Too Ugly for My Sister’s Wedding, So I Became a Lingerie Model Instead

 

Part I — The Test Shot That Changed the Room

The email subject line from Laurel had been gentle, even pretty: bridesmaid palette & photo guidelines. The document attached was not. It was a three-page manual for disappearing. “Muted neutrals only.” “Long sleeves preferred.” “No pattern of any kind.” “No shine, no silk, no satin.” “Hair back, no volume, no dramatic makeup.” And then, because subtlety had never been my family’s love language, a fourth page I scrolled to and reread three times before the sentence settled like a stone: We’re keeping the photo aesthetic light and ethereal; please sit out the group portraits so we can maintain symmetry. xo.

Sit out. Like I was a last-minute plus one from Craigslist. Like all those years at Laurel’s side—splitting lip gloss, studying each other’s faces in mirror light, staying up late whispering secrets we used to be convinced were only ours—had been practice for stepping outside the frame when the light got good.

I didn’t cry. Darius was across the room, half under my couch with a screwdriver, swearing softly at a wobbly leg that had outlasted three apartments and two serious relationships. “You okay?” he asked without looking, because after six years of friendship he recognized the precise quality of silence I carried when I was about to either implode or become a problem.

I held out the phone. He slid out and read. His face did the thing where every emotion on the menu tried to show up at the same time. “You don’t have to go,” he said, which was his way of saying You don’t have to set yourself on fire to keep them warm.

“I know,” I said. And I did, in the intellectual way you know you shouldn’t touch a hot pan. But family rhetoric is a religion; and I had worshipped, tithing in shame and swallowing every attempted prayer whole.

“Come to the studio with me,” he said suddenly, sitting up. “Malachi’s doing a test shoot for a new lens. He needs faces. He said bring anyone who isn’t a beige chair.”

“I am not a model,” I said, gesturing at my body like it was an exhibit. The curves I’d been taught to camouflage. The belly I carried honestly. The thighs you could not ignore if I climbed stairs in front of you. “I am… not Laurel.”

“Exactly,” he grinned. “You’re Annabelle. And I’m tired of watching you act like that’s something you have to apologize for.”

Malachi’s studio was on the third floor of an old factory whose bones thrummed with the ghosts of shirts and shoes. The last of the afternoon sun spilled through huge windows and turned dust into glitter. Everything smelled like lemon cleaner and coffee. The seamless paper background was bright white like a dare.

“You must be D’s Annabelle,” Malachi said. He had a camera slung over his shoulder and the kind of smile that made strangers tell him secrets at drugstores. “You’re beautiful. I’d love to shoot you if you’re comfortable.”

I stared at him because men don’t say this to women like me without an asterisk attached. He raised both hands half an inch. “Not that,” he said gently. “Not ‘the brave, plus-size, body-positive moment.’ I mean, let me take your picture before you talk yourself out of it. If you hate it, we delete.”

We started with jeans and a black tank top because that’s what I’d worn. He put me on the mark and asked me to breathe. “Everyone thinks modeling is about holding still,” he said while the shutter clicked softly. “It’s really about letting go.”

He asked real questions—What did you love at seven? Who made you feel small at fifteen? What do you want to say to the version of you that’s still apologizing?—and clicked while I answered, my face shifting without permission from training to truth. It felt like a therapy session I’d swear I’d never attended.

“Take a look,” he said after twenty minutes, gesturing me over to the monitor.

After Malachi shows me the shots on his computer, I barely recognize myself. Holy crap, I whisper.

“Right?” he says, zooming in on one photo of me laughing, my curves unapologetic, eyes fierce. “This is gold.”

“That’s me?” I ask, breathless. Not because I doubted compositing or lighting—because I had never seen my face without shame edited into it.

“That’s you,” he says. “All you.”

“Mind if I send these to a few people?” Malachi asks, turning his chair toward me. He looks like a kid who found a new favorite thing and needs to show everyone he loves.

“Where?” I ask, my heart pounding.

