The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

emotive pout. Cheekbones a high arch. If anyone had ever bothered to use digital calipers they would have discovered that Carmen has perfect bilateral facial symmetry, as in completely zero fluctuating asymmetry within human measurement error, and that additionally her features are perfectly proportioned; that the distance between her pupils is exactly half the distance between her ears, that the distance between her eyes and mouth is exactly one-third the distance from her hairline to her chin. You’d have to do an MRI to find any asymmetries in Carmen, and that would only be a minor differential in the thickness of her sternomastoid muscles, due to tilting her head to the left when listening. To this day Carmen has never found out exactly how much money her mother made from the gigs, but occasionally a magazine, like J-14 or Teen Ink, would arrive at the house, and there it would be on some glossy page—her face. At school she tried her best to hide what she thought of as her second life, and in turn her secrecy was interpreted as pride. Her mother, in contrast, would frame at least one image from every shoot, hanging them all, dozens of them, until eventually they filled up the entire wall by the staircase. And a teenage Carmen would ascend past them to her room and put on loud music and read The Picture of Dorian Gray . . .

At the end of high school the compromise had been this: Carmen was allowed to major in a hard science rather than fashion or business, and her tuition would be paid for, but she must go to college in New York City, with official representation through an agency. And so at eighteen, having fitted meetings with IMG and Elite between campus tours, Carmen had moved to the city to attend Columbia University and study neuroscience. In addition to a full course load, to comply with her mother’s demands Carmen was working as many shoots as IMG could book. Once she actually started getting her own paycheck from the work, she was making more money in a month than in a year of being a part-time barista or work-study assistant like some of the other girls she knew. But friends at Columbia were impossible to find. As a part-time technician she stood out from the other members of the lab like a single masterwork sculpture among a lumpy amateur gallery. An Ivy League student, a scientist with a modeling job, sometimes she could almost hear the sharpening of the nails of other women. Her sophomore year she cried nearly every afternoon after classes, an infinite pit of loneliness in her chest, followed by sitting with icepacks pressed up against her eyes to prevent puffiness so no one would know.

But it was not that she truly hated modeling, for she did find some solace in it. She enjoyed being a success at something, the busyness and rhythms of it all, and in the modeling world she wasn’t treated like a freak. She made sure to curb her vocabulary, eschewing and dissecting her speech prior to parties. Fashion magazines began to accumulate next to her collection of William and Henry James, and she was quick to develop the kind of high-end taste that impressed at meetings and photo shoots, which of course separated her even more from the sweatpants-wearing girls struggling to get by in the difficult neurobiology courses. Carmen, in an absurd balancing act of scheduling, would sit at the front of the class with her different colored pens and take notes in perfect handwriting. She read vignettes from Oliver Sacks to the makeup artists during shoot prep. She began attending show weeks and shoots in Europe and got used to studying textbooks in the back of the airplane next to the mephitic stench of the bathroom while the other models were nursing a bitchy hangover from alcohol and cocaine. Backstage at shows, the other girls called her “doctor” to her chagrin, even though the doctorate she was always talking about applying for would be in neuroscience or psychology, not medicine. Yet still they came to her with their problems; for cramps in their feet Carmen would prescribe them bananas for potassium, for headaches suggest that they stop staring at their iPhones 24/7, or buy a neck pillow to avoid sleeping wrong during flights.

Her senior year everything had come to a head. Once the fall fashion shows began everything became pressured, tightly wound. Abnormal Psychology was known as a GPA-buster, but Carmen had taken it anyway, and that fall the class was always the small thing making everything else impossible. She had been hectically absent for weeks, in Milan and Paris, then New York, then Milan and Paris again, transforming her life into a haze of emails to professors, of fitting into dresses, of sitting still while makeup was applied, of trying to find a place to print out case reports while tottering around in high heels on foreign streets in the liquid soup of foreign languages. In the back of the airplane the abnormal psych textbook pages blurred as she read about trichotillomania or pica or, with a grim survey of the other models, bulimia and anorexia. Her TA in Abnormal Psychology took pity on her. When she’d first seen him lounging at the front of the class she hadn’t given him a second thought—Josh was tall, with big ears and thick eyebrows, and he had a mild lisp when he spoke enthusiastically about schizotypal case studies, famous depressives, cognitive behavioral therapy. His TA hours at a coffee shop were sparsely attended, and one day Carmen just unloaded on him about how she wanted to apply to graduate school, the difficulties of modeling, being alone, everything. And Josh, the big-eared, smart, and kind goof that he was, had done his best to comfort this beautiful creature that had landed in his lap as neutrally as possible. Eventually she was coming to all his TA hours