Girlhood, Interrupted

Rachel, who calls herself a "dork by day, model by night," takes to the top of the faux runway in her Fluffernutter-colored Gap baby doll dress and black heels, and then nearly wipes out doing the model walk-three-steps-cross-turn-hold pattern (who knew being a walking hanger was so complicated?). "Slow it down, and think about your turns," the teacher gently offers over blasting hip-hop music and giggled conversations. "When I think about it, I feel like I'm going to fall over," Rachel says, then gives it another go. With a self-conscious swipe at her dark-chocolate hair, she moves all 5 feet and 10 inches of creamy white limbs and torso down the make-believe catwalk. She's coltish and awkward. Sheepish, really. She's in eighth grade, for goodness' sake.

After 45 minutes of awkward vogue-ing, the class moves down the hall to the glaring lights of the makeup room for skin-care tips. As the teens pair up and take turns instructing each other on how to properly cleanse their faces – wash, toner, five dabs of moisturizer! – the teacher uses the opportunity to lecture on eating habits. "I eat to live; I don't live to eat," she says as Rachel and her friends play a not-so-discreet game of Hangman. "I want to cover eating disorders in another class, because I see a lot of that in this industry." That is a lecture Rachel doesn't care to hear. "I eat two bacon double-cheese burgers and large fries every time I go to McDonald's," she whispers to a super-skinny girl sitting next to her. She does that even though she's already been told by those in the industry that she has baby fat to lose.

At the end of the two-hour session, with the kids squirming in their seats, the teacher reminds them to bring their bathing suits to class next Saturday. Groans all around. "What if I accidentally forgot my bathing suit on purpose?" asks Rachel with a giggle. "Just mentally prepare yourselves beforehand," the teacher says. "You'll be doing it in front of each other; this is your safe place."

At least for now it is. But Rachel has already been thrown out into the supremely harsh lights of the high-fashion modeling industry, which, as recent history has shown, is anything but safe these days.

It all started with a simple goal: learn to stand up straight and gain some confidence. A year ago, Rachel Fleming was a normal middle schooler from Northbridge – albeit an extremely tall one – who loved to play the flute and bounce on the trampoline and crush on teeny-bopper heartthrobs like actor Daniel Radcliffe. And, just like any normal middle schooler, she was plagued by adolescent angst and self-doubt. "Seventh grade last year was not a good year," she tells me in her sweet, quiet voice. "I didn't have much confidence with myself last year, and I was basically the geek of the school." The nasty queen-bee-and-wannabe set teased and, worse yet, ignored the shy girl with the glasses and ponytail. And so she slouched her way through her day, pulling her 5-foot, 10-inch frame in on itself, hoping to just disappear.

Her parents simply wanted her to uncurl herself, and so they enrolled her at John Robert Powers School in Boston, about an hour's drive from their home. The acting and modeling classes were expensive – the Elite plan cost them nearly $6,000 – but Rachel loved them. It was a small price to pay to see her start to carry herself less like a question mark and more like an exclamation point.

And then the unimaginable happened: The wallflower was discovered. In January, a rep from Model Management Group in New York walked into the school and fell in love with Rachel. A few weeks later, Rachel and her mother, Becky, drove down to Manhattan and signed an exclusive, three-year contract with the management company. "It was pretty crazy," Rachel says. "We were kind of nervous signing, but then I figured, once the contract is over, I'll be about 16-and-a-half, and if I want to do something else, I can just go somewhere else." But until then, as Rachel puts it, the agency owns her: She can't even cut her hair on a whim.

The indescribable "it factor" – a unique look that captivates you – is how Jeff Cohen, the president of Model Management Group puts it, and that's why his company jumped on the chance to sign her exclusively. "When we see someone who's very strong, like Rachel, we have to make a decision right up front," he says. "We know when other people see her that they're going to try to steal her from us. The industry is like the Wild West. People poach. It's a really funny industry."

And sometimes not so funny. "There are serious dangers to modeling, and I don't think anybody should minimize them," Cohen says. Last August, Luisel Ramos, a 22-year-old model from Uruguay – who reportedly subsisted on nothing but lettuce and diet soda – dropped dead during a fashion show in her home country due to complications from anorexia; her 18-year-old sister, Eliana, also a model, died from a heart attack related to malnutrition six months later. A media firestorm prompted organizers of Madrid's fashion week last September to ban models with a body mass index, or BMI, of less than 18. (Luisel Ramos's was said to be about 14.5; the World Health Organization considers a BMI of 16 to be indicative of starvation.) But just two months later, a 21-year-old Brazilian model, Ana Carolina Reston, who weighed just 88 pounds, died in Paris of an infection related to complications from anorexia. Cohen says that he watches his models carefully, but it's a struggle. "There's such resistance to it," says Cohen. "We had a model who had that problem, and we ended up losing her because she didn't want to hear it from us. The problem is the fashion market. The people who should be in there should be people who are naturally thin. A lot of people go in, and if they don't starve themselves, they don't fit the measurement."

