Modelland by Tyra Banks
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
01/30/2016 Update:
The plan is hatched. Dylan pretends to faint, the lights in the entire stadium turn out, and while everyone panics because, holy fuck it’s dark and the dark causes people to stand up and just run around, the Unicas make their way into the depths of the stadium to find the ZipZap.
The ZipZap was brilliantly hidden in the bowels of a state-of-the-art stadium by burying it in a bunch of rocks.
I’ve been giving Tookie and her friends a lot of shit for being stupid, but I guess it didn’t really occur to me that, although they’re dumb, the baseline for dumb in Modelland is SO LOW that, you know, they’re pretty sharp for a bunch of teens.
This is the place that hides a thing under a pile of rocks, INSIDE of a stadium. If you want to hide a ZipZap in the floor, just put, I don’t know, a fake floor over it? Or a piece of furniture? Putting a pile of rubble on top of it, that’s too obvious, not to mention that a goddamn janitor is going to find it just by doing his job.
Seriously, this is like hiding a $20 bill underneath a donut in the breakroom at my work for safekeeping.
The girls find the ZipZap, which you may remember as being, basically, a portal, but also a zipper. This ZipZap is different. Its sides are red hot, and the zipper pull is glowing red. Tookie touches it. I guess you have to unzip(zap) a ZipZap, but c’mon. Use your fucking brains and get an oven mitt or something. This is like one of the first things we learn. We don’t touch hot!
The girls jump in, even though it looks like the ZipZap is filled with boiling blood or something, and they’re in some kind of long, dark slide, hoping to end up in LaDorno instead of the diabolical divide. The word is, they’ve got a 50/50 shot.
Now, up to this point, I figured the ZipZap was pretty much instant, but in this case the girls are in a sort of slide, and they have to make a choice of going left or right.
They go right, and they end up in the Diabolical Divide. But no problem, the jump back in the ZipZap before random fireballs can incinerate them, and this time they end up in the city of LaDorno.
Sooooo when they were saying that there was a 50% chance they’d end up in the Diabolical Divide, what they meant was that there was a 50% chance of them ending up in the Diabolical Divide, and they’d have to turn around, get back in the ZipZap, and go the other way. When there was a 50% chance of something bad happening, it was a 50% chance of a minor inconvenience. It’s like booking standby tickets, and someone says, “There’s about a 50-50 chance you’ll get on this flight.” But if you don’t get on the flight, you just get on a different one later. You don’t then remain stuck in the airport or just have to go wherever the next plane is going, be it Detroit or Beirut. It’s an inconvenience, but let’s not get crazy.
But anyway, we all come flying out of the ZipZap in LaDorne, finally safe.
At this point, the girls all discuss what to do next, and all independently decide that they’re going back to their awful, shitty lives in their homes. Why they decide this, I’m not sure. I would think, I don’t know, they could do something? Stick together? Not just slump back to working in a country that’s literally a giant department store. Not go live with parents who didn’t seem opposed to prolicide, as a concept.
By the way, there are a bunch of fun -cide’s.
Avunculicide: killing your uncle. Does that happen enough to be its own thing?
Omnicide: the act of killing all humans.
Giganticide: The act of killing a giant. AKA HEROISM.
But just then, Ci~L appears in the sky with, YES, her giant gossamer ballsack! It’s back! And she’s going to collect the girls and take them back to Modelland.
The girls make a run for it. Here’s the entirety of the chase, for your pleasure:
“The girls screamed and clambered out of the fountain, running down an alley, ducking under fire escapes and around garbage containers, and climbing over fences, Ci~L’s pouch in pursuit. They skidded to a stop at an open manhole cover. They scooted down the ladder and ran through a labyrinth of dark, steaming tunnels.”
And that’s how we do a getaway. Run through a New York alleyway. Don’t forget to dodge the guys moving a giant pane of glass across the street (they should really park on whatever side of the street they need to be on rather than carrying glass sheets across), and look out, that fruit vendor’s cart is ripe…for the tipping! Wuh-oh!
Okay, okay. They go through an alley, knock over some dumpsters, into the sewers, then back up top, where they find themselves at the exact spot where Ci~L selected Tookie to go to Modelland.
Tookie takes a moment to stand around and reflect, when out from behind a garbage can comes…Lizzie! Yes, faithful readers will remember Lizzie as Tookie’s multiple-personality friend who delicately (horribly) handled the issue of cutting in a toughtful (no), reasonable (NO) not outrageous manner (she sees a sharp-ish rock, can’t help herself, and picks it up to cut herself with). Tookie and Lizzie hug, and they do their insane secret handshake, which involves pointing up, smelling their armpits, then a curtsy, then the phrase “What’s up, Hot Queen!”
