Chapter Eighteen
The music is too loud, like it always is at these photo shoots. Jules watches the model. She looks about sixteen, but the photographer keeps telling her to “fuck the camera with her eyes.” He’s a crass, gross Englishman who wears glasses with pink lenses.
Whoever said that all that glimmers in this world will soon fade had it right. It’s been less than a year and these shoots, these men—and even Milan—have lost their sparkle.
Jules thinks back on her first week in Italy and the excitement.
Sitting at the Nepentha Club on Tartufo Night—an orgy of pasta and mushrooms and champagne.
The heads of all the major modeling agencies—Milanese, Ford, Elite, Hunter—surrounded by the beautiful people.
The big names—Christy Turlington and Kate Moss—primping, with Jules and the new faces and lesser mortals on the fringes.
The rich, pretty Milanese boys known as Milano per bene with their long hair and more money than brains showering her with attention.
Everyone letting loose after a day at the Fiera Campionaria, an ugly convention center where designers showed their latest wares.
She found the job part easy. Jules was a quick study, charming them at the endless castings, befriending the hair and makeup teams on set, perfecting her walk.
She saw some red flags, for sure. The agency constantly reminding Jules that she needed to watch what she ate.
The Italian agent saying she had “cocksucker lips.” The repeated advice from almost everyone that the most successful models do “whatever it takes” and have “no boundaries.” The older men and their wolfish smiles and open shirts with gold chains on sweaty chest hair.
The reminders that she’s lucky to be there.
The curvy, all-American classic look has given way to heroin chic, so Jules is living on borrowed time as a model.
The photographer is cursing now. He tells the girl she’s done, and it’s clear he’s not pleased. Jules considers going over to console her, but now a woman in her forties—her agent? her mother?—is pulling the girl aside and taking her to task.
Another model, a pouty French girl sitting in the waiting area near Jules, rolls her eyes.
“Delaney,” an assistant calls out. Jules stands, smiles at the French girl, but gets only another eye roll.
The photographer, Alastair Essex, looks her up and down. Dismissively, he says, “So, you’re Stadium Girl?”
“Jules,” she corrects. What once seemed like the best thing to ever happen to her, a lightning strike of fortune, is now a professional liability, a nickname uttered with sarcasm.
“Stadium Girl.” The model discovered at a University of Nebraska football game. She was credited by the media, tongue-in-cheek, for the Huskers’ national championship.
It was September 11, 1993, Nebraska versus Texas Tech.
Jules’s first game her freshman year. She was showing off, wearing a skimpy midriff sports jersey so tight it didn’t leave much to the imagination.
Playing the role of the cool, confident girl while inside she felt anything but.
She was drinking, of course, the key to her method acting.
And then came the Kiss Cam. It hadn’t fixed on her at first. It zoomed in on a couple several rows above Jules.
The boy looked like a freshman too and, unlike the rowdy students surrounding him, seemed out of place.
A bookish, sweet-looking kid. The camera framed in on him and the girl seated next to him, everyone waiting for the smooch.
He had an uncomfortable smile, like he wasn’t going to pressure her, like perhaps they were on a first date or he wasn’t sure how she would react.
But react she did. Instead of leaning in, she gestured for a frat boy one row up, and he craned over and planted one on her.
The frat guy’s friends then mercilessly heckled and taunted the boy she’d snubbed, humiliating him in front of the packed stadium.
Jules remembers anger rising in her chest. Especially at how the Kiss Cam lingered on the scene, making the indignity of it all even worse for the boy.
So, she stood, strutted up the aisle, shaking her ass in a way that she knew would grab the cameraman’s attention.
When she got to his row, she pointed at the boy.
She didn’t even glance at the giant video screen that loomed over the stadium.
She somehow knew the Kiss Cam had her. The boy pointed to himself unsure, then looked behind him.
Jules nodded and beckoned him with a curled index finger.
He climbed right over the girl who’d been so mean and Jules gave him a kiss that launched the crowd to its feet.
Two days later, she was having a wave of anxiety—that old sensation of someone following her—as she fast-walked toward the dorms, when she heard someone calling her name. A middle-aged man walked up to her, breathless.
“Jules Delaney?”
She nodded.
“I’ve been trying to find you.” He handed her a business card and she read it: SELECT MODELING AGENCY, INC. “I’m in town from New York and so glad I found you. Look, I know this is weird. But have you ever modeled before?”
She shook her head.
“I saw the clip of you at the football game. I’m a scout. And my agency, well, we think you have a future as a model. That you could make a lot of money.”
Jules had known the Kiss Cam video was spreading across the country when her aunt from Texas called saying she’d seen it on a local morning show. Jules couldn’t understand why that moment had swept the nation like a forest fire, but it had.
“I know how this sounds,” the man continued. “You’re a smart girl, being wary. But do me a favor, talk to your parents, have them look me up, look up my agency. This could be an amazing opportunity.”
Alastair Essex’s voice intrudes upon the memory. “Okay, luv, I really need you to give me something special. I need you to make me wet…”
She finishes the shoot, fucking the camera with her eyes, as directed.
On her way out, she gathers her things in the now-empty seating area, spots the New York Times on the coffee table.
It’s nearly impossible to get news from the States, so she’s about to scoop it up when she sees a headline that takes her breath away:
MIDWESTERN SERIAL KILLER ELUDES CAPTURE.
She drops onto the couch and forces herself to read the story: “The FBI is assisting the Nebraska authorities’ hunt for a serial killer known as the May Day Killer.
The perpetrator has abducted and killed several women on May 1.
Sources close to the investigation say that May Day strangely released some of his victims, some of whom are assisting with the manhunt… ”
Jules’s hands are shaking uncontrollably, her gut churning. She’s made progress this year in beating back the fear, the anxiety, the feeling of being followed, the night terrors, the day terrors. But it all returns now, alongside the unanswered question: Why did he let me live?