Rory knew before he came to New York what sort of life he would have. He’d read about it in novels by hip young authors who lived there. He saw the apartment, small but high-ceilinged, a tall, sooty window with a fire escape twisting past a chemical-pink sky. Nights in frantic clubs, mornings hunched over coffee in the East Village, warming his hands on the cup, black pants, black turtleneck, pointed black boots. He’d intended to snort cocaine, but by the time he arrived, that was out. He drank instead.

She sat up and rubbed her eyes. She looked slaphappy, the way she looked sometimes after a second gin and tonic. Eight months before, after a year’s meticulous planning, she had bought her own ticket to New York from Cincinnati. And this was just the beginning; Stacey hoped to ride the wave of her success around the world: Paris, Tokyo, London, Bangkok. The shelves of her tiny apartment were cluttered with maps and travel books, and whenever she met a foreigner—it made no difference from where—she would carefully copy his address into a small leatherbound book, convinced it would not be long before she was everywhere. She was the sort of girl for whom nothing happened by accident, and it pained Rory to watch her struggle when all day in Vesuvi’s studio he saw girls whose lives were accident upon accident, from their discovery in whatever shopping mall or hot dog stand to the startling, gaudy error of their faces.

At Stacey’s suggestion they took a cab to a TriBeCa bistro where Vesuvi often went. It was probably expensive, but Rory had just been paid—what the hell, he’d buy Stacey dinner. Maybe he would even call Charles to see if he was back from L.A., where he’d been styling all week for Sara Lee. Rory didn’t envy Charles his job, although he made good money; sometimes he was up half the night, using tweezers to paste sesame seeds onto hamburger buns or mixing and coloring the salty dough that looked more like ice cream in pictures than real ice cream did. Rory had been amazed to learn that in breakfast cereal shots it was standard to use Elmer’s glue instead of milk. “It’s whiter,” Charles had explained. “Also it pours more slowly and doesn’t soak the flakes.” Rory had found this disturbing in a way he still didn’t quite understand.

“So,” Anouschka said, “what places you have been?”

Stacey didn’t answer at first. She looked double-jointed in her chair, heaped like a marionette.

“I’ve been to New York,” she said.

There was a beat of silence. “New York,” Anouschka said.

Vesuvi started to laugh. He had a loud, explosive laugh that startled Rory at first. He had never heard it before. “New York!” Vesuvi cried. “That’s priceless.”

Stacey smiled. She seemed as surprised as everyone else.

Vesuvi rocked forward in his chair, so that his heavy boots pounded the floor. “I love it,” he said. “New York. What a perfect comeback.” Anouschka just stared at him.

It began to seem very funny, all of a sudden.

A chuckle passed through the group like a current. Rory found himself laughing without knowing why; it was enough for him that Vesuvi had a reason. His boss gazed at Stacey in the soft-eyed way he looked at models when a shoot was going well. “It’s a hell of a place, New York,” he said. “No?”

Stacey opened the refrigerator. Rory always kept a supply of Cokes for her in there; Diet, of course, but also some regulars in case she had earned one that day and not yet rewarded herself. To his surprise, she pulled out a can of regular now.

“What the hell,” she said. “I mean, really, what difference does it make?”

Rory stared at her. She had never said anything like this before. “What about Vesuvi?” he asked, regretting it even as he spoke.

“Vesuvi won’t hire me. You know it perfectly well.”

She was smiling at him, and Rory felt as if she had peered into the lying depths of his soul. “Vesuvi doesn’t know shit,” he said, but it sounded lame even to himself.

Rory’s heart beat quickly. “So maybe it doesn’t work,” he said. “The modeling. Maybe that just won’t happen.”

He searched her face for some sign of surprise, but there was none. She watched him calmly, and for the first time Rory felt that Stacey was older than he, that her mind contained things he knew nothing of. She stood up and handed her Coke to Rory. Then she grasped the railing of the fire escape and lifted her body into a handstand. Rory held his breath, watching in alarmed amazement as the slender wand of her body swayed against the yellow sky. She had no trouble balancing, and hovered there for what seemed a long time before finally bending at the waist, lowering her feet, and standing straight again.

“If it doesn’t work,” she said, “then I’ll see the world some other way.”