Impossible Odds

familiar society.
    The dance that evening soon faded in her memory, but the conversation with her father stayed with her. John Buchanan didn’t expect his daughter to go into his business, he just encouraged her to ignore the world’s baser temptations and choose a life of service. For him, the details of her life choices were not as important as the attitude she brought to the world and the honorable state of mind she maintained there.
    Her mother, Marilyn, was determined to keep Jessica from feeling as if she needed to live just down the road and encouraged her to follow any honorable dream that appealed to her. A dilemma over her future arrived soon afterward with the local newspaper’s call for teenaged girls to appear as models in print and television ads.
    Jessica showed up at a large open audition with a few of her school friends. They attended as a group of bored local girls looking for something to do, but the “adventure” turned out to mostly involve waiting. Once each girl got in front of the casting board her moment in the sun was brief. The board members knew in a glance if they were looking at workable talent. Most of the girls in the room passed by without causing anyone to blink.
    Then it was Jessica’s turn. She watched their eyes light up when she strolled in at five feet, eleven inches tall. She quickly discovered she was what they were looking for. In this uniquely attractive teenager they saw a thin body to drape with couture garments and a face whose lines and angles would mold themselves to countless combinations of color and shade.
    At first, their enthusiasm for her swept her up on a warm wave of social approval. It felt appealing and frightening at the sametime. But once they began to send her out on auditions, the real nature of that world blossomed in front of her. These were environments where she received automatic approval just for entering the room looking as she did. It was bizarre to recall the catcalls she had drawn over her awkward height since the age of twelve. Now there was this surreal experience of walking into the modeling world to see coiffed strangers light up at the sight of her and hurry over to greet her.
    Everyone seemed to assume the attention delighted her. She could tell plenty of other young women loved everything about it. Many of them found the payoff worth the stress and sacrifice.
    But Jessica discovered that the prospect of receiving automatic success via the DNA lottery was about as satisfying as trying to quell real hunger with cotton candy. New faces beamed back at her, but their gazes stopped at the pores of her skin. She imagined herself in a line of work based on promoting the material world’s fascination with consumer goods. That image was bleak. Rather than picturing a set of exciting opportunities, she felt herself repelled by the odor of slow death in a pretty box.
    A wordless message settled in: Her emerging identity didn’t matter in those places. For them, this semihippie, with her childish dreams of doing something for the downtrodden of the world, was of no consequence until she helped them sell something. Those sensibilities prevented her from finding any satisfaction in the prospect of a career as a clotheshorse.
    She knew many other women would consider her arrogant and ungrateful for failing to appreciate easy offers of legitimate modeling work. But their approval wasn’t enough to justify that life to her, and neither could their disapproval be allowed to steer her off course on something that felt so vital. Her life up to that point was spent watching her mother’s and father’s charitable service to all sorts of organizations, leaving Jessica immune to the sneers of those who saw such service as a foolish waste of time.
    The delayed outcome of that ride to the dance with her father finally arrived when she realized that the world’s easy benefits, such as they were, had little attraction to her. She listened to people obsess over their houses and their cars and it felt like listening to alcoholics obsess over their choice of drinks.
    Even if it were presented to her on a platter and tied with a bow, a life lived for the camera wouldn’t stem her growing desire to get involved on a direct personal level and do something in the humanitarian field, to work with real people, hand to hand. She quit the audition process in its early stages and never went back.
    At that point Erik and Jessica had developed a connection. Neither one