The Crasher by Shirley Lord

“your-parents-worry-I-influence-you-too-much” garbage, was it possible Alex was acting as an emissary of her mother
     in bringing her to his jewel box of a club?
    “Remember when I told you once what constitutes the real importance, influence, of a top designer today?” He wasn’t expecting
     an answer. “Well, Ginny, there’s a new era of influence emerging, my little duckling…”
    She was too depressed to remind him she’d looked like a bored cheetah half a glass of piña colada ago.
    “The supermodels, they’re beginning to replace movie stars as icons, influences, and they’re earning incredible bucks, huge
     bucks because”—another Alex laugh—“they are huge; they’re literally titans of beauty. Schiffer told me she’s five eleven,
     and Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford—”
    “She’s much shorter and has a mole,” Ginny interrupted sulkily.
    “And thanks God for it every night. How much d’you think these beanstalks are getting for a sitting?”
    “A sitting?”
    “A photo shoot.”
    “I haven’t a clue.” Couldn’t her superperceptive cousin realizeher anger was so heavy, it was hanging in the Doubles air like a bomb waiting to explode?
    Of course he realized, but he was so secure he made matters worse. He chucked her under the chin.
    “Don’t do that!”
    “D’you know why I did it?”
    No answer.
    “You have a dream of a chin, a pointy little chin which makes you—”
    “Pretty!” she snarled out the word, having heard her mother say it more times than she could count and now certain where her
     faithless cousin was headed.
    She had been too carefully raised to watch for behavioral clues, slip-ups in speech, any kind of evidence of a moving day
     around the corner, not to be able to sniff “trouble,” even from her once-beloved A.
    “No, you’re not pretty,” he went on as smooth as silk, “well, not conventionally so, but you have a cheeky urchin look, emphasized
     by that pointy chin of yours, which, as I’ve explained to your perceptive mama, might make you eminently photographable.”
    The bomb exploded. “I can’t believe it; I can’t believe that you’re actually talking about me becoming a model.” Ginny took
     a good slug of her drink. “For the one and only time in my life I agree with my father. I’d rather do anything, serve hamburgers
     at McDonald’s, spray scent at Bloomingdale’s or make selling lamps there my lifelong career, than strut along a runway. It’s
     brainless, it’s mindless. I want to use my brain, not my body. I thought you understood I want to be a designer.”
    The tears were out in the open, one fast after the other down her cheeks. She no longer cared.
    Apparently neither did Alex. He leaned back, as cool and as unperturbed, Ginny thought, as Sam Shepard as Chuck Yeager in
The Right Stuff.
For the first time she was tempted to slap him across the face, hard.
    “How d’you plan to go about that?”
    Playing for time to think of an answer that would finish the discussion, Ginny took another long sip and made a disgusting
     slurping sound as she dredged up what was left at the bottom of the glass.
    Alex beckoned and another piña colada appeared.
    Ginny protested, but he ignored her, repeating the question. “How do you intend to become a designer?”
    She was ready. Well, almost. “I’ll start as a design assistant, a gofer, a dupe maker, a fitter, anything with one of the
     fashion greats.”
    Alex raised an eyebrow sardonically. “Who d’you have in mind?”
    Before she could start on the list, Alex put his arm around her, not just the banquette, and because it was so unusual, she
     wanted to burst into tears and have him kiss every tear away. Instead, she shut up like a tortoise and sort of withdrew her
     head (and pointy chin) into his shoulder.
    “Listen to me for a minute?”
    She brought out her tortoise, duckling, cheetah head to nod yes.
    “After meeting Fräulein Schiffer I looked at the economics of