It turns out Lizzie has been hiding out in a trash can, Oscar the Grouch style, and waiting for Tookie to come back. And she’s already forgiven Tookie for leaving because she KNEW Tookie would come back.
Then Lizzie freaks out about something that’s happening in her mind and runs away. Tookie chases her, but alas, can’t match the speed of a homeless, malnourished girl who is probably experiencing significant blood loss if her desire to cut is any indication.
THEN, Ci~L shows up again, but the other Unicas show up in a bus just in time, and the group tries to escape in a bus. The bus even drives by Lizzie, who stares at something shiny on the ground, then picks it up and uses it to cut herself.
“‘Noooo!’ Tookie wailed.”
Haha, oh Lizzie. Can’t you stop picking up every shiny thing you see and cutting yourself with it, you silly goose?
Then the bus almost hits some dude, the driver slams on the brakes, and everyone smashes into the front windshield.
Smash cut to night. All the girls wake up, and outside the bus is Ci~L, who has resumed whipping herself bloody again, the same way she did when Tookie found her that fateful night, whenever the fuck that was.
Ci~L screams a bunch of nonsensical shit about how she could have saved someone, something about three people who were dead or maybe not dead or something, and how it’s all her fault, and the result of this display of pure insanity?
“Tookie stared at the Intoxibella. All at once, everything she’d assumed about Ci~L flipped upside down. She still wasn’t sure what was tormenting the Intoxibella, but one thing was certain: Ci~L was not guilty of murder. The guilt she felt right now was over something far more abstract, something more like bereavement and failure.”
So, after thinking Ci~L was evil for pretty much no reason, now we’re back to thinking she’s good, also pretty much for no reason.
And of course, that mystery simmers for less than a page before Ci~L explains what happened and removes all doubt.
Near as I can figure. This is as much sense as I can make of what happened with Ci~L, and I call this story
THE BALLAD OF SEAL [that way I don’t have to type a tilde just this once]
Ci~L became a supersupermodel. And she had these three friends from back home who looked an awful lot like the Unicas Piper, Dylan and Shiraz. Once Ci~L was a model, she brought her friends to live in the city in her fabulous penthouse with her, and they were happy, but then one day, her friends were gone. For whatever reason, Ci~L figured her friends were in the Diabolical Divide, so she went in there to find them. She found two of their buried corpses, and she found the other one I guess, somehow. She never says she found the third one, but I guess she did. Ci~L was planning to parade the corpses through the streets of LaDorno to show how evil Modelland was, but someone from Modelland got wind of the plan, so (and this is where it gets extra confusing) all Ci~L could do was bury her friends under these three obelisks, which I THINK Ci~L made, but I’m not sure.
And then Ci~L reveals that none of the Unicas were on the list for her to pick up on TDoD. Except Tookie, that is. And when Ci~L saw how weird-looking Tookie was, she figured it was her chance to pick other weirdos like the friends she lost. This was her “experiment” that Tookie overheard her talking about and assumed was an experiment that involved dissecting and whatnot. Yes, words are hard, and sometimes a thing like “experiment”, though ominous sounding, really does just mean what it says, a test to find out whether or not something is true. And perhaps next time we won’t run off assuming we’re going to be killed when really the “experiment” in question is about as dangerous and subversive as the time I mixed Bugles and Doritos in the same bowl.
Ci~L’s brave experiment is to bring together these 4 girls who defy the normal expectations of what a model is, and she explains this to them, that they are better than all the other models there who conform to the traditional standards of beauty.
By the way, I don’t think we’ve even talked about this part yet, but why is it that in this book, most attractive people are inherently bad? That’s the opposite side of the coin that says all ugly people are good, and it’s some kind of weird, four-sided coin that has the ones about ugly=bad and pretty=good. It’s not really defying a stereotype to show that the opposite is true. It’s kind of reaffirming the stereotype, but we were just incorrect about WHICH groups were in which categories.
I’m having trouble saying this right, but what I mean is, if we assume all one type of person is smart and they go in the smart bucket, and all of one type of person is dumb and they go in the dumb bucket, it’s not doing us much good to keep those same buckets and just switch the contents of each bucket without sifting and sorting. It’s still saying that all of people X are this certain way. Modelland is still saying that beauty, whether it’s present or not, is the determining factor for personality as well.
Anyway, the girls are given an ego boost by Ci~L, and they step back inside her gossamer ballsack to head back to Modelland before anyone notices they were gone.
So the purpose of this little jaunt was to check in with Lizzie, forget about her entirely AGAIN, and then find out the real deal with Ci~L, which, as in most parts of this book, could have just come through a conversation where Ci~L explained all this stuff.
83% finished. My god are we getting close to what is going to be a rousing conclusion.