“Some brands I work with,” he says casually. “Including Lucy at Except Lingerie. She’s been looking for new faces.”

My heart stops. Except is the biggest body-positive brand in the country. Their billboards are everywhere. Lucy Chen is the woman who told Good Morning America that the word “fat” is only dangerous when you point it like a weapon at someone who didn’t consent to be hurt.

“Send them wherever you want,” I tell him, trying to suppress my grin and failing. “I’m done being invisible.”

He lifted the camera back to his eye. “Okay, Annabelle,” he said softly like a prayer. “Let’s make you impossible to ignore.”

Two weeks later, I’m standing in a professional studio, wearing nothing but black lace lingerie and a silk robe. It’s 7:13 a.m., and I’m trying not to hyperventilate.

Lucy is exactly what you’d expect from the Except CEO—confident, sharp, and radiating authenticity. “You’ve got this,” she says from her position near the monitors. “You’re about to change lives. Starting with your own.”

“Take off your robe whenever you’re ready,” Malachi calls from behind his camera.

I close my eyes and picture my mother’s living room—the way Laurel couldn’t even look at me while suggesting I hide during her wedding photos. My mother folding her mouth into the kind of empathy that stings. The countless family pictures where I was positioned in the back, or worse, asked to take the photo instead of being in it.

The robe hits the floor.

“Beautiful,” Malachi says softly. He doesn’t say, “brave.” He doesn’t say, “even though.” He says the thing I needed and no more.

“Now tell me what you’re thinking?” he asks, camera still in hand.

“I’m thinking about every time they made me feel ugly,” the words come out stronger than I expect. “Every time they told me to cover up or stand in the back or skip the beach trip or—”

Click. Click.

“Keep going.”

“I’m thinking about my sister’s wedding. How they’re so worried about their precious aesthetic that they’d rather pretend I don’t exist.” I straighten up, shoulders back, head high. “So I’m going to be everywhere.”

“Yes,” Lucy claps from the sidelines. “That’s the money shot.”

Black lace gives way to deep red silk, then emerald satin. It feels like an exorcism orchestrated by Vogue. I have never even owned lingerie, let alone worn it in a room full of people who do this for a living. Mom always said girls like me should stick to practical underwear. Girls like you. The phrase carves a groove in my skull I’ve been stepping in for twenty years.

“Girls like you,” I say out loud during a pause, then wince, catching myself, shame rising like static.

“Sorry,” Lucy says gently, stepping close enough that I can feel the sincerity of her breath. “Plus-size. Fat. Thick. Use the words you want. Don’t apologize for ‘fat.’ It’s a descriptor, not an insult. They made it an insult to control us. Take it back.”

“Fat,” I say, rolling the word around in my mouth like a marble. It doesn’t cut. It clicks into place.

“Last set,” Malachi announces. “The white bridal collection.”

I freeze. “Bridal?”

“Too soon?” he asks gently.

“No,” I square my shoulders. “It’s perfect.”

The white is stunning—delicate lace and pearl details that would make any bride feel beautiful. I pose. I imagine Laurel in her size two Vera Wang, and something inside me goes quiet in the way you go quiet before you make a choice you will not regret.

“You know what?” I say to Malachi between shots. “I actually feel sorry for them.”

“Why is that?” he asks, snapping another picture.

“Because they’re so trapped by what they think beauty should look like,” I say, moving, the fabric catching light like a conspiracy. “They’re missing out on so much joy, trying to maintain this perfect image.”

Click. Click. Click.

“That’s it,” Malachi says softly. “That’s the shot we’ve been waiting for.”

Later, looking at the final photos, I barely recognize myself—not because of how I look, but because of how I feel when I look at them. There’s no shame, no apology in my eyes. Just strength. Lucy pulls up a chair next to me, her eyes flashing.

“We need to talk about the campaign rollout,” she says. “These are going to be everywhere. Magazines, social media, billboards.”

“Billboards?” My heart races.

“We’re thinking major cities, high-traffic areas. Saturation.”

