Glitter on the Web (2 page)

Eli noted how this audience instantly idolized Jace, to the point he became an unintentional rock star and sex symbol selling millions of songs overnight, as well as selling out venues all over the world. This guy went from relative obscurity to beloved idol in a scant few months, which was all Eli had ever wanted to do.

He realized that there was a hidden benefit playing up to the ordinary girls, the forgotten girls, the wallflowers of society; something he had never considered before. So Eli did what any market-savvy entrepreneur would do. He lined up all of these potential groupies, to literally give Jace a run for his money. He penned his first hit, “Big Girl/Big Heart” over one long, sleepless night, and had a video within the week. He charmed the pants off of a crowd of larger women to participate in the video, where he was the hero dating them all to find “The One.”

Of course he picked the thinnest of the big girls, but whatever.

He then crafted his public persona to be the kind of guy who courted all the lonely girls by being their biggest cheerleader. He told each and every one of them they were beautiful in their own ways and if the guys couldn’t see it, it was their loss.

And I mean this literally. He
literally
told each and every one of them these things. He publicly answered every single girl who reached out to him in those early days, with encouraging messages peppered with terms of endearments sure to get their hearts racing. He quickly became the man behind the curtain of social media. His alter ego, @Eli_Blake_Music, said whatever needed to be said so that every forgotten girl could feel empowered and important.

He was like a virtual cat poster for the downtrodden, doling out platitudes 140 characters at a time. His followers grew by the day. Pretty soon
he
was the one selling out venues all over Los Angeles. His new fans came out to see him in droves. He sold out all of his independently produced CDs as all his new fans went rabid to support him in the same way they felt he supported them. His video went viral, featured on talk shows like
Dixie
, which was hosted by a big girl herself. She delighted in this tasty little morsel giving all the big girls the love she knew they deserved.

People were so hungry for his message that it didn’t matter the only place he was ever seen with a big girl actually on his arm was in a video. They believed what they wanted to believe.

And they believed Eli Blake was a romantic hero who could actually fall in love with them, no matter how they looked.

Within three months he was signed on with Graham Baxter andBaxter Mega-Worldwide Media Corporation, the same label as Jordi and Jace. Pretty soon he was everywhere. As he got more famous, he dated models and actresses, the kinds of girls you’d expect to see on a famous singer’s arm.

Of course he’d been asked about it in more than one interview, but he had a standard answer down pat. “I’m not the one who is concerned about what size they are, man. You’re the one writing the questions.”

He would go on to say he hadn’t met The One yet, and he was just having fun dating all different types of people. He dated girls every color of the rainbow, young and old, from all walks of life. It wasn’t
his
fault they were all 110 pounds or less. If pressed about that, he’d turn it into an indictment on the industry. He was so busy with the music that the only people he met were people who were already famous like he was, and the gatekeepers had made damn sure no girls of size were welcome.

For the few girls that were, like Jordi for instance, they were already taken.

Of course, he met girls of size all the time when he’d do Meet & Greets after every show, but he had a Get-Out-of-Jail free card for that, too. “I don’t date fans. It never works out well. You start a relationship with someone who already knows everything there is to know about you, and cares much more about you than you could possibly care about them, because you just met them. It’s unbalanced from the start, and people just get hurt. I respect them too much to hurt them.”

Girls ate it up by the second, even though it was supposed to keep the red velvet rope between them so they could never get as close as they wanted to get. Nothing stopped his fans from thinking they could be The One if they were just persistent enough, and everything about his spiel was designed to make them think it was possible.

He
wanted
a big girl to love, after all. And with dozens of failed relationships with thin women littering his past, it was an easy fairy tale to believe that was exactly what he was holding out for.

They kept him trending on social media, his biggest army of support whenever he lifted a finger. If anyone had a bad thing to say about him, they’d turn on them like a pack of rabid wolverines, determined to protect their special little snowflake because he wasn’t like every other guy.

It’s amazing what people believe if they really, really want to.

