The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore

by Kim Fu

  “No, I’m fine,” Dina said, trying to stride purposely for the elevators. She was grimy from the plane, her hair pulled back. One of the wheels on her suitcase had been busted in transit. The suitcase skittered and bounced loudly along the marble floor.

  The woman stepped out from behind the desk and cut off Dina’s path. She was wearing knee-high brown boots. “Are you expected by one of our residents? Would you like me to call someone for you?”

  “I, uh.” Dina produced the key card from her purse, thinking now that the envelope looked suspicious, obviously stolen. “My mom owns Unit Eight-oh-eight. I’m going to be staying here for a while.”

  “May I see that?” She plucked the card from Dina’s hand before Dina could respond. “Thank you.” She went back to the desk and Dina stayed standing in the middle of the lobby, tethered to her broken suitcase. The receptionist poked around at a computer and then said, “You’re Mrs. Chang’s daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “She hasn’t informed us about any new renters or guests.”

  “It was kind of last-minute.”

  “If you’ll just stay there, I’m going to give her a quick call to confirm.”

  Dina wondered if she should make a run for it. Would her mother call the cops on her? To teach her a lesson? The things Dina had seen on TV and in movies about the LAPD were not encouraging. Before Dina could decide, the receptionist brought her the cordless receiver. “Your mother would like to talk to you,” she said.

  Dina lifted the phone to her ear.

  “Well, aren’t you a clever little thief. Cleverer than I thought.”

  Dina didn’t respond.

  “I tried not to spoil you, but I’ve clearly failed,” Mrs. Chang continued. “A wise mother would have you kicked out of the building, leave you to starve in the street until you came crawling back, humbled. But I’m too soft-hearted. I don’t know what your plan is, what you think you’re going to do out there with no money and no legal way to work, but go right ahead.”

  “You’ll see,” Dina said. And then, glancing at the receptionist, she added, “Thank you.”

  She gave the phone back. The receptionist smiled sweetly and said, “I’m sorry for the confusion. Security is very important to our residents. I’m sure you understand. Enjoy your stay, Ms. Chang.”

  The air in the condo was stale, dust coating its elegant wood, quartz, and stainless-steel surfaces. There was no furniture or linens in any of the rooms, nothing in the cabinets or drawers. The building had been a new construction when Mrs. Chang had bought it, acquired when it was just an artist’s rendering and a pit in the ground, so there were no remnants of staging or previous owners. Dina slept on a pile of her clothes that first night.

  In the morning, she went to a nearby coffee shop and used her laptop to find under-the-table, non-union acting and modeling gigs. Nearly all of them alluded to nudity. The ones she called turned out to be student filmmakers and hobby photographers who couldn’t pay, and out-and-out pornographers.

  By the end of the week, she conceded to the student filmmakers if they provided lunch and a ride, the hobby photographers if they sent her copies, more to feel like she was doing something than for the bagels and sweaty slices of cheddar she stuffed into her purse. She built a portfolio website on a free hosting service, but no one ever emailed or called. Dina’s mother stopped paying her phone bill—the roaming charges were astronomical—so she bought a prepaid burner from a guy who ran a stall near the beach. She sweet-talked a couple guys off the street into dragging the free futon she’d found on Craigslist inside; the real trick was getting rid of them afterward. The garbage bag she used as a trash can and the bare, plaid-patterned futon looked absurd in the middle of the large main room of the condo.

  Eventually, she found a few paying gigs—handing out cans of energy drink at a gas station while wearing a crop top and short shorts in the drink’s signature colors, handing out fliers for boat tours in a sailor suit—but generally even the party promoters and booth-girl organizers wanted a Social Security number.

  She spotted celebrities all the time, in open-air restaurants and coming out of specialty bakeries, waiting for valets, walking their dogs. They were invariably shorter and more shopworn than she expected, without the aura of specialness they’d had in pictures and on-screen. To the point where she wasn’t sure she’d seen them or just someone who looked an awful lot like them: an older sibling, a body double, a malformed twin.