“Why?” I say, pulling out my phone and opening the wedding invitation I’d been avoiding. St. Margaret’s Cathedral, downtown, right on Main Street. I swallow. I zoom in on the map. Across the street, a billboard the size of a small apocalypse currently advertising luxury watches. “How much would it cost to get a specific billboard location?”

Lucy studies my face. “You’re thinking something deliciously petty, aren’t you?”

“The pettiest,” I grin, showing her the Google Maps location. “The wedding’s in eight weeks. Is that enough time?”

Lucy’s smile turns wicked. “Oh honey, for this level of poetic justice, I’ll make it happen in six.”

Malachi looks between us, then at the bridal shots on his screen. “You’re going to put these up across from her wedding venue?”

“Not just any shots,” I say, pointing to one specific photo. Me in white lace, looking directly at the camera with years of pent-up defiance. “This one. Let’s see them try to keep me out of the wedding photos when I’m fifty feet tall across the street.”

“You know this will burn bridges,” Lucy says quietly.

I think about the torn-up envelope of cash that showed up in the mail the day I turned eighteen to “discourage bad habits” that looked like prom dresses. About years of subtle cruelty masked as concern. About a lifetime of being told to make myself smaller so other people could feel bigger. Some bridges need to burn, I say, feeling the heat already. “And I’m done hiding in the shadows.”

 

Part II — The Red Dress and the Revenge Receipts

They keep a record of you in their phones. You learn it only when you stop handing them the pen. My family’s group chat is called “Hart Fam Bam,” which tells you most of what you need to know. It’s confetti and breathless texts about Reykjavik and real-estate listings and “who wants to bring deviled eggs to Easter.” In the past few months, it had also become a field guide to the people my mother and sister became when they thought I had left the chat.

Mom: Has anyone heard from Annabelle? She hasn’t RSVPed for the shower.

Laurel: Probably too busy feeling sorry for herself.

Holly: Maybe someone should check on her.

Holly is our cousin. She has spent most of her life trying to remain invisible in the family photos. She occupies the edges and keeps the secrets. She was the first person to text me after the “sit out the photo” email. You okay? she wrote. It wasn’t large. But it was a yes in a room full of no.

I screenshot the conversation, adding it to my growing collection of evidence. Darius calls it my “revenge receipts.” He is not wrong. They’re less about revenge than reality. When you’ve been gaslit for years, “proof” becomes a form of oxygen.

The doorbell rings. I open it to find my mother on the other side, holding a gift bag the color of teeth with tissue paper spilling out the top.

“Darling,” she breezes past me into my apartment like the air isn’t mine. “We’ve been so worried. You’ve been avoiding everyone’s calls.”

“I’ve been busy,” I say, which isn’t a lie. Between stacks of lingerie in my closet and nights in Malachi’s studio and afternoons in Lucy’s office, I have built myself a life.

“Too busy for your sister’s bridal shower?” she asks, setting the bag down on my kitchen island.

“I’m not going,” I reply. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she laughs, like ridiculing my choices is an old family game. “Of course you are. Family supports family.”

I laugh. “Since when?”

“Annabelle,” she sighs, that familiar disappointed sigh. “I know you’re hurt about the wedding photos, but we were trying to be kind. Sometimes love means protecting people from embarrassment.”

“Protecting who exactly?” I ask, and watch her search for a good answer in a mind that does not hold one.

She pivots. “You posted that photo on Facebook,” she says quietly, picking up a framed picture from my bookshelf of me and Darius at his birthday party. I’m in a red dress that shows every curve. I’m laughing with my head thrown back, my whole body in the moment. The kind of image we never took in my house because joy was a resource only certain bodies got to hoard. “Aunt Margaret called me about it.”

“Was she clutching her pearls when she did?” I ask, smiling without humor.

“This isn’t you,” my mother says, tracing the glass with a finger. “These attention-seeking outfits. This rebellious attitude. What happened to my sweet, sensible girl?”

“She grew up,” I say. “Realized she deserved better than being your family’s dirty secret.”

