Tweenager
By Hillary Flynn
Lilly pressed the button for apartment 5D and waited on the stoop as the buzzer rang. The blare was so loud she glanced down the street to see if anyone heard. None of the people walking down University Place paid attention to her. The women had headphones in their ears and iPods tucked into the pockets of their faux fur coats. They had on Marc Jacobs dresses, patterned stockings, and heeled boots. Lilly thought she looked perfect that morning when she got ready in front of her bedroom mirror. She’d turned in front of the glass admiring her low-cut jeans and tight pink sweater believing she looked as effortless as Mischa Barton’s character on The O.C. Now she felt like anyone walking down the streets of Greenwich Village could tell she didn’t belong.
She pressed her glossed lips together, debating whether to push the buzzer again. This was the time Carl told her to come to his studio for the photo shoot, but she didn’t want to annoy him by ringing his doorbell too many times. Lilly met him last week when she was walking around the Short Hills Mall with her two best friends after her shift at Abercrombie & Fitch. The Short Hills Mall was the nicer of the two malls near Lilly’s suburban New Jersey town. It had a J. Crew, a Nordstrom, and a Legal Seafood. The other mall had a Payless and a food court.
Lilly and her friends couldn’t afford to shop at most of the stores, so they simply strolled down the halls glancing at the window displays. Lilly’s friends weren’t talking much. She knew they were jealous that she had a job at Abercrombie, a store where only hot girls were allowed to work. Until last year Darlene was the prettiest of the three. But Lilly had her growth spurt and transformed into a leggy blonde. Now, at lunch, Lilly caught Darlene sneaking glances at her thighs before pushing her food away.
That day at the mall the girls wound up outside Victoria’s Secret, salivating over the bras decorated with bows and sequins.
“We can’t go in,” Lilly giggled. “It’s too embarrassing.”
What she really meant was how aroused she got in the store was too embarrassing. She always pictured herself in the lacy garments, wearing them like a secret underneath her ordinary school clothes. She had this recurring fantasy that a man would show up at her school and drag her out of her tenth grade English class in the middle of one of her teacher’s banal lectures. Her dream guy would drive her to Manhattan and book a room in one of the fancy hotels that Lilly’s mother called “obscene.” He’d throw her down on white linen sheets that smelled like the sea. Then he’d rip off her clothes and stare at her body wrapped in lacy red lingerie like she was a juicy steak.
“God, Lilly, don’t be so immature,” Darlene said. “I shop at Victoria’s Secret all the time. You will too, once you grow breasts.”
Recently Darlene brought up her C-cup breasts every chance she got. Lilly knew that it was because Darlene was threatened by her looks. If Darlene had a choice she would have picked Lilly’s lithe body over having boobs. This knowledge allowed Lilly to shrug off her comment and follow her into the store.
The entire place smelled like sugar cookies. It was almost Christmas and the store put small boxes of chocolate on each of the displays. Lilly let her fingers dance over the padded bras, lost in fantasy, when Carl approached her.
He wore ripped jeans and eyeliner. He looked like one of the guys in Fall Out Boy or Panic! At The Disco. He seemed like he went to underground concerts and called the Metropolitan Museum of Art “the Met.”
“Can you help me with something?” he asked.
“I don’t work here.”
“But you’re stylish. I’m visiting my girlfriend for the weekend at Farleigh Dickinson and wanted to get her a present.”
He called her “stylish” offhand, like it was a fact rather than an opinion. Lilly was worried she’d blush if she met his eyes, so she focused on the racks of bras trying to decide what his girlfriend would like. She was probably a sophisticated woman who only wore black and smoked herbal cigarettes. But Lilly’s hands were drawn to the lurid red sets. She pulled one off the rack and held it in front of her body.
“This is what I wear,” she said.
Carl gave her a slow smile that made Lilly feel like she’d taken a bite of a warm loaf of bread. He took the lingerie from her and went straight over to the counter.
Lilly and her friends continued roaming around the store. She kept replaying her and Carl’s interaction in her mind, wondering if she’d been too forward. She worried that he’d tell the story of the fifteen-year-old girl who tried to seduce him in a Victoria’s Secret to his girlfriend. They’d laugh about her while sipping red wine and listening to indie rock. Lilly felt like she was cradling a pool of mucus on her tongue trying to stop the sour saliva from slipping down her throat. She hoped her friends hadn’t seen.
They finished perusing the panty bins where you could buy five thongs for twenty-five dollars and were heading out the store when Carl found them. He didn’t run over to Lilly and grab her hand with desperation and need. He called out, “Hey,” and Lilly immediately turned toward him.
“You’re a model, right?” Carl’s lips were cocked up in a half smile. Lilly felt like he had sunk down to his knees, lifted her shirt, and kissed her stomach’s bare skin. She raised her chin and said, “Yes, I’m a model.”
“And you’re eighteen?”
Lilly blinked. “Of course.”
