The Everything Girl by L. Maleki

Author:L. Maleki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2018-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

If you have to have two jobs, make the second one pleasant.

I was lucky to have a skill I could parlay into extra cash, while a good chunk of Middle America was forced into working two or three crappy jobs in order to feed their families. I had an opportunity for two income streams. One paid my rent and the other was not … really paying, not yet, but it was enjoyable, and I could see the potential, if I worked hard.

During the first week of April, I wandered the city. I stumbled across artistic inspiration and possible backdrops while hanging fliers and talking to businesses who dealt with weddings and big events. I occasionally suffered a twinge of guilt or fear, praying no one from PRCM saw my advertising. I was breaking a firm company policy by moonlighting, but I had weighed the benefits and harms and decided the risk was low while the need to help my father was high. But it would suck to lose my well-paying job, especially before I was making any real money taking photos.

I felt a surge of pride the day I did a shoot for a mom in my building. She wanted a headshot of her toddler, for her budding acting career. The mother was pleased with the plethora of smiles I was able to get out of the kid—I’d followed Adam Sandler’s lead and smacked my head on an open cupboard and my pain made the kid howl with laughter. The mother referred me to a number of her stage-mom friends, after offering me a box of Band-Aids. I went away with cuts and bruises and a wide smile.

By the second week in April, I started getting calls from models, thanks to Lucia. A handful of her friends needed to update their comp cards and iPad portfolios. I had to up my game. I couldn’t just run into a wall to get the right shot. These people knew what they wanted and had high expectations.

“I brought you a prezi,” Lucia said, dropping a leather duffle bag onto my couch. She’d come over with no warning. I was in my after-work, not-for-viewing-pleasure pj’s, while she was wearing a yoga outfit and yet looked like she’d just stepped from the pages of a glamour magazine. At almost nine weeks, she was an advertisement for beautiful mothers-to-be.

I swiped at the hummus on my pajama top and then pointed to the duffel. “Is there a head in there? I don’t have the strength to deal with that.”

Instead of answering, she reached down, unzipped the bag, and upended the contents onto the floor: lotions and wipes and insect repellent and nylons and a lint brush and panty liners and dress jewelry and scissors and sunglasses and hair ties and false eyelashes and flesh-colored thongs and pasties …

I blinked, slowly. “What the hell?”

With a proud, graceful swish of her arm, she said, “La mia collezione—my kit. If you are going to set up shoots, you will need this.

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