My mother’s face hardens. “We have never treated you like a secret. We’ve only ever wanted what’s best for you.”

“Do you think I enjoy seeing my daughter throw herself at cameras, flaunting her condition?”

“My condition?” I step closer. “You mean my body? The one you’ve been trying to shame into submission since I was eight years old?”

She grabs her purse like it’s a weapon. “The shower is next Saturday at noon. Wear the dress I brought. Show everyone you can be mature about this.”

After she leaves, I text the family group chat: Can’t make the shower. Have a work commitment that day. Send Laurel my love.

Within seconds, my phone explodes.

Laurel: You can’t be serious.

Mom: We all have work, Annabelle.

Aunt Margaret: I’m sure she has a good reason!

Laurel: She always has a “good reason.”

Holly: I’m proud of you for taking care of yourself, Belle. (Then a second later: sorry, wrong chat. Which was not wrong.)

The next morning, Lucy’s name lights up my phone. “Billboard contract signed,” she says, her voice fizzing with mischief and a kind of electric righteousness. “Installation date confirmed—6 a.m. on wedding day. You ready for this?”

I’m about to answer when another message pops up on my screen. Mom, in the chat I still haven’t left: I’m worried about her. This isn’t healthy behavior. Maybe we should suggest therapy.

Laurel: She’s probably just depressed about her weight again. Remember when she tried that crash diet last year?

Holly: Guys, she might see these messages.

Mom: Don’t be silly. She left the group chat weeks ago.

I take a screenshot so fast I nearly sprain my thumb.

“Am I ready?” I ask Lucy, one eye on the text, one eye on the Google Calendar where installation time now sits like a surprise party with the wrong cake. “I have never been more ready for anything in my life.”

The next eight weeks are a blur of fabric and light. Except fast-tracks the campaign. We do spreads that make people who have never seen my body celebrated for anything other than its potential to be punished stop scrolling. We film videos where I talk to camera like I’ve known it all my life, telling truths I’ve been told were ugly—about the day a babysitter pinched my stomach and said “you’ll thank me when you’re older,” about every time a sales associate in a boutique looked at me and suggested I try a scarf. We shoot the white set again with a veil this time, my hair piled on top of my head like a chapel, the lace catching light like hope.

Then, early on a Saturday that feels like summer even though the calendar insists it isn’t, a crane lifts my image into the sky.

At 6:13 a.m., Darius texts a picture from the other side of Main Street. It’s me, fifty feet tall, in white lace, my mouth open in a laugh that looks like I just said the thing that got me in trouble at Thanksgiving. Across the street, St. Margaret’s Cathedral squats in all its stone finery, its steps already draped in tulle.

“It’s perfect,” he writes. Then: “People are already stopping and taking selfies. You’re going to break the internet.”

By 7 a.m., the billboard is trending. By 8, local news trucks have parked two blocks down. By 9, Aunt Margaret has posted three pictures of florals and one Facebook status that reads, Lord, give me strength. By 10, Lucy calls. “You’re everywhere,” she says. “CNN. BuzzFeed. Vogue wants an interview. You want to talk to Vogue?”

“Why not?” I reply. “Maybe I’ll wear red.”

At 11:45, I stand across from the cathedral and watch guests arrive in satin and insecurity. I watch an uncle I love squint up at the billboard and then across at me and grin like a co-conspirator. I watch a cousin whisper to another cousin and then take a selfie with the photo I never would have let them take in my old life.

At 12:03, Laurel, in her Vera, steps onto the sidewalk with our mother. They look like a Madewell ad—neutral palette, hair artfully undone, faces set to a filter. Laurel sees me. She sees me again, across the street, the version of me she tried to edit out. Her mouth tightens into the shape of someone who can command rain. She pivots so her back is to me. The photographer composes his frame. In the background, I glow.

“Don’t you dare,” my mother mouths at me across the traffic, her voice invisible, her meaning clear.

I don’t move. I don’t need to. The billboard does. It is as immoveable as anything I have ever made myself into.

