Poser (3 page)
I imagined having to look straight into a camera and say stupid catchphrases like “Chewy, gooey goodness!” or “Betalax: for real relief you can trust” or “Bursting with berry, berry good taste!”
I could not bear it.
As I stumbled away on shaky legs, Macy grabbed my arm. She's got a grip like a linebacker.
“Hey, not so fast, buster!” she laughed. “You gotta look at my new promo stuff! C'mon.”
She dragged me over to the computer and pulled up her website. A creamy background displayed swirly purple lettering:
Models by Macy
. There was a glamorous picture of someone in the top corner.
I squinted at it. Was that supposed to be Macy? She was wearing a ton of makeup and looked about fifty pounds thinner. I guess it really was Macy, because underneath the photo, it said
Macy Spinelli, M.A., Professional Modeling Agent and Promoter.
“M.A.?” I asked. As far as I knew, Macy had barely finished high school.
“Modeling Agent,” Macy said over her shoulder. “You gotta have letters, otherwise people don't think you're legit. Wait a sec.” She clicked some more, pulling down the
Clients
menu.
“Now, it's not final yet. I'm just kind of drafting it up, but HEEEERE he is! Here's BEAUTY BOY!” she shouted.
There I was. A huge, fake-smiling portfolio picture introduced a long, glowing write-up of all my accomplishments. Everything. Even my winning the Eastside Mall Kutest Kid Kompetition when I was five. There were endless scroll-down pictures from what appeared to be every shoot I had ever done. Fake-laughing, fake-running, fake-pointing, I just kept on coming.
I closed my eyes long before we scrolled to the end and slid weakly to my knees beside the computer desk. Nobody noticed; Macy and Mom were busy pointing and reminiscing.
“Oh, remember that one? With that little train engineer's cap and the overalls? Sooo cute!”
“Here's BB looking all smarty-pants in glasses and a tie! The Serious Students campaign for
Know-It-All
magazine.”
And on and on and on.
I sat crumpled on the floor.
There I was. One Google search, and anyone could see me. Anyone. Like, for example, my entire grade-seven class at Leonard Petrew Junior High School. My friends, the kids in my class, my teachers, the class jerk.
Anyone
.
This was a full-scale disaster. I felt like sirens should be wailing and a SWAT team should be hammering on the door, bellowing through megaphones and swarming down the sides of the duplex.
They weren't.
It was quiet on Dead End Street.
Deathly, deathly quiet.
I TRY TO GET YOU ON MY SIDE EVEN THOUGH I SOUND KIND OF WHINY
I'm calmer now. I've thrown out my
Top Ten Things To Do To Stop Macy
list, which included running away and living in the school Dumpster, blowing up our computer (if baking soda and vinegar do the trick for science-project volcanoes, why wouldn't they work on a hard drive?) and catching a highly contagious, preferably disfiguring disease.
Nothing will work.
Nothing stops Macy. I should know.
So, Spin
, you say, trying to be nice even though you're confused and annoyed with me,
what's the big deal? Just tell them you don't want to model anymore. Get out of it. And shut up already.
Well,
I reply, trying to speak slowly and keep my slightly hysterical voice down,
thanks for your understanding and concern, but it's just not that simple.
Looking at it from your point of view, it must look weird. That's because it
is
weird. Only I didn't realize how weird it was until a few years ago.
It all started when I was six months old. Don't worry: I'm not going to give you a month-by-month summary of my life. Something important happened then.
Now, I know I said “nobody dies” right there in the first chapter of this book. I did not lie about that. But I meant all the people in the story who are currently alive. Living people. The thing is, when I was a baby my dad died in a car accident. It wasn't his fault. It was one of those accidents you read about in the newspapers. Those things actually happen to real, actual people, not just newspaper-headline people. It happened to him. It happened to us.
So maybe what I should have said was, nobody
else
dies. Guaranteed.
Now don't go thinking I'm getting all sad and serious on you here. I'm just explaining. I never knew my dad, although I've heard a lot about him from Mom and Macy. Judging from the stories, Barry Bryce Spinelli (BB for short, same as old Beauty Boy here) was quite a guy.
