Free 2 Death of a Supermodel by Christine DeMaio-Rice Page A

not to notice the flakes of rainbow translucence floating on the surface of her coffee. A newspaper lay within reach— The Daily News , folded with the headline pressed against the counter. She slid it closer and opened it. She had made a point of avoiding the headlines when she passed the newsstand because she knew something she didn’t want to see would be on the front page. She was right, but her fear that it would be her face, in all its unmade-up exhaustion, was unfounded. Thomasina’s job was to be in print, and she did it even after her death.
    SUPERMODEL THOMASINA WENTE DEAD AT 27
    Laura realized she hadn’t known how old the model was, as that wasn’t generally a subject for discussion. The window of opportunity when one should be modeling, between eighteen and twenty-five, was too short. Either a woman was too young and a target for MAAB, or she was too old and a target for indifference. Thus, they lied. All of them. And their agents lied. Because it took two years to build a girl into a full-on giraffe and then the agents wanted enough time to capitalize on it before she had babies or drank herself into an unfittable twenty-seven-and-a-half-inch waist.
    If the front page was any indication, she knew more than the reporters did. Sartorial Sandwich, along with her and Ruby’s names, appeared at the bottom of page one. Also, Thomasina was featured in her first outfit, a rayon suit that draped on her like cigarette smoke over a coat rack.
    The story continued on page eleven, where she was hit full-on with her own face in stunning black and white. First runway show of her life and she couldn’t drag a mascara stick over her eyes in the morning? Is that the way things would run her whole life, seeing herself and being stunned at the dishrag eyes and hay-bale hair? And why didn’t they print Ruby, who always looked Photoshopped, even when she woke up hung over and cranky? Pretty news in the front, ugly news inside, she guessed. It took her another minute of shaking off her shock at seeing herself to get to the actual story.
    “Ms. Wente was the founder of the White Rose Foundation, a rescue mission for young girls in Eastern Europe. She is survived by her brother, Rolf Wente, and sister, Hannah. Both live in Berlin.”
    The article didn’t mention that she was one of the ostalgie heiresses, an old guard of East German wealth who had managed to get the mobs of protesters to protect them by saying that the new democracy would help them join the Wentes in the new meritocracy of the rich. Then, they played on the nostalgia of the prewar days and their part in the beauty of the East German countryside to keep protesters at bay. For that, they used the passion and anger of the skinheads, who wanted to return to some past permutation of Germany. Brilliantly played, if ethically questionable.
    When Laura saw the picture of Rolf, she knew why his sister had been so ashamed that she’d led Laura to believe she had no family, and why the celebrity-sucking media had only mentioned Thomasina’s dead sister. Rolf Wente was a skinhead, and a mean-looking one at that. She hoped he stayed in Germany.
    The Lancaster Glass building was a big pig on the waterfront that had captured the imaginations of developers, journalists, and activists. The building was twenty-two stories of fat red bricks and steel casement windows that were mostly broken, not because the neighborhood was “bad,” and not because the nearby residents didn’t care. On the contrary, the building sat on some of the most valuable real estate in the city. Back in the eighties, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Williamsburg was the arson center of the city, Lancaster Glass, which had owned the building since 1850-something, abandoned their factory/warehouse and moved their manufacturing operations to China. Nobody cared until the late nineties. Then, suddenly, everyone cared.
    Floor-to-ceiling casement windows. Exposed brick. Breathtaking views of the city.