During the ceremony, two dozen guests step outside to point their phones up at the sky. During the photos, one flower girl points at me and whispers something that makes her mother turn and smile without meaning to. During the reception, two of Laurel’s bridesmaids slip out and take selfies with my face behind them, and their comments sections explode with women from their hometowns tagging each other and writing, THIS.

By dusk, my body has appeared on five more billboards in four more cities and one Times Square digital marquee that makes tourists stop and stare. I do the Vogue interview with Lucy sitting beside me, our knees touching like anchor points.

“What is this really about?” the reporter asks.

“It’s about being edited out,” I say. “And editing yourself back in so big no one can pretend not to see you.”

The video gets two million views in twenty-four hours. The hashtag #BillboardBride trends on Twitter and in living rooms. People from all over send photos of themselves at beaches they were told to skip, wearing dresses they were told to avoid, eating ice cream they were told they didn’t deserve. I repost as many as I can. I go to bed feeling a kind of full that has nothing to do with the donut I ate at midnight because it had glitter as a topping.

A week later, someone leaks our family group chat screenshots. I don’t ask who. I don’t post them myself. I watch as the comments pour in, as people nominate their own family’s worst text, as women mail each other courage and the instructions for blocking numbers. Mom’s attempt at a damage-control status—Sometimes love means protecting those we love from consequences—is screenshot and memed and turned into a t-shirt whose proceeds go to a nonprofit that provides access to therapy for kids without money.

Laurel tries to sue me for defamation and disruption of a wedding operation. The email makes me laugh so hard I send a copy to Darius and Lucy and Malachi with just the cry-laugh emoji. My lawyer writes back with a thing that starts with “Hi, counselor,” and ends with “best of luck.” Six days later, Neil files for annulment, citing irreconcilable differences. He texts me an apology that is more about him than anyone he hurt. I type back the one sentence I owe him: You weren’t there when I needed you and I will not be using you as a mirror ever again.

Holly texts me for the first time without an apology attached. I’m proud of you, she writes. Her text bubbles sit for a long time. I want to be brave like you.

You already are, I write back. Come to the show tonight. Wear something you like.

 

Part III — The Runway and the Sister I Choose

The Vogue runway show happens in a room that looks like a warehouse trying to confess to being a church. The music is a heartbeat. The audience is a storm drip. The smell is hairspray and adrenaline and fabric you want to eat. Backstage is a chaos I hadn’t prepared for—the good kind, the kind made of women reminding each other to breathe.

“Malachi’s ready,” the stage manager calls. “The Vogue team’s in position. You know what to do.”

I check my reflection one last time. The wedding gown I’m wearing isn’t white. It’s a deep, powerful red—the same shade I wore to crash my sister’s wedding. The same color that’s become my signature.

“You look like a fire someone finally allowed to burn,” Lucy says, pinning one last piece of hair into place. “You ready?”

“I was born ready,” I say, and for once, I believe it.

The lights are blinding as I step out onto the runway. The crowd’s energy fills the room, but I hardly hear it. My heart pounds in my chest, and yet, for the first time in my life, I feel completely calm. This is my moment. Every step I take is for the little girl who thought she was too much, too loud, too big. Every turn is for the teenager who was told to stand at the back of family photos. And every pose is for the woman I’m becoming—a woman unapologetic, confident, and powerful.

I walk the runway like I own it. Because I do.

At the end of the runway, Holly is in the front row in a black jumpsuit that fits her like a love letter. She looks stunned and beautiful and like she wants the ground to swallow her in the old way, the way we were taught to pray to dirt.

I step down. “Come on,” I whisper. “Your turn to be seen.”

She hesitates. Her hands are already half up in apology. “Belle, I—”

“Just once,” I say. “Just walk.”

She stands. Her chin lifts. Her body remembers how to be a person. She takes my hand. We turn back toward the camera bank and walk the runway together, two girls from a living room where the word “flattering” was a weapon, two women from a group chat that told us we were a problem. The crowd loses its mind. The sound is a wave.

