small corner for my own toothbrush and zit cream. Then I peek into the double room where Ling and Isabel are. Like my room, the decor is feminine and luxurious while at the same time eerily impersonal, kind of like the inside of a dollhouse. The walls are apple-green and the curtains and bedspreads have a green-and-pink floral motif, and the rug in the center of the room is pink. Ling and Isabel lie on their stomachs on the floor, watching videos on a laptop. 

Brigitte, finally dressed, is ready to leave for the airport. 

I’ll move my clothes out myself when I get back, she says, touching up her lipstick in the hallway mirror. Don’t touch my stuff. She punctuates by capping the tube, then throws in into her bag. With a little wave she flounces down the stairs.

Brigitte is kind of terrifying, but I’m not about to let some psycho model intimidate me, and I don’t want to live out of a suitcase so I remove all her clothes from the dresser, stack them on the floor of the closet and unpack my things. Not that I brought very much. Almost everything from Dad’s house, including most of my clothes and books, is in storage in Denver.

I never gave much thought to my looks, in the same way that I never gave much thought to the fact that I don’t play the zydeco or speak Vietnamese. But in the couple of hours since I’ve been here I feel like one of those little plastic troll dolls in a display case full of Barbie dolls. If I ever make it past 5’2" that would be nice, but I read somewhere that by the time girls are fifteen they’ve reached their full height so I’m not counting on it. I don’t have a curve to speak of and last summer I cut my hair really short, which I regretted after about a week so now I’m trying to grow it out and it’s at some weird in-between stage where it sticks out all over my head. It’s the color of wet sand or tree bark, neither brown nor blond nor beige. In sixth grade a boy told me I look like E.T. so I guess that’s what I look like: E.T. with hair the color of nothing.  

After I’ve unpacked I find Isabel, Ling and Campbell (back from her appointment) in the TV room on the third floor, looking like the mermaids in an illustration from a vintage edition of Peter Pan I once owned. I wonder how much they know about my relationship with Gigi. I don’t know if they realize that I’ve only seen Gigi a handful of times in my life, and that Gigi had no contact with my dad after the car accident that killed my mom when I was four. I don’t know if they’re aware that Gigi and my mom weren’t even speaking by then, a rift that dated back to Mom getting pregnant by an art school punk and then dropping out of Barnard College, and probably a lot earlier. I do know that they have no idea that I’ve  saved every article about Gigi ever written, that I’ve seen every interview she’s ever given, that I’ve bought and read all her books. They have no idea that I’ve gazed at photographs of Gigi with her perfect girls lounging at her feet and wished them all gone, myself in their place, with Gigi at my side, literally and figuratively.  But from the reception I’m getting from the girls, it looks like Gigi hasn’t talked about me at all. 

Campbell sits on the sofa with her legs tucked under her, stroking Gigi’s white Persian cat, Dovima, who glares at me through half-closed green eyes. Make sure you keep your room and the bathroom super clean, because sometimes Gigi checks, Campbell advises me. And Margo reports back to Gigi about everything she sees and hears so watch your step when she’s around.

 And stay out of the kitchen when Betty’s there, Isabel adds, lying in a yoga pose with her legs straight up against the wall. She’s the cook, and she doesn’t like any of us.

Just then Maya arrives from a photo shoot, in full makeup, looking like an extragalactic princess. She walks like a dancer, and her luminescent makeup makes her brown skin shine like bronze. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so striking up close in my life. Maya goes upstairs to shower, and when she comes back twenty minutes later, her face clean and her hair damp and curly, she looks so young and natural that it takes me a moment to realize she’s the same person. As she sits on the floor and massages lotion into her hands and feet she tells us about her shoot.

"So they had this security guy there to guard the jewelry because we were shooting these beautiful diamonds from Bulgari —have you ever seen a pink diamond? I wore one in a ring and it was this big —  and this guy, he was such a little pervert, he kept poking his head into the dressing room while we were changing, even though we’d already given him our jewels back, so this Ukranian model, Oksana — right, the one who does J. Crew —  she’s standing there in her underwear and she sees this nasty horn dog watching us from the doorway, and she picks up a shoe and just clocks him, right in the forehead, with the heel, so now he’s bleeding all over the place from this gash in his head."

I really want to hear the rest of this story because holy cow, but then Margo appears in the doorway. 

Jane, Gigi is on her way, Margo says, motioning me to join her. Please wait for her in the living room. She brings me to the second floor living room and leaves me there. 

The room is something straight out of Architectural Digest (literally, I mean it was actually featured in Architectural Digest a few years ago) with a thirteen-foot ceiling, dove-grey walls and white plaster moldings. A nineteenth-century French landscape oil painting hangs over the fireplace, and photographs in silver frames adorn the end tables. I wander the room, getting a feel for my new home. There’s the photo of Gigi taken by Annie Leibowitz for Vanity Fair, and another one of Gigi on the cover of Vogue. And there, almost hidden behind another frame, is a black-and-white picture of a young girl on a swing. My mother, Victoria. 

I pick up the frame and examine the picture closely. I’ve always thought I looked like Dad, with the same grey-blue eyes and wide mouth. But in this picture I can see how much of my mother there is in me. I have her eyebrows, straight and dark, and her hair, pulled back in a ponytail, reveals the same forehead and hairline as mine. 

Just as I lean forward to replace the frame Gigi strides into the room, and with a start I straighten up and drop the picture. With a crash it knocks over the other pictures on the table, and as I scramble to set everything upright again I see that the glass on my mother’s picture has cracked.

Jane, Gigi says. Well.

She’s dressed in a cape and tall black boots, and her hair is snow white, cut in a chic bob, curling under at the ends and showing off her long neck. You can see immediately why Gigi once used to be a model in her own right, before she left her agency taking a handful of their models with her, and opened up her own agency to become the best agent in the business. I meet her in the center of the room, still clutching my mother’s picture. I feel like I should hug Gigi, but we never hugged any of the previous times we met, and now I don’t know what to do. When I saw her at Dad’s funeral we barely spoke to each other. Gigi places her hands on my upper arms and gives me a small squeeze which doesn’t quite pass for a hug and kisses the air above each cheek. She takes the picture out of my hands and places it on a side table without giving it a glance.

Come, sit down, she says as she removes her cape and places it on the sofa beside her. She wears a pencil skirt and a black cashmere sweater and she sits with her ankles crossed, her back straight. I catch myself doing the same thing, squirming and crossing and uncrossing my ankles until she places a hand firmly on my knee, and I stop instantly.

Have you found your room? Are you comfortable? she asks. I assure her I am. Good. We have a lot of catching up to do, but unfortunately this is a very busy time for me. I have to go right out again after dinner.

If the disappointment shows on my face, Gigi doesn’t notice.

You’ll start school on Monday. You’re very lucky that they’re able to take you. Egleston has a long waiting list, but your grades are excellent and your teachers sent very good recommendations. Fortunately you’re a bright girl. At least there’s that. The unspoken thought hangs in the air.

I’ve never transferred to a new school before. I’m a little nervous.

It’s just for a few months, anyway, until the end of the semester.

You mean I’ll go to a different school in the fall? 

Gigi takes a breath.

We don’t need to decide anything right away, she continues. But everything has happened so fast. I think we should view this as a trial period for both of us. 

I feel the floor rock beneath me. 

I thought I was coming to live with you permanently, I say. I thought that you had custody of me now.

I do. I am responsible for all the decisions regarding your education and upbringing. One of those decisions is whether you wouldn’t be better suited going to boarding school. After all, I’m very busy running the agency and I travel constantly…

Gigi’s words turn into a dull roar in my head. This isn’t my new home, I realize. This is a