While all my friends back home in Texas were swooning over the man, who seemed to get even more attractive the more he publicly wooed atypical ladies, I suspected he was completely full of shit. Part of that was my own past experience. I had come to learn that the more someone poured on the charm, the less I believed them.

The other part was that I was a bigger girl myself. Technically speaking I was just north of “average,” if you consider that the average American woman is 5’4”, 140 pounds and a size 12/14. I was 5’7, 162 pounds and a size 14/16, depending on where I shopped. I really didn’t get hung up on that stuff. I couldn’t. I’d rather be comfortable in a size-16 than squeeze into a tight 14, just to fool myself into this illusion smaller made me better, even by a smidge. I had already learned the hard way what a dangerous mindset that was, setting me up for a lifetime of feeling like I needed to change to be acceptable.

It was a complete waste of time, considering most of the people who needed me to change to accept me didn’t give a shit about me anyway.

That was another hard lesson learned.

My hourglass figure had a few more minutes in it than average, measuring in at 42/34/42 since I was about eighteen. According to the BMI chart, I had just barely tipped over into the “overweight” category, but I had had my share of people calling me fat since elementary school so I didn’t need the stupid calculator for that. The world around me made sure I knew, like it was their duty or something, like I wouldn’t know otherwise, or worse—as if it was my job to make myself as attractive as possible for them, and if they couldn’t look any deeper it was really my fault.

It was a misogynist pile of crap, and I wasn’t buying. I suspected almost immediately that Eli Blake was one of those people, so I wasn’t buying his pack of bullshit
either.

After I moved to L.A. and started working for his brand new agent, Frank Abruzzo, I learned what kind of guy he was for a fact. My very first day on the job, Eli came into the office, his newest (size-0) girlfriend hanging off of his arm like an accessory. He looked me up and down exactly once before he dismissed me entirely like some kind of flunky who was beneath him. Before I could ponder if it was my station itself that made him so dismissive, he turned his attention to the 20-year-old mailroom girl who could do nothing for him except fill out a pair of size-2 jeans, and turned on the charm so thick I thought I might choke on it.

That was bad enough, but when you’re a size-16, you get used to that stuff. That’s how you can sniff out the phonies a mile away.

But what really made Eli Blake the biggest asshole I had ever met was when he dared to treat his fans this way if they wanted to get close to him. These are the people who loved him most and loved him best, the ones he had shamelessly courted. He wouldn’t even have a career it weren’t for them. I have had the unfortunate displeasure of watching excited young women of varying sizes clamor to meet him, only to get the same cold shoulder I did, rejected however subtly for someone who was thinner and prettier than they were, usually the thin sisters or friends they had dragged along to meet him, who fell for his shtick even when he was right in front of them, doing what every other self-involved douche bag had ever done.

Yet they walked away defeated, as if there was something wrong with them. Eli made his career crooning to big girls, so if you were fat and he still rejected you that meant there was something fundamentally wrong with you as a person.

Needless to say, I had no use for the man.

Well, that’s not exactly true. I worked for his agent and, as such, was responsible for maintaining his public persona whether I liked it or not. Eli Blake was one of the biggest stars on Frank’s roster, and one of the reasons we were having such a kickass year. This meant I had been working with him, talking to him and thinking about him every day of every week of every month I’d had my job. I was paid a few bucks above minimum wage to keep his public persona sparkling, and I earned every dime I made twice. Smoke and mirrors was all part of the PR game, and I was damned good at my job.

I was even more talented not kneeing the jerk in his balls every time I had the dishonor of being in his company.

It was this patience I summoned when Eli came into the office that afternoon, his new girlfriend, Rhonda Esposito, in tow.

Like Eli, Rhonda was a pop star on the rise. This petite, fiery Latina was feisty and outspoken, with a fearless sexuality that dared anyone to slut-shame her for, dare I say it, living her life like a man. She sang about sex almost exclusively, turning grown men into slobbering adolescents whenever she flashed some skin, which, again, she did almost exclusively. Talk about booty, that girl had an ass that wouldn’t quit. And she knew how to shake it better than anyone I had ever seen.

