Emerald City by Jennifer Egan Read Free Book Online Page A

those fat, silvery clouds I’d seen from airplane windows. What I felt, seeing her, was a jolt of disappointment.
    “Amanda,” I said.
    She twisted around to look at me, squinting without recognition. Her confusion shocked me: for all the time I’d spent thinking of Amanda, she had barely known who I was.
    “Oh yeah,” she said, smiling now. “Sacred Heart.”
    She told me to wait while she finished with her customer, and I went to look for my shoes. I picked white satin with tiny pearl designs sewn on top. I brought them to the cash register, where Amanda was waiting, and she rang them up.
    “Where do you go to school?” I asked.
    She named a large public school and said she liked it better there. Her fingers moved rapidly over the keys.
    Lowering my voice, I asked, “Where did you go?”
    Amanda flipped open the cash drawer and counted out my change, mouthing the numbers. “Hawaii,” she said, handing me the bills.
    “Hawaii?” It was not what I’d imagined.
    My mind filled with a vision of grass skirts, flower necklaces, and tropical drinks crowded with umbrellas and canned cherries. Julius had been there, and this was how he’d described it.
    “We were there two weeks,” Amanda said. “Then my dad cameand got us.” She did not sound ashamed of this in the least. As she handed me my box in its plastic bag, she said, “He came all the way over, he had to. Or else we would’ve stayed forever.”
    Amanda closed the register drawer and walked me out to the street. The day was warm, and we both wore short sleeves. Her arms were smooth and lightly tanned. On my own arm, the scar was no more than a thin pink line.
    We stood a moment in silence, and then Amanda kissed me goodbye on the cheek. I caught her smell—the warm, bready smell that comes from inside people’s clothes. She waved from the door of the shoestore, then went back inside.
    I felt a sudden longing not to move from that spot. I could feel where her arms had pressed, where her hands had touched my neck. The smell was still there, warm and rich like the odor a lawn gives off after hours of sunlight. I tried to spot Amanda through the store windows, but sunlight hit the glass so that I couldn’t see beyond it.
    Finally I began to walk, swinging my bag of shoes. I breathed deeply, inhaling the last of her smell, but it lingered, and after several more blocks I realized that what I smelled was not Amanda. It was myself, and this day of early summer—the fresh, snarled leaves and piles of sunlit dirt. I was almost fifteen years old.

EMERALD CITY
    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.
    He was a photographer’s assistant, loading cameras all day, holding up light meters, waving Polaroids until they were dry enough to tear open. As he watched the models move, he sometimes worried he was still too California. What could you do with sandy blond hair, cut it off? Short hair was on the wane, at least for men.So there it hung, golden, straight as paper, reminiscent of beaches he’d never seen, being as he was from Chicago (in Chicago there was the lake, but that didn’t count). His other option was to gain or lose some weight, but the starved look had lost its appeal—any suggestion of illness was to be avoided. Beefy was the way to go; not fat, just a classic paunch above the belt. But no matter how much Rory ate, he stayed exactly the same. He took up smoking instead, although it burned his throat.
    Rory stubbed out his cigarette and checked to make sure the lights were off in the