SHORT HORROR STORIES #11
THE FAME ILLUSION
For years Katrina watched the models on DESI AGENCY’S website. She wished, prayed and dreamed of the day that she too could maybe be signed just like all those gorgeous models.
Katrina decides to attend a DESI Agency open casting. To her delight, DESI Agency exclusively selects Katrina from the 100’s of girls that attended the casting.
Katrina is over the moon! She immediately adds every single model from the agency on Instagram (after all she has been admiring their profiles for years). Gleefully, like birds of a feather the other models follow her back. They become friends, chatting, tweeting and liking each other’s images.
A couple of months pass, Katrina gets an exclusive catwalk show, she then gets 1 big campaign. She immediately unfollows all her ‘unsuccessful’ model friends. Their friendship to her, fleeting and replaceable. Katrina believes that she is on her way up and does not want to associate with these ‘lesser beings’ anymore. Katrina gets a few magazine articles, ‘upgrades’ her agency and gets another campaign. She makes it to the Models.com’s Hot list, then the top 50 list… Weeks pass and Katrina has stopped replying altogether to the ‘lesser models’. However, Tanu who had been with DESI AGENCY for 3 months before Katrina joined, never stopped commenting and congratulating Katrina, despite Katrina’s complete non-response. I mean they were friends once, after all.
6 months passes.
Katrina’s career stagnates. She’s been removed from the models.com top 50, removed from the hot list and plunged into the icy cold ‘has been’ list. The industry buzz around her dissipates. The ‘agency upgrade’ was just in name and reputation, but she was left worse off because the agents didn’t like her and therefore stopped working on her.
Tanu on the other hand, one of the models Katrina considered ‘unsuccessful’ in the past and unfollowed, breaks through and becomes the new IT girl. Katrina, struck by a pang of envy to save her fledgling career by association quickly refollows Tanu the new IT girl. Katrina writes vacuous nice comments all over her feed so that casting directors can see their association and pick her instead. Katrina also asks Tanu to meet for coffee. However, Tanu hasn’t let fame get into her head, she chooses not to unfollow all the ‘unsuccessful’ models as Katrina chose to. Tanu keeps them all as friends, trying to uplift them with her because she knows that circumstances can change in a heartbeat.
However, when Tanu’s phone beeps and she sees Katrina’s ‘obviously thirsty’ message, she feels a pang of sadness. Tanu clearly remembers when Katrina was mean to her because Katrina thought she was better than all the other girls because of the ‘special’ campaign. Tanu can’t bear the pain of having been cast aside because of her perceived position in the past. So instead she chooses to ignore Katrina. After all, Katrina too had a choice to be unconditionally kind but chose not to.
Embittered & jaded, Katrina’s career never recovers.
People will forget what you said, however, they never forget how you made them feel.