The Devil Wears Prada (33 page)

 My dad
walked in and opened the duffel bag that he’d been dragging around all
day, one I’d assumed held racquetball clothes for his game later. But he
pulled out a maroon box emblazoned with “Limited Edition!” across
the front. Scrabble. The collector’s edition, where the board came
mounted on its own lazy Susan and the squares had little raised borders so the
letters didn’t slide around. We’d been admiring them together in
specialty game stores for the past ten years, but no occasion had ever
warranted purchasing one.

 “Oh,
Dad. You shouldn’t have!” I knew the board cost well over two
hundred dollars. “Oh! I just love it!”

 “Use
it in good health,” he said, hugging me back. “Or better yet, to
kick your old man’s ass, as I know you will. I remember when I used to
let you win. I had to, or you’d stomp around the house, sulking all
night. And now! Well, now my old brain cells are fried and I couldn’t
beat you if I tried. Not that I won’t,” he added.

 I was
about to tell him that I’d learned from the best, but Alex had walked in.
And he didn’t look happy.

 “What’s
wrong?” I immediately asked as he fidgeted with his sneakers.

 “Oh,
nothing at all,” he lied while glancing in the direction of my parents.
He shot me a “just hold on a sec” look and said, “Here, I
brought a box.”

 “Let’s
go get a few more,” my dad said to my mom, moving toward the door.
“Maybe Mr. Fisher has some sort of cart. We could bring a bunch up at
once. Be right back.”

 I looked
at Alex, and we both waited until we’d heard the elevator open and close.

 “So,
I just talked to Lily,” he said slowly.

 “She’s
not still mad at me, is she? She’s been so weird all week.”

 “No,
I don’t think it’s that.”

 “So
what is it?”

 “Well,
she wasn’t at home…”

 “So
where is she? Some guy’s apartment? I can’t believe she’s
late for her own moving day.” I yanked open one of the windows in the
converted bedroom to let some of the cold air dissipate the smell of new paint.

 “No,
she was actually at a police precinct in midtown.” He looked at his
shoes.

 “She
was where? Is she OK? Ohmigod! Was she mugged or raped? I have to go to her
right away.”

 “Andy,
she’s fine. She was arrested.” He said it quietly, as if he were
breaking the news to a parent that their child wasn’t going to pass
fourth grade.

 “Arrested?
She was arrested?” I tried to stay calm, but I realized too late that I
was screaming. My dad walked in, pulling a giant cart that looked ready to
topple under the weight of unevenly stacked boxes.

 “Who
was arrested?” he asked off-handedly. “Mr. Fisher brought all this
stuff up for us.”

 I was
racking my brain for a lie, but Alex stepped in before I could think of
anything remotely plausible. “Oh, I was just telling Andy that I saw on
VH-1 last night that one of the girls from TLC was arrested on drug charges.
And she always seemed like one of the straighter ones…”

 My dad
shook his head and surveyed the room, only half listening and probably
wondering when exactly Alex or myself had become so interested in female pop
stars that we actually discussed it. “I’m thinking that the only
real place your bed can go is with the head against the far wall,” he
said. “Speaking of which, I better go see how they’re doing.”

 I
literally flung my body in front of Alex the minute the apartment door closed.

 “Quickly!
Tell me what happened. What happened?”

 “Andy,
you’re shrieking. It’s not so bad. Actually, it’s kind of
funny.” His eyes crinkled as he laughed, and for a brief second he looked
just like Eduardo. Ew.

 “Alex
Fineman, you better fucking tell me right now what happened with my best
friend—”

 “OK,
OK, relax.” He was clearly enjoying this. “She was out with some
guy last night that she referred to as Tongue Ring Boy—do we know who
that is?”

 I stared
at him.

 “Anyway,
they went out for dinner and Tongue Ring Boy was walking her home, and she
thought it’d be fun to flash him, right there on the street outside the
restaurant. ‘Sexy,’ she said. To get him interested.”

 I
envisioned Lily unwrapping a dinner mint and strolling outside after a romantic
meal, only to pull away and yank up her shirt for a guy who’d paid to
have someone ram a post through his tongue. Jesus.

 “Oh
no. She didn’t…”

 Alex
nodded somberly, trying not to laugh.

 “You’re
telling me my friend got arrested for showing her breasts? That’s
ridiculous. This is New York. I see women every day who are practically topless—and
that’s in the workplace!” I was shrieking again, but I
couldn’t help it.

 “Her
bottom.” He was looking at his shoes again, and his face was so red, I
couldn’t tell if he was embarrassed or hysterical.

 “Her
what?”

 “Not
her breasts. Her bottom. Her lower half. Like, all of it. Front and
back.” An ear-to-ear grin had finally broken out, and he looked so
delighted that I thought he might wet himself.

 “Oh,
say it isn’t true,” I moaned, wondering what my friend had gotten
herself into now. “And a cop saw her and arrested her?”

 “No,
evidently two little kids saw her do it and pointed it out to their
mother…”

 “Oh,
god.”

 “So,
the mother asked her to pull her pants back up, and Lily loudly told her what
she could do with her opinions, and the woman went and found a cop standing on
the next street over.”

 “Oh,
stop. Oh, please, just stop.”

