Bonus chapter: 8+
(this takes place during the early days of the Atlanta FitFams studio, just after Jamie is evaluated by Dee and criticized for her "posture" in front of Willa)
The knocking on the bathroom door grew louder, as did the sound of frantic whining.
“Seriously! I really, really, really need to get in there! You know how it is with Chipotle!”
Ew.
Yes, Jamie did know how it was with Chipotle, not because she herself would ever cram a bunch of wet beans and mealy meat into her body, but because she was far too familiar with how that disgusting stuff turned her roommate’s digestive system into a shit sluice.
“Gross. Go to the bathroom in the lobby,” Jamie said through the locked door.
“Fine!” yelled Leslie, a 23-year-old website proofreader who wore a wooly, ear-flapped hat, even when it was hot out. “But it’s gonna be a disaster, and I’ll tell them it was you if they send a memo to the complex again!”
The apartment door slammed. Jamie remained seated on the closed toilet seat in the cramped, moldy-edged bathroom, one of the only places she could find privacy in the one-bedroom Beltline apartment she rented with three people she’d found on Craigslist.
Jamie had been ensconced in this room since Dee’s evaluation of the class demo earlier in the day, an experience that could have been viewed as constructive if not for the final kicker about Jamie’s “posture.”
Placing a palm on the exposed skin between her crop top and leggings, Jamie thought about her mother. If she saw me now, she’d be absolutely horrified.
The hair was OK; Jamie hadn’t cut it in years. But she wore three silver studs in her left ear and four plus a cuff in her right. Beaded bracelets were stacked on both wrists and she was wearing pants.
All of this was forbidden by her family’s Pentecostal faith, which was indeed a bit like “Footloose” in its prohibition of dancing with Kevin Bacon, or anyone at all. Laying of hands and people speaking in tongues. The snake-handling stuff. They did all that. But there was more to it. Did you know that Pentecostal churches were among the very few to be racially integrated during Jim Crow? And that, in the church’s early days, women were empowered to write religious songs and edit Pentecostal papers?
Jamie’s own mother even taught at and helped run a Bible school. That didn’t last very long, though. The church tightened up its rules while Jamie was a grade-schooler, sending the women back into full-time domesticity while the Black folks mysteriously disappeared from the pews.
The church required girls to wear dresses that exposed nothing but their heads, necks, wrists, ankles, and feet. Jamie’s best friend, Ruth, often confided that she yearned for the halter tops, booty shorts, and septum piercings she saw on the secret smartphone purchased for her by Mark from the Citgo in exchange for a sub-par handjob behind the counter.
The wideness of the world outside the church near Dothan, Alabama, held appeal for Jamie, but at the same time she found the restrictions kind of comforting. They meant she didn’t have to think about what to wear or what her body looked like because no one could see it.
Only her mother had — and took — the opportunity to evaluate and criticize Jamie’s shape, watching from the door as she undressed at night and then serving her a smaller and smaller dish of eggs and dry toast in the morning for breakfast.
“How do you expect to live up to God’s standards if you’re so gluttonous?” her mother would tsk. “You really do fall short of the glory of God.”
One afternoon at Ruth’s house, during a 10th-grade study session, Jamie and Ruth were sitting on the carpet in her frilly bedroom while her parents argued loudly downstairs about drywall. Ruth brought a finger to her lips, then reached under the bed to produce a taped-together Stride Rite box.
Sliding it toward Jamie, she whispered: “Open it.”
Jamie lifted off the lid and saw a pile of shiny, silky, stretchy fabric. She hooked two thumbs into the spaghetti straps of a backless, handkerchief-style top and held it up. It was so very small.
“Where did you get this?” Jamie asked. “It probably won’t even fit. I ate too much mashed potatoes last night.”
Ruth pulled out a pair of cut-off jeans and threw them at Jamie. “Shut up and try this stuff on before my parents come upstairs.”