“Big BB was so happy! So much fun...” my mom says, her face lighting up.
“A walking teddy bear, God bless him,” Macy says. Weird to think that he was her little brother. I look quite a lot like my dad, apparently (although, as I've mentioned already, so does Macy, which is confusing and alarming).
The week after the accident, two things happened: Macy moved in with us to help Mom out, and my baby picture was picked from a ton of other cute-baby pictures sent in by parents (14,213, to be exact) to be on the first cover of
Baby Show
magazine. My dad took the picture. The story goes that he was lying on the floor playing with me, and he snapped a picture of me looking up, amazed, at a bird outside, a perfect drop of drool just falling from my smiling, toothless mouth. He couldn't have known what would happen because of that one picture.
Baby Show
started everything.
As a national US magazine, it was huge “exposure” for me, as we say in the business. The Dribbleez Diaper people saw it and contacted my mom about their new diaper campaign. I was the first Dribbleez Cute Patoot! Your parents might even remember me. Anyway, I was a happy, photogenic baby and the campaign was a big success.
Everything snowballed from there. It's amazing how many companies use babies in their ads. They're like cute, cuddly puppies and kittens, only human. My really fat face was everywhere. And I didn't only appear in ads for baby equipment and baby food. If a car company needed a cute baby for their minivan ad, I was the baby smiling in the car seat. If a flooring company needed a baby to crawl happily across discount carpet, I was that baby. I sold everything. Macy quit her job selling cars and became my full-time agent, selling me.
Mom and Macy threw themselves into my baby-modeling career. It was a whirlwind of bookings and shoots and travel. It became the biggest thing in our lives.
“You saved our lives, BB,” Macy once said when I was about ten and we were driving home from a shoot in Red Deer. “Your Mom and me were a total mess after Big BB died. It was so sudden, so senseless.” She shook her head, her eyes swimming with tears. “But there you were: beautiful, happy, full of life. Everyone loved you. A little gift from heaven, that's what you were.” She reached back and shook my shoulder affectionately. Until it hurt.
The craziness continued into toddlerhood. People love a chubby kid with a dimple and lots of curly dark hair. Especially if you put fake glasses on him! Then he's kind of adorably dorky too!
When I lost my two front teeth, I was solid gold, marketing-wise. Companies love a kid with missing front teeth for some reason. Is it cute or funny or what? I never figured that one out. All I know is that I was working so much I don't even remember kindergarten or grade one.
When I was little, modeling felt normal and (I'm trying to be honest here) even fun. It was exciting to be in modeling shoots and mall fashion shows. I got to go on planes. Everyone told me how cute I was. They smiled and applauded. I felt special and important. It was like playing dress-up every day.
Hey, I was four, okay? Then five and six...Then it didn't seem so fun. Macy and Mom were so busy and caught up in it that they assumed I was still enjoying it. But I kept noticing more and more that I was different from other kids. I was missing out on things. Other kids went to the movies and played hockey and soccer and went camping and rode their bikes all summer long.
Not me.
Modeling became a grind.
Think of it this way: if every Saturday for your whole life you have broccoli at dinner, you don't even think about it. It's just there, every Saturday, whether you want it or not and whether you like it or not. Pretty soon, broccoli comes to be a part of Saturdays, so you think it's
normal
. You think
everyone
has broccoli on Saturdays.
Then one day, maybe when you're twelve or so, you go over to a friend's house for dinner on Saturday, and they have pizza. And you realize, in a blinding flash, that not everyone has broccoli on Saturdays. It's just your family's version of normal.
(Not a bad little example, hey? For those of you who are wondering what the heck broccoli has to do with anything, broccoli = modeling, and pizza Saturdays = a normal life.)
How have I become almost professional at something I hate doing? It's very complicated, but modeling is really all I know how to do, and I've never had much of a say in it. Macy books the shoots, and I go and pose. End of story. Like I said, it's been happening my whole life. My modeling is also our main source of income. Mom works at a greeting-card store, but other than that, my modeling pays the bills. I don't see much of the money, but I hear I have a killer education fund.
