Pure Belleza | ✔️

(70)

The weather was getting warmer each morning. Soon summer would be upon us and it would be time to go to Texas for three months. Or longer. Depending on where I was at, mentality wise. Although, I suspected that I'd end up back in California with Flynn. Where I knew I belonged.

Sunday morning beams of sunlight came through my bedroom window, touching the surface of the sea inspired decor and illuminating the blue wallpaper so that if I laid still, peeped through hooded lids and became still, I could pretend that I was floating on a cloud, staring up at the sky.

Yep, I missed California.

I couldn't complain too much though. New York was great. Max and Amalia were a dream to live with and I was having an incredible time with Bernie, designing, making, promoting. It'd been two weeks since mom said that she would give Bernie's portfolio to Harriet Bennett and I'd spent the entire week at her place in Philadelphia after school. If she wasn't required to attend, I'd have told her to skip and spent the entire day at her house. But she'd end up in trouble.

Things with Avery had been quiet in the media. There hadn't been anymore updates on his case, and I hoped it remained like that. I wanted nothing more than to put the entire ordeal behind me and move on.

Before I got dressed, I opened the brand new Instagram account that Bernie and I created together and checked out if there was some new activity. We'd created a page called Bernie&co. I was co. I didn't want to taint the page for Bernie and have a whole lot of spiteful haters flooding the comment section with negative bullshit. So instead, Bernie sent me photos of her designs and I edited them a little. Some filters, cropping and refining before I captioned them with the details. I also reached out to a few trusted friends that had a large following, asking them to give the page a shout out.

Not all of them had. A lot of the girls were threatened by the inclusion of more plus size and range in the fashion world. Like the standard was going to drop and render them all without a job. Not to mention, a lot of them felt that they had earned the right to model, they felt they had worked hard to meet the criteria and big girls who did nothing but sit on their asses and eat, didn't deserve the spotlight. That was Melrose Farthing's words, not mine. She wasn't nice to a single person on our sets. Not even herself. Nevertheless, there were a few, Jasmine, Darla, Jessica, those girls were all for the representation of all shapes and sizes.

Our Instagram page had three thousand followers so far and a lot of enthusiastic comments on Bernie's designs. There were three new messages inquiring about custom made dresses and pant suits and Harriet Bennett was a new follower on the page.

My gaze widened when I saw her name in the notifications, the little blue tick indicating her status, her seven point seven million followers who could potentially be pointed in the direction of Bernie's page. She was going to have a full on panic attack when she saw this, if she hadn't already.

When I was dressed in a white off the shoulder romper with a sashed waist and billowing shorts, I pulled my hair into a knot and wandered out into the corridor, coming to an abrupt halt when I heard the chatter of multiple women's voices. It'd slipped my mind that Amalia was having brunch with some of the girls from her high school.

She'd invited me to join her too and of course, I'd slept in. Rude.

But before I could make an appearance, I caught a snippet of conversation and stilled.

"You must know what she was in there for, right? I mean, you're dating her brother."

I waited for Amalia to answer but she didn't.

"We know it was an eating disorder," someone else said, a deeper but still feminine voice.

"Ugh, I hate it when girls with amazing bodies go on about how fat they are and how much weight they need to lose. It's so attention seeking."