“Fine,” Jamie said, “but let’s turn our backs to each other. I don’t want you to see me without my clothes on.”
She unbuttoned her pale-yellow dress and carefully lay it on Ruth’s bed, then removed her bra. The forbidden tank top felt like liquid as it slinked over her head and on to her slim shoulders. She stepped into the shorts, which barely covered her cheeks.
“OK, let’s both turn around,” Jamie said, spinning to face her friend.
Ruth was already there, taking photos with her phone.
“What are you doing??” Jamie whisper-yelled. “Did you get me with my clothes off?”
“Stop being such a prude,” Ruth said. “No, I’m just getting shots of you in this outfit. Put your hand on your hip. Look out the window. Good. And … posted.”
Jamie’s mouth dropped open. Both hands rushed to cover her exposed midriff. “Posted?”
“Yup. Instagram,” Ruth said, very satisfied with herself. “I made it public with the #model and #WLYG hashtags. That second one is the one IMG Models tells you to use when you want them to discover you.”
Jamie scoffed. “Modeling? Me? No way.”
A week later Ruth shared with Jamie a DM from an IMG Models scout named Colin who wanted to speak to her parents about her future career plans. Jamie hesitated — wouldn’t she get into trouble for the Instagram photos? — but Colin said he’d fib and tell her parents he’d been visiting his sick grandmother at a local home and spotted Jamie leaving the facility after a volunteer shift.
“Lying is sin,” she told him.
“Your body is too,” he said. “You can’t miss this opportunity. Trust me.”
Maybe it was because most girls in her town were on the path to marriage at 16 that her parents were comfortable sending her to New York alone at that age. Or maybe they believed Colin’s interest in her appearance meant she was too stained with sin to be redeemed? Jamie really couldn’t wrap her brain around their decision to say yes, even as they left her at the station with a bus ticket and one rolling bag of essentials.
Colin moved her into a Lower East Side apartment with seven other aspiring models, where she lived on cocaine, cigarettes, espresso, and cotton balls dipped in Diet Coke (the soda helped them go down easier and, as a bonus, helped settle her artificially full stomach). This got Jamie down about 10 pounds and led to some successful go-sees, including one at Chloé, which booked her to walk the runway in a burgundy and blue track jacket paired with a long floral skirt and stacked heels.
Backstage Colin introduced Jamie to Anthony, who quickly taught her not to say no to him.
“Don’t let yourself go, now,” he would say when, during dinner at Le Cirque with the other models and their ridiculously old “boyfriends,” he saw her bring a tiny forkful of caviar from the Osetra trio to her lips.
At least he was kind enough to drop her off in front of the emergency room when she overdosed before his kid’s viola recital. He also paid for the surgery required to remove the glob of cotton balls lodged in her intestines. And, when she went from a size 00 to a size 0 during her recovery and it became clear her days on the runway were done, he got her a membership at CoreFix.
The managers of the Pilates studio were so impressed by Jamie’s fitness-model body and once-, twice-, sometimes thrice-daily workouts they hired her to coach, then moved her to Atlanta to help open a CoreFix there.
After posting a photo of herself in a deep lunge on the CoreFix Pilates machine, her long legs strong and lean, her torso toned and tan, Tara slid into her DMs.
“Hey beautiful! Have you heard of FitFams? We want to open in Atlanta, and we want you,” she wrote. “Dee, our founder, has seen videos and photos of you and thinks you’d be an amazing member of our team. She thinks you’re awesome. Can we meet?”
That’s really all it took. They wanted Jamie.
But now, as she sat stock-still in the bathroom, her hand feeling her abdomen for any unwanted softness, her mind obsessing about what she’d done wrong during her demo for Dee at FitFams, Jamie felt afraid. Unsure. Was her mother right? Did she fall short of the glory of God?
Did she fall short of the glory of Dee?
Should read: "Stride Rite box." Hopefully y'all figured that out. :)