Backstage, Lucy is crying. “You just broke the internet again,” she says, smiling so wide I can see the teeth she paid for and the ones she earned.

Darius appears like he always does, camera in hand, grin like ninety watts. “You know,” he says, lowering his camera for a second, his eyes soft, “I think this might just be the start of something huge.”

“You’re damn right it is,” I say, my eyes already flicking over to the team of stylists and photographers, most of them already swarming over the models in the bridal collection. “We’re not just modeling underwear anymore. We’re modeling permission.”

As the show continues, Lucy pulls me aside. She’s wearing that confident smile of hers—one that says everything’s in place. “We’re thinking about expanding,” she says. “You’ve become a sensation. We need you to head up the next campaign, maybe even launch a new line. The Visibility Project could go nationwide.”

The Visibility Project has been a bullet point on a sheet in Lucy’s office for a year—an initiative to make representation less of a buzzword and more of a business plan. It had been talk. Now it feels inevitable.

“You’re changing lives, Annabelle,” Lucy says, her voice low and genuine. “Not just your own, but thousands of others. You’re helping people see themselves.”

I feel a surge of emotion like a wave and steer my body through it like a good swimmer who remembers the undertow can be a friend if you stop fighting it. Not today. Today, I don’t cry. Today is about reclaiming everything I thought I lost.

After the show, the after-party is a blur of lights and hands and congratulations. My phone is a war zone. I mute it. I let the noise be noise. Holly leans against a wall next to me, breathing like someone who just did a hard thing and did not die. “Did you mean it?” she asks, eyes on the ceiling.

“What?”

“We’re both a work in progress?”

“Absolutely,” I say. “Progress is the only goal I ever want.”

Neil texts me from a number I didn’t delete because I no longer find it threatening. I saw the campaign photos. I saw you on that runway.

I read it twice before my thumb hovers over the screen. I can feel the weight of my emotions. He was part of the machine that tried to erase me. He benefited from a culture where people didn’t ask him to apologize for the harm done in his vicinity.

I type back: You weren’t there when I needed you. I’m not looking for your approval anymore. I’m standing in my own light now.

Send. Block. Relief.

In the Uber home, my mother calls three times. I let it ring. She texts: I’m sorry. She texts: We should talk. She texts: You’ve humiliated us. The order tells me everything.

 

Part IV — The Project and the Peace

Three months later, I’m standing on stage again, this time at a press conference for the Visibility Project. The room is packed with reporters, influencers, and advocates for body positivity, disability representation, gender-affirming fashion—people who have had to fight for permission to take up space and now realize they do not need permission to be human.

I’ve been named the body positivity director, and the project is being launched nationwide—billboards in cities that wouldn’t run our ads last year, panels at campuses that still use BMI graphs as if they are God’s metric, pop-up events in parking lots where women can try on underwear without fear that a shop assistant will make a face.

As I take the podium, I look out at the sea of faces, and I see something I never thought I’d see: people who look just like me. People who have been made to feel invisible, or worse, like they weren’t worth celebrating.

“I’ve been there,” I say into a room that goes still not because anyone commanded it but because bodies recognize the temperature of truth. “I know how it feels to be shoved into the background, to be told you’re not enough, that you need to shrink yourself to fit into someone else’s idea of beauty. I know how it feels to get a wedding invitation with rules for vanishing.”

There are soft sounds. There are laughs that hurt because they recognize their own origin story.

“We’re going to do something different,” I say. “We’re going to show up. We’re going to put billboards where the churches are. We’re going to shoot red dresses in rooms that were supposed to contain white. We’re going to put people of every size and ability and color in places that told them to leave. Not because representation is a cute word. Because visibility is a safety issue. If you cannot see yourself, you cannot practice living. We’re going to make sure kids see themselves so they can stop practicing disappearance.”

After, a reporter asks the question I know is coming. “What about your family? Are you… reconciled?”