So of course they’d end up together. Why not?

Things had heated up so quickly that she had moved into his house in Malibu that previous week. From the string of Spanish she aimed at him just like a machine gun as they walked into the office, however, I suspected that it wasn’t going so well.

I mean, I didn’t know Spanish beyond what I had to learn in high school for a foreign language requirement, but “
bastardo
” was fairly easy to translate.

“Jesus Christ, Rhonda,” he finally exploded. “It was just a bird.”

One hand went on her hip while the other hand waved a finger right in his face. Her English was as rapid-fire as her Spanish. “Oh, no, no, no, no. You don’t get to say that, okay? I gave up everything to move in with you. The only thing I kept that meant anything to me was that fucking bird. I’m allergic to cats, but do you get rid of your precious Beau Jangles? No. I have to take a pill. I have to make all the changes and take all the losses. It is not
just a bird
.”

He wasn’t chagrined in the least. “I have twenty bucks in my pocket. I’ll buy you another parakeet. Just shut the fuck up about it already. Your bitching won’t bring Rosie back, for fuck’s sake.”

It was the wrong thing to say.

“My bitching? My
bitching
?” she repeated, her eyes narrowing into such small slits I suspected that a laser might emit right from her stare and disintegrate him on the spot. Another string of Spanish words followed, spoken much too fast for a non-speaker like me to follow, though I suspected the word “
puto
” wasn’t meant to be flattering.

It caused such a ruckus that the whole office came to see what was going on. Julie Russo, the aforementioned 20-year-old mailroom clerk, took one look at the fracas, then another look at me, and withdrew a twenty from her pocket to hand to me.

I was 5-and-0 predicting Eli’s “love” life, winning every office pool for the entire seven months I’d worked for Frank. It had even earned me the title of OGWO around the office, an acronym that stood for Oh Great Wise One. Most didn’t even bother challenging me anymore, but Julie was young and endlessly optimistic. She so wanted to see the best in Eli, despite my telling her—daily—there wasn’t any.

Frank eventually emerged from his office. “What the hell is going on out here?”

His demand unleashed a torrent of angry Spanglish from Rhonda, as well as pathetic mansplaining from Eli. Finally Frank raised his hands to shut them both up, which it did. He processed all the information before he turned to Rhonda. “So what do you want me to do about it? He offered to buy you a new bird.”

Her jaw dropped, and more angry Spanish poured from her mouth before she spun around on her heel and stomped out of the office. Frank glanced at Eli. “Where you just bored this morning, Eli?”

“It’s not my fault,” Eli repeated. “It was a bird. Beau’s a cat. You can’t fight biology. And besides, it wasn’t like Beau killed her the first time she escaped from the cage. We did everything to keep her safe, even putting her in a guest bedroom. She managed to open the cage, scoot out from under the door and take a walk on the wild side anyway. Gives me new appreciation for the term ‘bird-brained.’”

“I’m familiar with the concept,” Frank growled as he glared at him. “I told you not to move her into your house. Hell, I told you not to get into a new relationship at all. It causes too much negative attention. I can’t keep explaining why you pick the women you do, while singing the songs you’ve written. I’m getting letters from feminists, Eli,” he said. “
Feminists
.”

“Rhonda happens to embody female empowerment,” Eli shot back.

“Rhonda is a nineteen-year-old shaking her rump roast for cash. What is wrong with you?”

Eli bestowed that aggravating smirk of his. “I already told you. Can’t fight biology.”

Before Frank could reply, a stapler went whizzing past the both of them and smashed into the wall behind them. Everyone turned to see Rhonda, who had stomped back in as angrily as she stomped out. She grabbed whatever loose thing she could nab from a desk and threw it at the two men in the office.

Normally I was all about girl power, but that tablet she threw next got a little too close for comfort. Julie and I dove under my desk for cover, where my young coworker dug out another twenty to hand to me.