  Some days, discouraged, Dina just hung around the pier, waiting for someone to come up to her and remark on her beauty. Which plenty of men did, but they were never the right people, never people who could even plausibly pretend to have money or power, the ability to make her famous.

  One afternoon, someone approached her who looked no different from the others, a youngish guy with glasses, in khaki shorts and a plaid shirt. His opening line was a common one. “Are you a model?”

  “Yes,” Dina said.

  He took his business card out of his wallet. “My name is Steve Marsh. I run a modeling agency.”

  Dina took his card warily. He did not look like someone who ran a modeling agency. He looked like every other internet sleazebag she’d met and worked with. Maybe a little younger, which seemed only more suspect. She’d also never heard of the agency on his card.

  “You’re just stunning,” Steve said. “I’d love to get to know you, with an eye to signing you on with us. Can I take you to lunch sometime?” Her doubt must have showed. He added, “I’ll bring one of our models. To show you everything’s on the up and up.”

  Dina wasn’t really in a position to say no.

  The restaurant was a gaudy indoor-outdoor place in West Hollywood, red-and-steel heat lamps dotted between tables like alien spacecraft. The hostess showed Dina to the table, where a woman was waiting. “Steve is running late,” she said, standing to greet Dina. “I’m Janice.”

  Janice was tall and willowy, with an older, sun-damaged face, her eyes ringed by black eyeliner, her knitted fuchsia dress casual for the surroundings. “I’m Dina. Are you a model?”

  Janice laughed. “I’ll pretend I’m not offended by that.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “Yes, I’m a model. I was with a different agency for ten years and I just signed with Steve. And, you know, nobody sings praises like a new convert.”

  “What made you switch?”

  “Let’s get some drinks first,” Janice said. “Steve is paying for lunch. We should make the most of it.” She waved over their server. She ordered herself a martini, and after glancing at Dina to confirm, made it two. She checked her phone, in a pink case on the table. “Where the hell is he? Anyway. Basically—I’m sure you’ve had this problem too—I was tired of my agency taking such a huge cut. Forty percent since my first job and never negotiable. Steve only takes ten. It’s revolutionary.”

  “That sounds . . .”

  “Too good to be true, I know.” The server put a basket of bread on the table and Dina resisted the urge to tip it into her bag. She thought often of all the food her father and stepfather had made over the years that she’d refused. Real hunger was very different from self-imposed. “There’s no big secret to it. Basically, there’s less legwork for him than a traditional agent. All the bookings are managed by a computer system, between clients and us. All he has to do is vet the models and the clients on both sides, and then we deal directly with each other. It’s cheaper for everyone.” Janice’s phone buzzed. She read the message on-screen and said, “Steve’s meeting with investors. He’s going to be a while. We can order.”

  “Investors?”

  “Yeah. The thinking is that he’s going to—what is it they say?—‘disrupt’ the modeling business, and make a fortune. Plus, rich guys like to be around models, so nobody turns down a meeting with Steve.”

  Dina waited until the food arrived before saying, “That all sounds great, but I should tell you right now, I’m not in the country l
egally.”

  Janice waved this away. “Oh, Steve’s lawyer can deal with that. The agency can sponsor your visa. Steve has capital coming out of his eyeballs but he needs users—models, I mean, and clients—to really get this off the ground.” Janice gave Dina a knowing look over their salads. “Imagine if the new fashion it-girl was discovered through Steve’s system. That would change everything for him. And for her.”

  It was exactly as Dina had always hoped. Someone had seen her on the street, recognized her potential, offered her everything she needed. Representation, residency status. Steve rushed in at the end of the meal and she signed a contract right there and then. But her time in Tinseltown had ground something out of her. Too much time deciding whether or not to go down the stairs into a photographer’s basement “studio,” whether or not to undo one more button or let him pose her limbs, whether that would lead to more buttons or a hand on her ass, at what point a “student film” tipped into soft-core. Expected to provide her own products and do her own makeup and hair, “working” at a loss. Days where it was easier to just lie on the floor of the condo and try to crawl back inside the teenage fantasies—flashbulb, limo, applause!—that were becoming harder and harder to access. What was she even doing here?

