red right ankle

“You are finished!” Umberto hissed before flitting away, the queen bee off to round up her drones.

Arguably, she had not even truly begun yet. Gwendolyn, having ridden this planet around the sun nearly twenty-six times, was not ready or willing to be put out to pasture just yet; but she was keenly aware that she’d gone around a few more times than the others. A chill shook her bare shoulders, as another fiery bolt of pain crackled up her leg. She winced at the sight of her swelling ankle, the black-and-blue already creeping out from under her pasty skin.

Sitting in a canvas-backed director’s chair, she waited. Her cue came and went with a small eruption of verbal chaos; she would not make her next and last cue, either. Umberto barked orders into a headset, while fiendishly re-fitting Gwendolyn’s final ensemble to another girl’s fragile frame. This was the grand opening of Colette’s new store in the Place Vendôme, and Gwendolyn was in a brash leather belt with tassels shooting out from her hips and swishing against her thighs as she walked; a silk and silver braided necklace that graced her cleavage perfectly; these were not the problem. Nor was the problem that she’d strutted out in these accessories wearing nothing but lingerie, a plain ivory cotton bra and panty set, to give the illusion of a clean palette, no clothing, no distraction. The problem, simply, ostensibly, was the shoes: an impossible six inches high, her feet gingerly balanced atop needle-thin spikes, barely held in place by gauzy golden straps.

Gwendolyn did not question, she did not fear. She would pull it off with dazzle and flair, as usual. She’d guarantee her high-profile spot at the next night’s Hermès show. Four years on the road may have matured her features, but they’d also taught her how to play the game. She was well positioned, head and shoulders above any of these other girls. Especially Shanta, the vaguely Indian girl who couldn’t be a day over sixteen even though she told everyone she’d just turned eighteen. She was a child, trying to do a woman’s job.

But it wasn’t always the vicious girl eat girl world that Tyra Banks painted on TV. Exemplified by Clarice, a sweetheart from Lisbon who’d done a handful of shows with Gwendolyn and who, now, was acting as her primary caretaker, bringing her an ice pack for her ballooning ankle.

“It wasn’t bad,” Clarice said. “You took the hit so graceful.” Her voice was gentle, her smile kind, although the stark way her hair was pulled off her face made her look angry, as cold and mean as Nurse Ratched. The hit, as it were, was a defect of neither shoe nor ankle but of the combination. The two working in tandem failed, such that the heel lurched left, snapping apart, and the ankle went right, with a crunch, and though there was a considerable wobble of her body and an awkward swinging of her arms that required a Nike-like effort to regain her center of gravity, Gwendolyn did not fall. If only the athletic shoes named for the goddess of strength and victory came in size haute couture.

She landed on that ankle, and the video will forever preserve how ugly it appeared to Johnny Audience. But by some miracle she maintained a bipedal pose, and limped off the runway to the sanctuary behind the curtain, where she collapsed in agony out of the eyes of the press. Clarice had been immediately behind her on the catwalk, had followed her behind the curtain then pulled her to her good foot and helped her into a chair in the dressing room, telling her urgently, “Please must elevate!” She lifted Gwendolyn’s bad foot up onto the makeup counter before twirling off to her wardrobe change and hitting the runway again.

“Oh, Gwen!” said a heavily accented voice behind her. “You are hurt?”

It was Shanta, of course; false concern oozing out of her bright-red-painted lips. The fact that Shanta repeatedly abbreviated her name to that of the tacky Ms. Stefani offended all of Gwendolyn’s sensibilities. She pretended not to hear.

“But you are next!” Shanta said loudly, coming around to face her. “You cannot go?” Innocent tone, but barely concealing a wicked grin. Whereas most of the girls simply ignored her plight, Shanta singlehandedly brought high school-style bitchery to the backstages of the highest fashion exhibitions around the world.

“Heels break, Shanta,” Gwendolyn said, nonchalant. “Someday yours will, too.”

“Forty seconds!” Umberto called. Shanta winked at Gwendolyn as two attendants slipped a long sheer dress over her head and fixed her sleek black hair, then tightened a small knot at her back, to better accentuate her narrow waistline.

Gwendolyn watched her sashay toward the stage, almost glad for the distraction as she waited, nearly nude, her ankle throbbing in time with her heartbeat. More than a small part of her hoped Shanta would trip or fall, wished her own fate upon her, but she made the walk successfully, exalted at the end as she smirked her way past Gwendolyn without even batting a single voluminous eyelash. The show was over. Clarice, now wrapped in a terry robe, brought Gwendolyn her street clothes and helped her dress, helped her outside and into a taxi, helped her to the hospital and back to the room they shared with four other girls.

She’d be on crutches for a while, but she would recover. She wouldn’t do Hermès the next night, and she wouldn’t go to Rio the following week, but she’d be damned if this was the end. Just this once, beauty could not, would not be so fickle. She’d worked too hard to get where she was. She had a few good years left. She would return to New York for fashion week then hop over to London, then she’d be back in Milan by the New Year.

Her heel broke, her ankle broke—it was not the end of the world.

For the next few weeks, as she was laid up in a hostel-like room-and-board just off the Rue Saint-Honoré, reserved exclusively for working models, she would be ostracized; might as well be a seventeen-year-old runaway leper trying to break in to the biz.

She would hang around, anxiously awaiting text message updates from Clarice, to find out everything she’d missed. The big buzz in Rio would be the unveiling of a transsexual model, with whom none could compete—not Gwendolyn, not Clarice, not even Shanta.

Staying off her bad foot meant staying away from the gym, so Gwendolyn had no choice but to fast, planning to be thinner when she recovered than she’d been previously. She’d make ankle-twisting the next hot thing in the modeling world, she’d make millions hocking her new weight-loss secret. Her comeback would be better than Kate Moss’s coke-fueled front page. Sure, she wasn’t as high as Kate Moss had been to start, and she didn’t have quite so far to fall, but at the end of the day, Kate Moss was thirty-five and still going strong, and at twenty-six, Gwendolyn’s world, when it healed, would be wide open.