 “It
gets better. By the time the woman and the cop came back, Lily and Tongue Ring
Boy were going at it on the street, pretty hot and heavy from what she
said.”

 “Who
is this? This is my friend Lily Goodwin? My sweet, adorable best friend from
eighth grade now gets naked and hooks up on street corners? With guys who have
tongue rings?”

 “Andy,
calm down. Really, she’s fine. The only reason the cop actually arrested
her was because she gave him the finger when he asked if she had, in fact,
pulled her pants down…”

 “Oh,
my god. I can’t take it anymore. This is what it must feel like to be a
mother.”

 “…
but they let her go with just a warning, and she’s going back to her
apartment to recover—sounds like she was pretty drunk. I mean, why else
would someone flip off a police officer? So don’t worry. Let’s get
you moved in and then we can go see her if you want.” He headed toward
the cart my dad had left in the middle of the living room and started unloading
boxes.

 I
couldn’t wait until later; I had to see what had happened. She picked up
on the fourth ring, right before it clicked into voice mail, as if she’d
been debating whether or not to answer it.

 “Are
you OK?” I asked her the second I heard her voice.

 “Hey,
Andy. Hope I’m not screwing up the move at all. You don’t need me,
right? Sorry about all this.”

 “No,
I don’t care about that, I care about you. Are you OK?” It had just
occurred to me that Lily may have spent the night at the police station,
considering that it was early Saturday morning and she was just leaving.
“Did you stay overnight? Injail? ”

 “Well,
yeah, I guess you could say that. It wasn’t so bad, nothing like TV or
anything. I just slept in this room with one other totally harmless girl who
was in for something just as stupid. The guards were totally cool—it
really wasn’t a big deal. No bars or anything.” She laughed, but it
sounded hollow.

 I
digested this for a moment, tried to reconcile the image of sweet little hippie
Lily getting cornered in a urine-flooded cell by an extremely angry and
possessive lesbian. “Where the hell was Tongue Ring Boy through all of
this? Did he just leave you to rot in jail?” But before she could answer,
it occurred to me: Where the hell was I through all of this? Why hadn’t
Lily called me?

 “He
was actually really great, he—”

 “Lily,
why—”

 “…
offered to stay with me and even called his parents’ lawyer—”

 “Lily.
Lily! Stop for a second. Why didn’t you call me? You know I
would’ve been there in a second and not left until they’d let you
go. So why? Why didn’t you call me?”

 “Oh,
Andy, it doesn’t matter anymore. It really wasn’t that bad, I
swear. I can’t believe how stupid I was, and trust me, I’m over
getting that drunk. It’s just not worth it.”

 “Why?
Why didn’t you call? I was home all night.”

 “It’s
not important, really. I didn’t call because I figured you were either
working or really, really tired, and I didn’t want to bother you.
Especially on a Friday night.”

 I
thought back to what I’d been doing the night before and the only thing
that stuck clearly in my mind was watchingDirty Dancing on TNT for exactly the
sixty-eighth time in my life. And out of all those times, that had been the
first that I’d fallen asleep before Johnny announced, “No one puts
Baby in the corner,” and proceeded to, quite literally, lift her off her
feet, until Dr. Houseman admits that he knows Johnny wasn’t the one who
got Penny in trouble, and claps him on the back and kisses Baby, who has
recently reclaimed the name Frances. I considered the whole scene a defining
factor in my identity.

 “Working?
You thought I was working? And what does too tired have to do with it when you
need help? Lil, I don’t get it.”

 “Look,
Andy, let’s drop it, OK? You work constantly. Day and night, and lots of
times on weekends. And when you’re not working, you’re complaining
about work. Not that I don’t understand, because I know how tough your job
is, and I know you work for a lunatic. But I wasn’t going to be the one
to interrupt a Friday night when you might actually be relaxing or hanging out
with Alex. I mean, he says he never sees you, and I didn’t want to take
that away from him. If I’d really needed you, I would’ve called,
and I know you would’ve come running. But I swear, it wasn’t so
bad. Please, can we forget it? I’m exhausted and I really need a shower
and my own bed.”

 I was so
stunned I couldn’t speak, but Lily took my silence for acquiescence.

 “You
there?” she asked after nearly thirty seconds, during which I was
desperately trying to find the words to apologize or explain or something.
“Listen, I just got home. I need sleep. Can I call you later?”

 “Um,
uh, sure,” I managed. “Lil, I’m so sorry. If I’ve ever
given you the impression that you can’t—”

 “Andy,
don’t. Nothing’s wrong—I’m fine, we’re fine.
Let’s just talk later.”

 “OK.
Sleep well. Call me if I can do anything…”

 “Will
do. Oh, how’s the new place, by the way?”

 “It’s
great, Lil, it really is. You did a fantastic job with it. It’s better
than I’d ever imagined. We’re going to love it here.” My
voice sounded empty to my own ears, and it was obvious I was talking just for
the sake of it, keeping her on the phone to make sure our friendship
hadn’t changed in some inexplicable but permanent way.

 “Great.
I’m so glad you like it. Hopefully Tongue Ring Boy will like it,
too,” she joked, although that, too, sounded hollow.

 We hung
up and I stood in the living room, staring at the phone until my mom walked in
to announce that they were going to take Alex and me out for lunch.