Emerald City by Jennifer Egan Page A

he tells her, adding mascara.
    “Puffy.” Bernadette snorts. “Wait twenty years.”
    When Nick is satisfied, Alice goes to the water’s edge. The two other models flank her, their backs to the camera. Alice extends her arms slightly from the shoulders, a ballet pose. As Jann begins to shoot, she raises them slowly. Bernadette stands beside Jann. She sees a thin child, a body barely settled in its first frail curves. There is something yielding in the girl’s face, something easily wounded. She is looking at Jann.
    “More eyes,” he says. “Make them harder.”
    The girl lifts her chin, sharpening the thin line of her jaw. Her eyes are bright and narrow. She looks at Jann and Bernadette with the sad, fierce look of someone who sees a thing she knows she cannot have.
    Jann is excited. “Kiddo! You’ve got it,” he cries.
    She does, Bernadette thinks. In three years she will probably be famous. She will hardly remember Lamu, and if she runs across pictures of herself on this beach, she’ll wonder who took them.
    When the shot is done, Alice wanders to the water and begins to wade. She still wears the black bathing suit, and standing alone she looks like a teenager about to dive in. After dressing the other models, Bernadette follows. She and Alice wade together in silence.
    “I want to go home,” Alice says. Her eyes are red.
    “Twenty-four hours,” says Bernadette.
    “I mean home home.”
    “Rockford, Illinois?”
    The girl nods. “I’m lonely,” she says.
    It’s amazing, thinks Bernadette, how the young can just say these things. How easy it is.
    “We’re in Africa,” she tells the girl.
    Alice shrugs and looks at the shore. Oddly shaped trees rise from behind the dunes. Jann is shooting again. The other models lie stretched on the sand.
    “Home never looks so good as when you’re in Africa,” Bernadette says.
    Alice turns to her, squinting in the glare. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean you can go home whenever you want,” Bernadette says. “No one’s stopping you.”
    The girl fixes her distracted eyes on the horizon. The water looks thick as molten silver. It feels warm against Bernadette’s thighs.
    “And then you’ll be home,” Bernadette says.
    Alice dips her fingers into the water and paints wet streaks along her arm. She looks disappointed, as if she had expected to hear something else.
    “But now that you’ve had a taste,” says Bernadette, “you probably won’t.”
    She feels a moment of pride in the way she has led her own life. I didn’t go home, she thinks.
    “I bet I won’t,” Alice says.
    Something relaxes around the girl’s mouth. She looks relieved. It is hard to pass up an extraordinary life.
    “Anyway,” says Bernadette, “I can cheer you up a little.”
    Alice shrugs, clinging to her gloom. She is, after all, a teenager.
    “That shot we just did—that one of you?” Bernadette says. “That was the cover.”
    The girl runs a hand through her hair. Her lips part, and her eyes fill with tears. She is trying not to smile.
    They turn at the sound of voices. Jann jogs toward them with Nick in tow. They have finished the shot.
    “I want to get one of you,” Jann says to Bernadette. “I’ll make you a copy.”
    Bernadette glances at Alice. The girl has turned away, and her wet hands dangle at her sides.
    “Us three,” says Bernadette.
    Jann hands the camera to Nick. He goes to Bernadette’s side, and she stands between him and the girl, one arm around each. She can feel the bones of Alice’s shoulders, fragile and warm as a bird’s. She brushes a few stray hairs from the girl’s face.
    “Smile,” says Nick.
    There is a stillness, the pause of a moment being sealed. Bernadette notices the breeze, the limp water washing her toes. She feels an ache of nostalgia. Jann’s hand presses against her back. Between them all is a fragile weave of threads, a spider’s web. Bernadette longs for this moment as if it had already passed, as if it could have been.