6“Think of me as your father,” the model agent said. “You have to tell me everything.”
Ava Germaine bit her chipped glittery pink nails. She was eleven years old.
It was 2006. Thirteen years before she would walk onto the Visage runway wearing a skin coat.
Andre Blancas’s office was rigged like a theater stage, lacking windows but sweltering under the stage lights above. A cube so small a model could spread her arms and touch both walls. The model agent was a kind of vampire who outfitted its coffin with blinding light, a Polaroid camera, and twelve-year-old girls.
Ava covered her eyes from the blinding stage light, hands trembling. “Ugh…I killed my hamster.”
“Not what I meant.”
“I’m really sad… See, it’s about Mr. Puffles. So, I snuck him into my bunk. Because…you know how sometimes