  When she signed with Steve Marsh, she didn’t think, All my dreams are coming true! She thought, I have nothing to lose.

  Steve and Janice arranged a shoot for Dina to fill in a gap they perceived in her portfolio. In these pictures, she wore a tight-fitting white T-shirt and jeans, her hair clean and brushed away from her face, her makeup natural and merely corrective, hiding the stress hives at her hairline and dark circles under her eyes. She stood before a plain black backdrop, her dark hair fading into it beneath the studio lights. It took several attempts before she could summon the right expression. “Chin up. Tilt your chin up. Not that far. Give me a little bit of a smile. Not that big. Don’t smile so big. No teeth. But not like you’re scared. Well, maybe a little bit scared. Uncertain. Uncertain but happy. Let’s try this—can you open your eyes a little wider? Yes, good. Okay, look at me straight-on. Right at the camera. Right here.” On and on, until finally the shot they needed: wide-eyed, credulous, full of hope.

  Dina scraped through six more months. She texted Steve periodically and his occasional reply assured her that her visa application was going forward, all was well, she’d start getting bookings any day now.

  The call box phone in the condo rang. It took Dina a few minutes to identify the sound and its source—a sleek, discreet metal panel by the front door—as it had never rung before. She pressed the single button, encircled in blue LED light. “Um, hello?”

  The concierge’s voice responded. “Good morning, Ms. Chang. This is Ariana at the front desk. You have a visitor, a Ms. Janice Morgan. Can you confirm that she’s expected?”

  Dina looked around the condo, down at herself. Well, shit. “Yeah, you can let her up. Thanks.”

  The elevator dinged. Janice swept in. She was wearing a swimsuit cover-up, a diaphanous blue-gray tunic, translucent enough to reveal the bikini underneath. She was clutching a newspaper in one hand, a wicker beach bag in the other. “I’m so sorry, Dina,” she said. “I wanted to tell you in person, since I’m the one who convinced you to get mixed up with that idiot in the first place—”

  She stopped talking as she came inside. Futon, garbage bag, suitcase, empty expanses of hardwood floor, luxuries built into the walls. “Are you squatting here?” She pushed past Dina. The room was blazingly hot. The large, sunny windows had no coverings, and the digital air-conditioning units had been remotely disabled. Faintly, almost impressed, Janice added, “How did you get the concierge in on it?”

  “I’m not squatting. My mom owns this place.”

  “Does she know you’re here?”

  “Yes,” Dina said, impatiently. “What happened to Steve? What’s happening?”

  Janice threw down the newspaper on the kitchen island. “The article’s not even about him,” she said. “It’s about overvaluation in tech and new labor models. He’s just one of the sad, sorry examples, a company in a list.”

  “What?”

  “It was a good idea, wasn’t it?” Janice said wistfully. “I mean, didn’t it seem like a good idea?”

  “What are you talking about? What are you saying?”

  “Steve was desperate for clients and models and he stopped vetting. He wasn’t even signing people, per se, just inputting data. The system filled up with garbage. The same garbage you’d find on any of the other online listing sites,” Janice said. Dina knew these well. “So the legit clients and models, the few there were, got spooked and quit.”

  Dina could not find it in herself to be surprised. She slid quietly to the floor and sat with her back against the wall. “So that’s it, then.”

  “I’m sorry.” Janice looked ridiculous, somehow, in her beachwear and clunky sandals, her heavily made-up eyes. “I want you to know, I’m really sorry. And if I can . . . if I can help you, somehow . . .”

  Dina glanced up, not knowing what to ask for. Tell me I’m pretty, she thought. Quietly, she said, “I think I’m done here. I think it’s time for me to go home.”

  “That’s your choice. But you have my number, if you think of something.”

  “Actually,” Dina’s eyes flashed, “I don’t. You never gave it to me. I had Steve’s number. He kept saying everything was fine.”

