The only message I replied to, spring of my junior year of high school, had all the markings of a scam. It was, instead, a fluke, a job modeling festival wear for a brand called Hippy Baby, based in Austin, a job for a girl with management, a comp card and portfolio. But someone had fallen through, someone had said rush, some scout plucked me off Instagram and said I had a “trademark smile,” all teeth. I was seventeen, barely licensed. But I drove my mother’s car the whole way, I-10 to I-71, three hours through wildflower fields to a loft downtown, a photographer named Eric, his nameless assistant, who was a girl my age. They rearranged my body like furniture, both frustrated that I was so unpracticed. “Where do I change?” I asked after the first outfit was shot and they said, “Wherever,” like I should know. In the room’s middle, I bent to pull up bikini bottoms, or to drop them, and imagined my asshole puckering in the air conditioned cold, how they would see it too. If they did, they didn’t say. They didn’t care about my asshole, just my ass itself, just the outside.

“You’ve got a butt,” Eric told me when he finished shooting. “But you’ve got a gut, too.” He said nothing of my smile.

“I’m keto and I love it,” his assistant said. She was friendlier once the work was done. And yet I left alone and hungry, just the photographer’s voice in my head, the word gut, repeating.