You want to be there. You know you do. Don't lie, dahling. It's okay. I know what you're thinking when you look up at that splendorous place atop the mountain. I
know what fills you, spurs you on, fuels your dreams. You're obsessed with being chosen. Everyone is.
    The Land you thirst for has loomed at the top of the mountain in Metopia for as long as you can remember. But for most of the year, it's covered in fog, it's color changing with each passing day as if it's a gargantuan mood ring. You begin your mornings staring at the fog, longing for the fateful evening when it will turn a golden yellow and then, finally, like a push-up brassiere, lift.
    Oh, how you long for that moment, with bated fresh breath, I hope. For it signifies that luminescent eye will soon blaze in the sky, bathing the whole world in gold, touching everyone of it's inhabitants...including you.
    But dahling, it is no ordinary golden light. Once it tickles you, you are suddenly...transported. You hear the softest of sighs or faintest of giggles in your ear, even if you're standing alone. The once-stale air around you becomes both sweet and tart, making you nose tingle and sending a charge of excitement through your brain. The finest silk, the softest velveteen, or the supplest suede will brush your skin, but whatever you thought was touching you is nowhere to be seen.
    Basking in the light is such a naughty tease, like getting a single lick of the most delicious butter-pecan gelato you've ever tasted: it inflames your obsession, increasing your desire a hundredfold. You lust to go to this Land to become one of the only famous people in the world. You ache to be a 7Seven.
    But very few ever get the chance.
    Nevertheless, you and every young girl in the world vie for an opportunity on The Day of Discovery, which is grander than every global holiday combined. Making the delirium even more intense, the Land sends seven talismans called SMIZEs into the world. (What an arcane word! Who thought of such a thing?) These SMIZEs, which boost your odds of being chosen by ninety-one percent, are propelled through the world’s waterways. Naturally, the week before The Day of Discovery bathing, showering, pool use, and even sewer diving increase, threatening a drought. Chance meetings erupt into fisticuffs on occasion. Every girl wants to find a SMIZE, dahling.
    But not nearly as much as you do.
    You ignore the slim odds and disregard the warnings you’ve heard since birth, like how it’s easier to grow three inches in a month than it is to score a spot in the newest class of Bella’s. You turn a deaf ear to the cautionary tales whispered in your hometown and throughout Metopia: in dingy alleys and side streets of PitterPatter, during shift changes in Shivera, and on assembly lines of Peppertown factories. Like the rumor that the school often takes inhumane and irreversible disciplinary action. Or that certain “disposable” civilian girls are brought to the Land to be tortured and killed, used as human sacrifices for ungodly experimens and animalistic rituals.
    It’s not true dahling... or is it.
    Be careful for what you wish for dahling, because Modelland holds dark sinister secrets in the shadows.
    Every girl wants to be there dahling. You and every young girl around the world, wants that dream-come-true moment. And you say to yourself. This is my year, but so does every other girl to and you say, They'll choose me for sure.
    Every girl feels the same way...except one.
    Nova Mclee


Are you ready? Modelland is waiting for you...

See you there girls!

LOVE MALMCD