“Cool, great.” He felt around the pocket of his jeans, pulling out a card. Its edges were worn and there was a crease down the center. “I’m a photographer, we usually do shoots at my studio in Greenwich Village and we always need new girls. Have your agent contact me.”
She begged Darlene to call him that night pretending to be her agent and set up a photoshoot Tuesday morning of the following week. Lilly stole her older sister Gail’s driver’s license when she came home from Rutgers to do laundry that weekend. Gail spent an entire day storming around the house emptying dressers and closets, but Lilly didn’t speak up. She tucked the ID in the pages of her baby pink journal and looked at it at night after everyone went to sleep, hoping Carl would believe this was hers. She wanted to be a model more than she’d wanted to live in Southern California, own a Chanel purse, or have backstage tickets to a Maroon 5 concert. She wanted it more than food or love.
She shifted her weight as she stood on the doorstep of Carl’s Greenwich Village studio trying to warm her legs. The winter air felt like someone was stabbing her cheeks with a hundred small pins. Lilly couldn’t go back home without having done the photo shoot. Darlene would look at her across the lunch table like a dog that exposed the soft part of its belly. Lilly was five foot ten and weighed one hundred fifteen pounds. Modelling was her destiny.
She pressed the buzzer.
The ring sounded like a metal spoon going through a garbage disposal. Everyone on the street must be staring at her, a thousand eyes ready to judge her shoes, her shirt, and her soul. She was about to step away from the doorstep and run to the nearest subway when there was a click.
A groggy voice asked, “What?”
She’d been expecting Carl to tell her sorry, or to thank her for coming. He sighed from the other end of the intercom.
She stammered out, “It’s Gail, it’s me.”
“Gail?”
“From the mall.”
He probably met dozens of beautiful girls every day. He was a professional. Lilly was just happy he chose her.
“The blonde?”
“Yes. Yes!”
“C’mon up.”
The next ring sounded like a metal desk being dragged across a concrete floor. Lilly opened the door and saw there was another right behind it. She realized that it was only unlocked as long as the buzzer rang, so she rushed down the hall hoping to get it open in time. She just made it, pausing for a second to catch her breath at the bottom of Carl’s steps.
The staircase was covered in a dirty green carpet that reminded Lilly of dying moss. Lights like the kind that lit up movies about insane asylums hung from the ceilings. Lilly slowly headed up the groaning stairs to the fifth floor and opened the door to Carl’s hallway.
The walls were painted puke yellow and the entire space smelled like wet dogs and decay. Carl was an artist. They were notoriously underfunded until they hit it big. When Carl became famous maybe he’d remember how she stood by him during the tough times and book her for photo shoots with Louis Vuitton and Prada. Some of the doors in the building didn’t have official markers, just signs where someone hastily wrote “5B” and “5C” in blue ink.
Lilly raised a tentative hand in the air and knocked on Carl’s door. There was shuffling inside. He knew she was coming, she had just spoken to him downstairs. There was the sound of glasses clinked and a piece of furniture being moved. Lilly felt like her entire body had gone numb and was now waking up again.
Carl opened the door and stood in the entryway in plaid pajama shorts that dipped low on his hips. Lilly knew she should meet his eyes, but she kept staring at the trail of thick dark hair stretching from his navel to deep underneath the fabric of his pants.
“Hey there, you look great,” Carl said lazily, leaning against the left side of the doorway.
Behind Carl was a room with a messy bed against the far wall and a kitchen sink stacked with dirty dishes. It smelled like eggs and wet dish rags.
Carl let out a low laugh that made Lilly think of sleep and sex. “Yeah, I’m not into those staged photos where the models don’t look like actual people anymore. Candids are more my thing. Like true art, you know?”
“Yes.” She hoped she didn’t sound like she was in middle school.
The way he was looking at her made Lilly want to take off all her clothes and beg him to find her worthy. “Do you have your ID?”
She nodded and he told her to wait a second. He came back with a camera and told her to hold it steady in her hands. He took a shot of the front and back of the driver’s license.
“Great, c’mon inside.” He headed into the room.
Back when Lilly was in kindergarten she dreamed of being a princess. Not a real princess, but one from a Disney movie. She wanted to be like Mulan, earning people’s respect through her beauty and strength, or like Belle who seduced men with her looks and wit. Personality was important, but Lilly knew people only ever noticed your spunk if they decided you were pretty first.
Carl turned around and frowned at her. His eyeliner was smudged, making his eyes look sleep-hazed and warm. “You okay?”
Lilly gave him a smile she’d practiced in the mirror five times a day since he scouted her at the mall. She walked into the studio apartment and shut the door behind her.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Hillary Flynn is a writer living in South Carolina. She was a finalist for The Bellingham Review's Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction and Chautauqua Literary Art's Janus Emerging Writer's Prize. She was a semifinalist for American Short Fiction's Halifax Ranch Prize, and was longlisted for The Masters Review's Flash Fiction Contest. She was also long listed twice for Disquiet International's Literary Contest. Her work appears in Fjords, failbetter, TulipTree Review, and The Good Life Review.