Lola was born into a slender family who’d prefer children to learn the hard way. She wasn’t particularly quick to learn or motivated, and she got through junior high just fine, though she was apprehensive at her school’s orientation. But Lola made up for what she lacked in brains with beauty. Born with naturally clear skin, a slim frame, wide-set eyes, and high cheekbones, Lola stood out from the crowd in ways that she didn’t want to. In most group photos, Lola was ushered to the center because she was typically the tallest among the girls, or at least that’s what the parents would say. She didn’t particularly like that attention. Lola liked fashion and was especially fond of Vogue. Since her parents didn’t order them home, Lola went to the library and would browse fashion magazines showcasing models of various races and ethnicities. She didn’t have many friends at school because she wasn’t particularly social. To Lola, the girls in those magazines were her friends: girls who looked like her and shared her penchant for dressing neatly and smiling. One day, when Lola was at the mall shopping for some necessities, a middle-aged woman approached her from the stand.
“I’m Agnes. Are you a model?”
“No. I’m not.”
“Would you like to?”
Lola paused for a few seconds. “I don’t know.”
Despite her response, Lola desperately wanted to say yes, as she dreamed of one day having a circle of friends she could call hers. She dreamed of getting away from her humdrum high school student body and into the big cities where she could have a circle of friends who shared similar attributes as hers.
Agnes gave Lola her business card. “Talk to your parents and call me if you’re interested.”
A year passed, and Lola is now sixteen. On her birthday, her mother went up to her and said, “Lola, why don’t we give the modeling thing a go? It could be quite a glamorous experience.”
Lola agreed. She didn’t particularly care about school or applying herself and felt modeling would be a much better alternative to the career path she was currently aiming for: being some businessman’s secretary.
So, Lola moved to Los Angeles—on her own because her parents couldn’t afford to go with her.
At sixteen, Lola moved in with Agnes in a modest house on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Agnes became Lola’s protector, talent agent, and business manager. It was a warm relationship based on money: you help me, and I help you. Agnes drove Lola to modeling castings, and Lola began auditioning for jobs here and there. She had some fledgling successes at lesser-known brands for jeans, sports cars, and makeup companies, but the more well-known commercial auditions, the ones where lines of beautiful girls wrapped around the building, were out of reach for Lola.
Another thing Lola couldn’t help but shake off was Agnes. Agnes accompanied the young model everywhere: social gatherings, meals, workouts. You name it, and Agnes was there. Also, the models that Lola saw in those glossy magazines (warm, smiling with perfect teeth) were the opposite at the casting calls: competitive, petty, and degrading. The idyllic world Lola had envisioned modeling to be was just a fantasy.
Upon this realization, Lola fell into a state of depression—not clinical—but bad enough that she didn’t want to go to any of the casting calls anymore. Agnes didn’t have it and, one night, got verbally aggressive with Lola.
“Oh you worthless, spoiled rotten child!” Agnes said to Lola. “After everything I’ve done for you, you’re just going to throw in the towel?!”
Lola, stunned, stood frigid on the bed, unable to move. Agnes grabbed a ceramic sculpture from the nightstand and hurled it at the wall, landing a couple of inches from Lola’s head.
“You fucking bitch!” Agnes screamed.
Lola started crying. In a fight-or-flight panic, she grabbed her phone lying next to her and sprinted out of the house. Lola had nowhere else to go. Agnes was her foster parent, and her biological parents lived in another nearby state. Improvising, Lola used the money she had left in her bank account and checked into a motel room. There, she called her father, who got into a car, picked her up, and drove her home.
Lola never heard from or saw Agnes again, but the words Agnes delivered that day became indelibly etched into Lola’s mind.
Decades passed, and Lola is now a judge in her local county courthouse. When she arrived home, Lola went back to high school, decided to go to law school, and, ironically, found the warm, pretty, smiling, fashionable people she’d seen in those glossy magazines. Yet every time Lola faced a disappointment or setback, her brain would instinctively think to itself: “fucking bitch”. Those words, and the intensity with which they were delivered, cut like knives into young Lola’s psyche that fateful day; they scared her and stayed with her into adulthood, a permanent mark of trauma.
Yet, ironically, Lola has always credited those words with what she eventually would attain in life: a doting husband, an esteemed legal career, and attorney friends who look and dress like fashion models. Agnes has since faded into oblivion, but her retort, delivered in a moment of passion, stayed with Lola for the rest of her life. On her deathbed, surrounded by the family and friends she’d gained in her long life, a vision of Agnes flashed into her mind, and Lola thought to herself, “Oh, that fucking bitch!”
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