At the club, the men kept offering us cocaine, which they snorted with their backs to the dance floor. They ordered bottles of alcohol that arrived with sparkling flames, brought by women in black miniskirts and heavy eye makeup. The men grabbed our bodies and fed us shots and sang along to the obnoxious pop music and pumped their fists in the air. Mostly, though, Isabella and I stood around in a booth, barely swaying to the music and not speaking much. I noticed that Chloe was slouched in a corner. At some point the three of us must have managed to leave, because I woke up the next morning in Isabella’s room with a pounding headache to a text: “So much fun last night! It’s Sacha btw, save my number.”
After that, I made a habit of ignoring Sacha’s weekly texts, which were always versions of the same message: “Hiiii babe. Thursday. Big meal at Nobu tonight before we go out! Gonna be sick, roll through.” When I told another model about him, she explained that Sacha was a party promoter.
“He got your number? He’s never going to stop texting you, girl. The rich dudes pay him to wrangle models. They always start the nights off with a big dinner, so that girls who aren’t making much cash come for a free meal.”
The whole situation gave me the creeps, but when Sacha texted me along with Chloe and Isabella about a free trip to Coachella, including tickets to the festival, a place to stay, and a ride out to the desert in a limo bus, I was too excited to turn it down. The three of us pored over the lineup and circled the acts we wanted to see.
Coachella was expensive. Just the year before, I’d driven there with my best friend and spent two nights sleeping in my Nissan with the seats laid flat, parked in a hotel lot where we paid ten dollars each morning to eat cold, spongy eggs from the breakfast buffet. We’d sneaked into the festival and on our way home we found an old Starbucks gift certificate under my front seat that bought us bagels and cream cheese. It had been fun, but now I could be in the VIP section of the beer garden and the front row at the concerts. The prospect made me feel grown-up.
“I mean, if we’re there together it’ll be fine,” Isabella texted me. We figured we could ignore the men while taking advantage of their setup.
We hit gridlock traffic leaving Los Angeles. There were about fifteen of us plus Sacha on the party bus, which was tricked out with purple neon lights and a bar filled with ice and bottles of alcohol. Sacha kept the music loud, walking the length of the aisle refilling drinks and smiling broadly. Eventually, even the most animated girls seemed to tire out. We stared at our phones. A tall model with thick black hair and a nasal voice came and sat next to me.
“So you know the big bald one is, like, a prince, right?” She melted into the seat, her long legs extending across the aisle. She was dressed straight out of the seventies: long skirt, crop top, and stacked bracelets. “His mom is super famous obviously. But yeah, I’ve heard him and his fiancée like to have threesomes.” Grinning, she retied a colorful silk scarf around her forehead. “So they’re, like, always looking for girls for those.”
When we finally arrived at the massive Spanish-style house in the desert where we’d be staying, we’d been in traffic for nearly six hours and were all exhausted and ready for bed. Sacha became frantic, trying to keep us awake. “Girls! Look how dope this house is!” he squealed when we entered the foyer, grabbing at us and ordering us toward the pool in the backyard. “Go for a night swim!” Outside, we found the prince and his pale fiancée in the Jacuzzi, along with some broad-shouldered man I’d never met before. We stood uncomfortably around the edge, admiring the house. A few girls changed into their swimsuits and got in the water. When I stripped down to the bikini I’d been wearing under my denim shorts, I felt the prince’s eyes land on my body.
“Okay,” he said, nudging his friend. “I’m always interested in something like this.” He pointed at me. “A girl like you, what do you want to change about your body? Like, what’s the thing you’re hung up on?” They both stared at me. I froze.
“I don’t know,” I responded, mentally running through the things I’d like to change about myself: a smaller nose, longer legs. He sipped his drink as his attention shifted elsewhere, bored when I didn’t play along. Despite being a little scared of him, I felt a strange sense of loss. Powerful men have always had that effect on me; they make me want to be noticed but also to disappear. I watched the prince as he laughed. The lights from the Jacuzzi lit his face from below, casting grotesque shadows.