I think about my mother’s last text: I’m sorry. You’ve humiliated us. You’ve destroyed our family’s image. And I think about Holly’s: I saw the latest Vogue spread. You’re a role model now, Annabelle. I think about Laurel’s suit and our lawyer’s reply. I think about Aunt Margaret’s Facebook apology that began with If I offended anyone and went downhill from there. I think about Uncle Rob’s text that reads simply: proud of you, kid.

“We’re a work in progress,” I say. “We’re starting from the truth. That’s more than we had last year.”

When it’s over, Lucy presses a glass of champagne into my hand and whispers, “The Billboard Bride broke the internet again.” Darius lifts his camera. He doesn’t have to ask if he can post.

After the event, I go home to my apartment and stand in front of the mirror in a stunning red gown, preparing for another event. The light catches the fabric, and for a brief moment, I remember everything. The pain, the rejection, the feeling of being overlooked. But it’s all gone now. Not because time has made it pretty. Because I have built something bigger.

Holly sends a photo of herself in a yellow dress she never would have worn last year. She is at therapy. She is safe. She writes: I told my therapist I want to be visible. It felt like a curse. Now it feels like a goal.

We’re both a work in progress, I reply.

My mother calls one more time. I let it go to voicemail. She leaves a message that starts with “I love you,” and includes “I’m sorry,” and ends with “I want to try.” When it’s safe for me, I’ll let that message mean something. For now, it’s enough to know I don’t have to perform forgiveness to prove I’m a good person. I am a good person because I am one.

I step into the car, ready for my next step. The city blurs around me—billboards and bus shelters, store windows reflecting my shape. There is a child at a stoplight with her mother. She points up at a photo of me in emerald satin, laughing with my arms above my head, my belly round and honest. “She looks like me,” the little girl says, loud in that way that makes grown-ups flinch because they’re not used to joy being that precise.

Her mother turns and follows her finger and sees me and sees herself and then nods. “She does,” she says. “She looks exactly like you.”

Later that night, Darius sends me a video that someone took of that moment. He is the only person who knew I needed it to sleep.

 

Part V — Epilogue: The View from the Other Side

The internet will move on. It always does. There will be a new billboard to rage about, a new bride to shame, a new brand that thinks repurposing a slur is innovation. The thing I have learned is that this is not a campaign; it’s maintenance. You show up every day and grease the gears. You listen when someone tells you a photo of your face made them want to buy a swimsuit for the first time in ten years. You cry when they send you pictures. You answer every message you can until your thumbs ache. You start saying no to things so you can say a deeper yes to your life.

Sometimes, I stand across from St. Margaret’s Cathedral and look up at that spot. It has already changed ads twice. Luxury sedans have taken the space where my face was. Watches have replaced my laugh. But every once in a while, a bird will perch on the bracket at the top left corner and I will remember how my body looked carved into sky. It does not make me wistful. It makes me grounded. Fifty feet tall felt like a performance. Five foot four feels like a life.

Laurel mails me her wedding photos. There are fewer of them than she wanted. There is a note inside: I was wrong. I don’t contact her. She needs to sit in the room she designed. One day, when I don’t need it to mean anything, I might call. I don’t owe her absence or presence. That is peace.

People still message me. Some send hate cloaked as concern. Some tell me I am promoting obesity like a disease they are trying to cure by yelling. I block. I go to the gym because I like the way my heart feels afterward. I go to the beach because I like the way the water holds me. I go to brunch and order pancakes because life is short and because my body is not a contract I signed to make other people comfortable.

There is a little girl in my building with hair like a dandelion. She wears a pink tutu every day in July. Her mother apologizes. I kneel on the sidewalk and say, “Sweet dress,” and she twirls so hard she nearly falls over. Her mother stops apologizing mid-sentence. That is the Visibility Project. It doesn’t need a press conference. It needs sidewalk moments and women who decide not to look away.

I’m Annabelle. I’m seen.

The world tried to make me invisible. I chose to make myself impossible to ignore. And the view from the other side?

It’s better than I ever imagined.

END!

Disclaimer: Our stories are inspired by real-life events but are carefully rewritten for entertainment. Any resemblance to actual people or situations is purely coincidental.