Model Behavior

Chapter 1
The Plan Is Hatched

Chapter Description: Jennifer's friend Amy begins to plot to help her friend out of her depression.

Jennifer Christine Jacobs was only 18 when she was discovered by a local advertisment agency. She began her career slowly, but her talent in the field of modeling and her inborn beauty brought her a lot of attention quickly. And so she made her way up the ladder quickly from local used car ads to regional cable commercials for local eateries, all the way up to national commercials for a rent-a-car agency.

It was no surprise that she garnered a lot of attention. She was a tall, lanky girl, at about six feet with only a hundred-thirty pounds to her name. Her eyes were big and blue, with lashes that called out "Buy me!" across the airwaves (no matter what it was she was selling), and her long, fine blonde hair reached down to her waist. She was a very beautiful woman, at least insofar as television audiences were concerned, and so her career skyrocketed quickly into a personal wealth of over a million dollars in less than three months.

She had just turned nineteen, and her fame was beginning to get to her head. At first, she had remained the same nice home-town girl she started out as, but as the months went on and the bank accounts grew, she began to lose touch with the common person she had started off as. She began to alienate her friends and relatives, and she began to abuse stimulants to maintain her figure. Paranoia began to set in, as it does with most people who reach fame without the proper preparation.

As her behavior and demeanor became more erratic, the business she had once taken for granted began to stop calling as much, and finally stopped calling at all. she had reached a low point in her short life and career, and since she had forsaken most of who and what had come before she had nothing to fall back on. While she remained wealthy, she had lost her career and her family and friends as quickly as her career had come.

Jennifer finally gave up on ever being called on as a model again on her twenty-first birthday. She instead chose to get another job, this time as a receptionist (ironically at the same advertising agency which had originally started her career), because although she didn’t need the money, she was desperate for some human contact.

She had worked at the office for a few months and she had become fast friends with a woman named Amy Jones, a twenty-two-year-old mother of one. Amy was the working member of her family, and her husband Joe was a stay-at-home dad to their two-year-old son Philip.

Jennifer loved children, and oftentimes Amy and Joe would call on her to babysit Phil so that they could have some time to themselves. Jennifer was more than happy to oblige; she still craved human attention more than anything else.

Jennifer was babysitting Phil one afternoon while Amy and Joe went out to lunch, and as the toddler watched TV on her lap, Jennifer was deep in thought.

She was busy mulling over the differences in her life as compared to Phil’s, and the more she thought about it, the more she became engrossed with a fantasy of trading places with the little boy. His life seemed to fulfill the only things that Jennifer had left to want for, the undying contact and love, the satisfaction in simple things, those were what Jennifer wanted back in her own life.

But an awful stench shook her out of that revelry and she giggled at the little boy. That was one thing she had going for her...at least she wasn’t stuck taped into a dirty diaper.

It wasn’t the last time she had those thoughts, though. The fantasy ran through her mind any time she was called on to babysit the boy over the next few months, and certain little things about her personality began to change when she was around children. subconsciously, she was acting more than a little childlike when she was around kids, to the point of actually engrossing herself in play with Phil to the point where she didn’t even notice his parents’ return.

It was, of course, something Amy and Joe noticed. Luckily for Jennifer, Amy and Joe were more than sympathetic to her, and were in fact willing to go one step further.

"You know Jen wants to go back to modeling...she’d never admit it, but she’d love to get the chance again, right?" Amy remarked to Joe as they lie in bed together that night.

"Well, sure...so?" Joe asked, non-commitally. He wasn’t sure where Amy was going with this one, but he couldn’t deny the statement.

"Don’t you still talk to Ken once in awhile?" Amy sat up and looked over at Joe intensely.

Joe realized now that something was up. Sure, he still talked to Ken. Ken Williams...he had gone to college with him, and Ken was in "the biz" as it were...he was a model talent agent, actually, although his specialty was children.

"Yeah, I still talk to him...always busy, now, though. Ever since he got that job." Joe looked back at Amy innocently. He had put two and two together, but he refused to finish the equation...let the wife do it. After all, the answer was most likely no anyhow...he didn’t have much use for a twenty-two-year-old for commercials on Nickelodeon.

Amy squinted at her husband. She hated when he acted like this, but she acted like she didn’t know what he was getting at. "Let’s have him over for dinner this weekend...I’ll ask Jennifer to come by and watch Phil for us while he’s here."

Now Joe definitely knew something was up. But the truth was, he was too tired from dealing with the kid all day to argue with Amy, so he just nodded, "Yeah, yeah," he mumbled, and then drifted off to sleep.

Amy watched him fall asleep and smiled to herself. She felt like she had just set a huge Goldberg machine in motion. It might take awhile to reach its end target, but it eventually would...of that, she was certain.

Before she drifted off to sleep, she considered her friend’s weird behavior that night. For two hours she had stuck around after her and Joe had gotten home, and she was playing with Phil...but almost like an equal. Maybe at a pre-schooler’s level. She only hoped that she was reading her friend’s behavior properly...this plan wasn’t one that would be good for an unwilling participant.

But before she could consider that particular better, she too drifted off to sleep.