To Carmen, modeling wasn’t nearly as distasteful as the pageants. Solitary affairs spent mostly around adults rather than girls her own age, she’d pass much of a shoot’s requisite downtime lost in a book. As a teenager she learned a lot about how to classify her looks through the conversations that happened around her. A natural projector. A downward-turned mouth that revealed just enough teeth. An emotive pout. Cheekbones a high arch. If anyone had ever bothered to use digital calipers they would have discovered that Carmen has perfect bilateral facial symmetry, as in completely zero fluctuating asymmetry within human measurement error, and that additionally her features are perfectly proportioned; that the distance between her pupils is exactly half the distance between her ears, that the distance between her eyes and mouth is exactly one-third the distance from her hairline to her chin. You’d have to do an MRI to find any asymmetries in Carmen, and that would only be a minor differential in the thickness of her sternomastoid muscles, due to tilting her head to the left when listening. To this day Carmen has never found out exactly how much money her mother made from the gigs, but occasionally a magazine, like J-14 or Teen Ink, would arrive at the house, and there it would be on some glossy page—her face. At school she tried her best to hide what she thought of as her second life, and in turn her secrecy was interpreted as pride. Her mother, in contrast, would frame at least one image from every shoot, hanging them all, dozens of them, until eventually they filled up the entire wall by the staircase. And a teenage Carmen would ascend past them to her room and put on loud music and read The Picture of Dorian Gray . . .