But Cohen thinks the real danger for a model as young as Rachel is what he calls the child-star syndrome. "There's a lot of jealousies out there, and a lot of my other models that are female actually have to almost be home-schooled because they get ripped to shreds by their other schoolmates. They get ostracized because people want to bring them down," he says. "Girls will tear your character apart; they'll spread vicious rumors, and it's really, really hard on them."

Rachel hasn't had any of these problems. But then again, she hasn't even been paid to model yet. She has the exclusive contract, but that just means she has an agency trying to get her work. Her five auditions so far – for book covers, commercials, websites, and the like – have not landed her a paying gig, despite requiring her to make the 10-hour round-trip drive to New York at a moment's notice (and wrecking the A student's perfect school-attendance record). That may be because she is always the youngest girl there. "I wonder if they think a 13-year-old could do the job," says her mother, Becky. This modeling thing was going to be a long, slow slog to the top, they thought. And then, she had another big break.

In May, an agent from the international agency Visage picked Rachel as one of only three girls in the United States to go to Osaka to work for the summer. (She left in July for Japan, where her separate contract says she can't get any heavier or get any sort of suntan, and she is not allowed to ride a bike while she's there.) They'll be paying to beef up her portfolio, market her to their clients, and, hopefully, get her on the runway and in print magazines and, maybe, says Cohen, modeling for products – a sunglasses ad for Prada, for instance, or a Gucci campaign.

It is, he says, an amazing opportunity. "Every American model would love to go to Japan for a couple months to get their feet wet and get tear sheets and actually get paid. There's literally 250 people behind her should she have balked at any of the conditions, and they let me know that. She's 13, and things like this don't usually happen to a 13-year-old. It's totally out of the ordinary. I actually was surprised that they took her at 13. It is so unusual; it's usually 15, 16."

After her trip to Japan, Cohen plans to try to get Rachel an agency in every major market. "People will want her in LA; they'll want her in Texas, Miami, London, Paris. And then, all of a sudden, you can get the call from Dior," he says. If she is in demand, his agency will start to renegotiate with everyone. "Now we know people want her, so the price goes up," Cohen says. "It all becomes business at some point."

And that's the part that perhaps worries the Flemings the most. Sitting in their modest Victorian in leafy, rural Northbridge last May before her Japan trip, Rachel looks all fresh-faced in jeans as two oversize sheepdog puppies crash around the small space. "It's overwhelming. Completely overwhelming," says her father, Sean, who works as a production manager at a door company, as he comes in from their 11-year-old son Dylan's baseball game. "It was way more than we bargained for. Our goal was to just have her walk upright and get some confidence, and this thing has kept growing and growing and growing. It's a lot."

Becky, a special-education teacher, is having nightmares. In just a few short weeks – after Rachel picks up her Presidential Scholar and Citizen awards at her eighth-grade graduation – mother and daughter are off to Japan for at least eight weeks. Becky, who has never tasted sake, and Rachel, whose closest encounter with Japanese food was some noodles at a mall, have no idea what's in store for them. They may even be asked to stay an extra month, which is why they're meeting with Rachel's new principal to talk about possibly missing the first four weeks of high school. It may be a moot point by then: If Rachel's career takes off, as everyone predicts, it could mean home schooling for the foreseeable future.

Becky, who loathes shopping and much prefers comfy shoes over anything smacking of hip, still cannot fathom her sweet young daughter having a modeling career. "I was horrified. I've just never been into the superficial fashion stuff at all, and when they liked her, I was worried that it was going to go to her head," she says. "The whole superficial part of it was kind of hard for me at first, but she stayed the same. She's the same kid." And she plans on keeping her that way: Becky and Rachel's grandmother, who lives upstairs, are determined to supervise her every job until Rachel turns 18. They'll also watch her weight closely. "We tell her if she ever gets to that point where she gets obsessed with her body and not eating," Becky says, "we're just going to take her out."

It's a legitimate concern. "She has these little chunky packs on the hip area," Becky says. "Even Mariko from Japan said that when she met her, she's still got some baby fat to grow out of. Rachel didn't take it personally." Didn't take it personally? Yikes. Isn't it hard being judged on your appearance, especially at such a vulnerable age? "It's a little weird having people stare you down, deciding whether they like you or not, but I really don't mind it, because I know not everybody's going to like me," Rachel says. She learned that ugly lesson in seventh grade. Of course, marching into the glittery, glossy, cutthroat fashion world may just be like battling those nasty girls all over again. The difference this time around is her newfound confidence in her own skin.

"Getting started in modeling is really expensive – taking her around, buying her clothes, photography. Outrageous. Money on top of money," her mom says. "All the money, if that's all she got out of it, it would have been worth it. If someone teases her, she just laughs at them now. That's worth a million bucks right there."

Sitting on the couch, "geeky Rachel," as her father affectionately calls her, curls up her long legs and smiles her dorky smile.

Gretchen Voss is a freelance writer in Concord. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.