  Janice stood up straighter. She opened her mouth and closed it again before another “I’m sorry” flew pointlessly out. She took out a business card and put it on the counter beside the paper. “You have it now.”

  Dina called her mother collect that afternoon, listening to the hiss of the overseas connection. Her mother had been living in Hong Kong full-time for just under a year. Dina had been dodging her calls for most of that time—her burner didn’t have voice mail—because despite Steve’s assurances, she’d sensed that this moment was coming. She thought her mother would be able to hear the mounting failure in her voice and wanted to put it off until it was absolutely necessary.

  “Dina.” Mrs. Chang said her name like a sigh, like it pained her. “You finally called me back. You have to come home to Hong Kong.”

  Dina had called to say the same thing, but somehow she couldn’t face it, that her mother had been right all along. The scale of this I-told-you-so, among all the others.

  “Your brother died.”

  Dina still had not spoken.

  “Dina? Are you there?”

  “How?”

  “A surfing accident.”

  “When?”

  “Three weeks ago.”

  Dina unleashed a flood of questions, informed by memories of when Victor had first learned to surf as a teenager. Was the water rough that morning, was there a weather warning, how long did it take to find him, what did they do when they found him, did they try to resuscitate him? Where the hell was Isabel in all of this, did she try to stop him, did she call the coast guard, why didn’t she call them sooner? Dina realized, as her mother answered—inadequately, tersely, she seemed to know so little—that what she really wanted to know was how it could have been prevented, how Dina could still prevent it.

  Then Dina had a flash of understanding. Something that made so much more sense than her young, healthy brother being dead. “You’re lying.”

  Her mother sighed her name again. “Dina.”

  “You’re lying! You’re trying to trick me into coming home. I’m not buying it.”

  “You think I’d lie about this? About my own son? Do you want to talk to Mr. Davies? He’ll tell you the same thing.”

  Dina felt a pang of fear. She had the sensation of being chased, footsteps on her shadow. “Of course he will,” she said. “He’s your little lapdog. He’ll do anything you want.”

  “Why . . .” Mrs. Chang’s voice cracked. On the verge of tears—no, of course not. Dina had never seen or heard her mother cry, not even during her father’s illness and de
ath. “Why are you like this?”

  Dina knew her mother had gone to Hong Kong in case the doctors there could do something about her ruined musculoskeletal system, to see if money could buy something there that it couldn’t in Canada. She knew that her mother was disabled, aging, that Mr. Davies and a nurse/maid took turns lifting her into the bathtub, that she had been once widowed and had possibly—no, it was a demented lie, it wasn’t true—lost her first-born child, a loss so tremendous there was no word for it in English or Chinese, as if not naming it made it impossible. But Dina couldn’t stop picturing her mother as young and strong, solid and unchanging, a force of nature to be resisted.

  Dina pressed the end-call button. A small gesture that made such a small noise, beep, to make her mother vanish, put her out of mind.

  Janice told Dina about her career as they drove. The sky was open and featureless above them, mountains hidden by smog at the horizon line. Under sunlight so glaring that filthy, dust-smothered cars were as blinding as polished chrome.

  Janice had done all the things that Dina had wanted to do: walked for labels in Paris and Milan, swimsuit shoots in Bermuda and Thailand, a mysteriously short stint as a Victoria’s Secret Angel—“It didn’t work out,” Janice said curtly. Background parts in major films, mostly the woman who glides through an early scene to make the lead “relatable” by comparison. Enough that she was called “model/actress” in the trade papers.

  “Your life sounds so glamorous,” Dina said.

  “Sure, with all the highlights lined up back to back like that,” Janice said. “That’s it. That’s everything. In twelve years. Sometimes absolute chaos and snowballing runs of work, where people knew who I was and were excited about me. Sometimes desperate, hungry months, where I thought I’d never work again. Friends getting strung out and fucked up, or just disappearing. Maybe they gave up and went home to Ohio to get married or whatever, or maybe they OD’d or got murdered or are working a corner in La Jolla—who the hell knows? A lot of it was fun, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of it took some seriously thick skin. Especially now that I’m getting older.”