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up on your wall, and I want you to study it night and day. When I see you again next Saturday, I want to see your leg at the exact same angle as Brooke’s. Remember your butt. And really take a close look at how she’s got her fingers splayed behind her and the way her eyebrow is cocked just so.” He cocked his eyebrow just so. “If you spend a good couple of hours a day, I don’t see any reason why you can’t master that pose. I really think you can do it.”
    “Okay, I will,” I said, trying to sound optimistic, trying to hide my doubts.
    Phillip playfully socked me on the shoulder. “You can do it, sport.”
    And for the first time in my life, I knew how it must feel to be a valued member of the football team.
     
    In my own defense, modeling school hadn’t been my idea. It was my mother’s friend Suzette’s. “Jesus, just look at him! He’sgorgeous! He’s so tall . . . and that hair! What magazine wouldn’t snatch him right up!”
    I was tall, skinny, and had thick, wavy blond hair: all the qualities that ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the female population equate with beauty. To Suzette, modeling school made perfect sense. Especially considering I had dropped completely out of normal school and had seen Brooke Shields in
The Blue Lagoon
six times.
    But my mother wasn’t as enthusiastic. “I’m just not sure, Suzette. I mean, that sounds awfully expensive. And we just don’t have the money. Augusten’s son-of-a-bitch father has really cut us off financially.”
    Suzette said, “I’ll pay!” Which was the only argument my mother ever needed on any topic in order to be swayed.
    “Oh, Suzette,” my mother dripped with polished gratitude. “That would be such a wonderful, supportive act of love.” I’d heard her say the exact same thing to people who had offered to pay her car insurance, rub her feet, or sneak a Frida Kahlo print into whatever mental hospital she was occupying at the time.
    The next month, I was enrolled in my first class.
    Of course, I’d seen the famous Barbizon ads in the backs of magazines for years. They were small black-and-white ads, featuring a handsome square-faced man with the headline “T RAIN TO B E A M ODEL . . . OR J UST L OOK L IKE O NE !”
    And while it’s true that I was obsessed with my hair, with all things vapid or flashy, and with celebrity in general, I’d never considered a career in modeling.
    That all changed the moment I saw the glamorous offices of the Barbizon School. I was convinced.
This is me. I was born to be a top male model
.
    The Barbizon School was located in a strip mall in Springfield, Massachusetts, tucked between a Radio Shack and a clothing store for plus-size women. When you stepped through those doors, you left the world of weak chins and superfluous hair behind.Smoky mirrors covered the walls, and a mauve sectional sofa created an intimate conversation pit. Framed photographs of Barbizon success stories lined the walls: a woman in a newspaper ad for JC Penney, a Sears print ad featuring a man in a kelly green Izod. In one ad for a tampon, an attractive teenage girl addressed her mother with the headline “Will I still be a virgin?”
    Junior high school, with its drab cinderblock walls and flat black chalkboards, simply couldn’t compare. Suddenly, it made perfect cosmic sense that I had dropped out. This was my destiny. This was my calling.
    “This is a cuticle pusher,” Sharon explained to the class. “Never, never, never cut your cuticles. Moisten them first, really get the skin soft. And then push them back with this little stick.”
    We were in manicure and makeup class, a required course even for the men.
    At first I thought this was silly. Makeup for men?
    “I’m telling you,” Sharon said. “Nine times out of ten when you go on a black-and-white shoot, you’ll be doing your own makeup.” She turned to the men. “You’ll be darkening your razor stubble, bringing out your bone structure. You’ll be hiding those