Read Online My Life in Black and White by Natasha Friend - Free Book Online

photo. Me, Lexi Mayer, right there on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, surrounded by supermodels. Then he snapped another one. And another. It was crazy—like an out-of-body experience. I knew it was happening, but I couldn’t believe it was happening to me.
    Afterward, I felt giddy. I couldn’t stop smiling. As we walked through the exhibit hall, I could tell Taylor was annoyed because she pretended to be really interested in Picasso, taking a million notes and even drawing little sketches in the margins of her notebook. Taylor, who never cared about school, let alone art history. So after about an hour of watching her become the world’s leading expert on the Cubist movement, I confronted her.
    “What’s bugging you?” I asked when my mother was safely tucked away in the restroom.
    “Nothing’s bugging me,” Taylor said.
    “Obviously something is.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “The photo thing? It’s not like I asked to have my picture taken. He just came right up and—”
    “Whatever.” Taylor waved her pencil through the air. “Modeling’s bogus. Half those girls are bulimic and the other half shoot smack.”
    “Where’d you hear that?”
    Taylor gave me a look like I’d just fallen off a turnip truck. “How do you think they stay so thin?”
    “Well,” I said, “it’s not like I’m going to—”
    “ Plus , they sleep around.”
    “You think?”
    “Of course. That’s how they get the big jobs.”
    Taylor kept going, laying out all the atrocities of the modeling industry. The longer she talked, the more obvious it became that—much as she denied it—the Zander Kent thing had touched a nerve. Big-time. And, bottom line, Taylor’s friendship meant more to me than a few photos.
    So that night, I nipped the modeling thing in the bud. When my mother wasn’t looking, I dug through her purse until I found Zander Kent’s business card. Then, I walked to the kitchen sink and stuffed my modeling career down the disposal.
    But a few days later, a package arrived in the mail. My mother squealed when she saw the return address and opened it right away. She wouldn’t even let me peek at the photos until she’d seen them. Then she got the crazy notion to run to the mall and buy frames so we could surprise my father with the “big reveal” at dinner. I thought this was a horrible idea, but I kept my mouth shut.
    Sure enough, after we had eaten my father’s favorite dinner—brisket, wilted greens, potatoes au gratin—and we’d reached my mother’s “Honey, let me tell you what happened the other day at the Met” portion of the meal, my dad got very, very quiet. He wiped his mouth on his napkin for a full minute. Finally, he set the napkin down. “Tell me you didn’t sign anything,” he said.
    My mother’s eyes widened. “What?”
    “Tell me you didn’t sign your name on a piece of paper. A photo release, a contract, anything.”
    “No,” my mom said. “Absolutely not.”
    My father sighed. “Good.” Then he launched in: How could my mother have given our address to a complete stranger? What could she have been thinking? Didn’t she watch the news?
    “That’s how girls end up in Dumpsters,” Ruthie chimed in.
    “Ruth,” my mother said, shocked.
    “What? It’s true.”
    “Laine,” my father said. “She has a point.”
    “Well,” my mother said, “he wasn’t a stranger . Zander Kent is a genuine fashion photographer…. Look.” She reached into the package and whipped out another business card that Zander Kent must have stuck in there. “It’s not as if this gentleman—and he was a gentleman, wasn’t he, Alexa?”
    I shrugged. “I guess.”
    “Well, he was. Very polite. And it’s not as if he just approached us out of the blue. He was already there , at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on a legitimate photo shoot.”
    “Or…” Ruthie paused for effect, “he was just posing as a polite, legitimate photographer. Any pedophile perv