So it's very, very hard to quit. Because it's not just about me. It's about Mom and Macy too. We're all in it. Modeling is still exciting and glamorous to them. They think I'm just one shoot away from a huge contract. They're
proud
of me.
I used to enjoy all the attention that modeling gets you. But I've never enjoyed the actual modeling. Well, once I had a shoot with eight puppies when I was about six years old, and I
loved
that, but that was the
puppies
, not the modeling. Some of the kids I model with, even the normalish ones, really, really
like
it. It matters to them. They talk seriously about their contracts and careers. They
want
their faces on the covers of magazines. They post songs on YouTube, just hoping to be discovered. They dream of big-time runway modeling in places like New York and Paris and Tokyo.
Me? Every shoot, I just want to get out of there. I can barely cope with how things are now, let alone doing
more
modeling, big-time modeling. Contracts? Career? I'm just happy to get some pizza. I'm not looking very far into the future.
But it's getting harder and harder to hide my modeling from everyone else. I lie my head off at school about the days I have to miss for modeling. Sure, Mom calls me in absent, but you have to say something when teachers or your friends ask you why.
I wrote the book on excuses. I've had every cold and flu that's gone around, and even a few tropical diseases. I've been hospitalized several times. I've been to more funerals than is normal for a kid my age. I've had a ton of dental work done, had sick pets and ailing relatives, you name it. Excuses R Us.
Seriously, think about it. Think about what my life would be like if it ever came out that after school and on weekends my main extracurricular activity was
modeling
. Not hockey or gaming or basketball or skateboarding. Modeling.
Yeah, junior-high-school guys would be really supportive and encouraging of that particular career path. Maybe they'd ask to learn a few poses and see my portfolio...or maybe my life would be over. I know for sure that Shay, the loudmouthed jerk in my class, would never,
ever
let me hear the end of it.
Or they might not even believe me, because I'm really just an average-looking guy. Biggish for my age and tending, let's be honest, toward chubbiness. Dark, curly hair, blue eyes. Looking in a mirror, I can see that I'm not an outrageously cute kid anymore. The older I get, the less adorable I become. This has probably been a good thing these last few years. The less adorable, the less in demand, despite Macy's feverish efforts. Maybe I'll have a really ugly adolescence. I can only hope.
Unfortunately, my portfolio makes me look like a movie star. Macy had it done professionally. Some of the photos in there are pretty good. I am photogenic. Some people are, some aren't. Even some really goodlooking people aren't photogenic. And some people you wouldn't notice are really photogenic. That's just part of the business.
Of course, my portfolio describes my
ebony curls, classical features and arrestingly deep-blue eyes
. I had nothing to do with that. That's pure Macy.
Portfolios never say
He's just an average, photogenic kid.
Who would buy that, even if it is the truth?
The problem is Macy. She's determined, this year, to bury me deeper and deeper, until I die of modeling. You have no idea how hard it is to stop Macy when she gets rolling on an idea. The woman is a human tank.
Put yourself in my shoes. Is it so wrong to want to be a normal almost-teenager? To goof around at school with my friends, drink soda, eat pizza and burgers, watch action movies and maybe play hockey (even though I'm no good)? Is it wrong to want to wear sweatpants and
not
have weekly haircuts? Is it wrong to wish a big fuss wasn't made over every pimple or extra pound?
You're thinking I'm being ridiculously dramatic. Am I?
AM I?
You're sitting there in your smug, non-modeling world shrugging your shoulders, reaching for a piece of pizza and thinking,
So, like I said, quit
.
Like
I
said, it's not that simple.
Look around you. See all those framed photos on the walls of our apartment? Mom and Macy wonder why I never have friends over. Aside from us almost never being home, I mean, look around: there are twelve years of framed photos of me lining the place, like wallpaper.
Twelve years.
My whole life so far. All caught on camera.
INTERRUPTION BY MACY #1
(the first of many)