"No," I said, "I'm in college." As if that made me superior. ![]() An agent spotted me in a Madrid bar (I was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt) and asked if I'd ever thought of modelling. In the last semester of my senior year, I went to study in Spain and was "discovered". By the end of the run, I had learned to put the make-up on myself. I felt like another person: not just in character but as another me, who didn't have a scar. Night after night, she covered the scar with pancake make-up and powder. The director worried that my scar might be distracting, so someone in the theatre department who was good with make-up offered to help. Still, I envied those women and kept a secret list of photographers I dreamed of working with: Steven Meisel, Irving Penn, Peter Lindbergh, and, of course, Annie Leibovitz, all the while pretending the scar didn't matter. The closest I had come to seeing someone like myself in a magazine was Yasmeen Ghauri on a Cosmopolitan cover in a pink satin dress. ![]() But while I loved fashion - I knew about everything from Elsa Schiaparelli and Chanel to Halston and John Galliano - I never thought I was pretty enough to model, even without my scar. "She's so pretty, she could have modelled." It angered me that people saw me as a ruined beauty. But now, all people noticed was the scar. I had always stood out for my height, my skin colour, my very long hair. My mother, I felt, was secretly relieved. Now that I had a caterpillar of scarred skin crawling down my arm, it seemed ridiculous to imagine that any agency would be interested in such an imperfect specimen. A year after the accident, we stumbled on the pictures in a drawer. The photographer promised my mother not to show the pictures to any modelling agency unless she agreed. But she disapproved of what was going on. Grudgingly, my mother had held the light reflector for him under the Santa Monica pier. Two months before the accident, my mother and I had met a photographer who begged her to allow him to take photos of me for his book. After nearly a year of physical therapy in the mornings before high school, I could once again stir pasta, dance, embrace others, throw a Frisbee or football, and in countless other ways, be a normal American teenager. The surgery that put it there had saved my arm. ![]() But I also knew my scar was a symbol of my survival. I perfected a casual pose that hid it under my left hand and thumb when my arms were crossed. When I first got the scar, I was self-conscious about it. I wished I'd had a conversation with the doctor and asked him to cut on the underside of the arm instead, where the scar would have been hidden. It was half an inch wide and seven inches long. After surgery, I regained the use of both of them but was left with a long scar on my arm. My right arm had been shattered and my right hip had been fractured. When I woke up hours later, I had tubes coming out of several places in my body. A helicopter landed in the middle of the highway to take my parents away. ![]() They used the "jaws of life" - giant metal cutters - to open the car roof like a sardine can. I remained conscious, covered in glass, for the 40 minutes it took for the paramedics and firefighters to get through the traffic.
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