“No, Katerina, but I know you.” He brought his hand back out of his jacket and handed her the card. “My name’s Sergei Baum and I work with Stein Model Agency in New York City. I’m sure you’ve heard of us.”
She nodded and laughed, finding some amusement in the card or in him, he wasn’t sure which. Maybe she was just nervous.
“Katerina, you’re tall, you’re beautiful, and most importantly, you have it. I have an instinct for these things, one that’s never let me down yet, and I know we can make a star of you at Stein. How would you like to be a model?”
“I’m flattered, Mr. Baum, but—”
“No, you’d be perfect, just perfect, and it needn’t interfere with your studies, not at all. A lot of our girls study at the same time as launching very successful careers.” He thought he could see her wavering and said, “I’ll even make a wager with you, Katerina, and you don’t have to decide right now—call me once you’ve had a think about it—but I’ll make a wager that you’ll be on the cover of Vogue within one year. One year! I guarantee it.”
She smiled, looking genuinely flattered, but just as he was beginning to think he’d reeled her in, she handed the card back, so decisively that he found himself taking it.
“Thank you so much, Mr. Baum, but no thank you.”
With that she moved gracefully on, walking away from him with such poise, such effortless beauty, that he couldn’t resist one last desperate gambit.
“I can make you a supermodel, Katerina!”
She stopped long enough to turn back with another bright laugh as she said, “But I don’t want to be a supermodel—I’m going to be a historian.” Her eyes seemed completely alive to the absurdity of it, but he saw now that there would be no persuading her.
And with that she was gone, disappearing among her fellow students. His phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out and glanced at it—the office—then looked up again, feeling the pressure he was under, thinking it wouldn’t hurt to try one more time. But she had vanished, slipping seamlessly back into her own life.
And as hard as he stared at the sea of students moving purposefully about the campus, as striking as she was, still he could not see her. Her name was Katerina, and he’d spoken to her just moments before, but already her disappearance seemed total, almost as if she had never been there at all.