The Devil Wears Prada (60 page)

 “Good
morning,” I said, kissing her on the cheek. “You know I don’t
want you to leave, right? And Isaac’s welcome to stay as long as he can
figure out how to sleep between the hours of midnight and tenA .M. Hell, even
Kyle can stick around if he promises not to talk. See? We’re easy
here.”

 Lily had
managed to hobble down the stairs and greet my parents, who were both dressed
for work and saying their good-byes to Kyle.

 I made
my bed and tucked Lily’s back underneath, making sure to fluff her pillow
before sticking it in my closet for the day. She’d come out of the coma
before I even got off the plane from Paris, and after Alex I was the first one
to see her awake. They ran a million tests on every conceivable body part, but
with the exception of some stitches on her face, neck, and chest, and the
broken ankle, she was perfectly healthy. Looked like hell, of
course—exactly what you’d expect for someone who’d danced
with an oncoming vehicle—but she was moving around just fine and even
seemed almost annoyingly upbeat for someone who’d just lived through what
she did.

 It was
my dad’s idea that we sublet our apartment for November and December and
move in with them. Although the idea had been less than appealing to me, my
zero-sum salary left me with few arguments. And besides, Lily seemed to welcome
the chance to get out of the city for a little while and leave behind all the
questions and gossip that she’d have to face as soon as she saw anyone
she knew again. We’d listed the place oncraigslist.org as a perfect
“holiday rental” to enjoy all the sights of New York, and to both
our shock and amazement, an older Swedish couple whose children were all living
in the city paid our full asking price—six hundred dollars more per month
than we ourselves paid. The three hundred bucks a month was more than enough
for each of us to live on, especially considering my parents comped us food,
laundry, and the use of a beat-up Camry. The Swedes were leaving the week after
New Year’s, just in time for Lily to start her semester over again and
for me to, well, do something.

 Emily
had been the one who officially fired me. Not that I’d had any lingering
doubts as to my employment status after my little foul-mouthed temper tantrum,
but I suppose Miranda had been livid enough to drive home one last dig. The
whole thing had taken only three or four minutes and had unfolded with the
ruthlessRunway efficiency that I loved so much.

 I’d
just managed to hail a cab and pry the left boot from my pulsating foot when
the phone rang. Of course my heart instinctively lurched forward, but when I
remembered that I’d just told Miranda what she could do with herYou
remind me of myself when I was your age, I realized it couldn’t be her. I
did a quick tabulation of the minutes that had passed: one for Miranda to shut
her gaping mouth and recover her cool for all the Clackers who were watching,
another for her to locate her cell phone and call Emily at home, a third to
convey the sordid details of my unprecedented outburst, and a final one for Emily
to reassure Miranda that she herself would “see to it that everything was
taken care of.” Yes, although the caller ID simply said
“unavailable” on international phone calls, there wasn’t a
doubt in the world who was ringing.

 “Hi,
Em, how are you?” I practically sang while rubbing my bare foot and
trying not to let it touch the filthy taxi floor.

 She
seemed to be caught off-guard by my downright chipper tone.
“Andrea?”

 “Hey,
it’s me, I’m right here. What’s up? I’m kind of in a
hurry, so…” I thought about asking her directly if she’d
called to fire me but decided to give her a break for once. I braced myself for
the verbal tirade she was sure to let loose on me—how could you let her
down, me down,Runway down, the wide world of fashion, blah, blah, blah—but
it never came.

 “Oh
yeah, of course. So, I just spoke to Miranda…” Her voice trailed
off as though she was hoping I’d continue and explain that the whole
thing had been a big mistake and not to worry because I’d managed to fix
it in the last four minutes.

 “And
you heard what happened, I’m assuming?”

 “Um,
yeah! Andy, what’s going on?”

 “I
should probably be asking you that, right?”

 There
was silence.

 “Listen,
Em, I have a feeling that you called to fire me. It’s OK if you did; I
know it’s not your decision. So, did she tell you to call and get rid of
me?” Even though I felt lighter than I had in many months, I still found
myself holding my breath, wondering if maybe, through some dumb stroke of luck
or misfortune, Miranda had respected my telling her to fuck off instead of been
appalled by it.

 “Yes.
She asked me to let you know that you have been terminated, effective
immediately, and she would like you to be checked out of the Ritz before she
returns from the show.” She said this softly and with a trace of regret.
Perhaps it was for the many hours and days and weeks she was now facing of
finding and training someone all over again, but there sounded like there might
be something even more behind it.

 “You’re
going to miss me, aren’t you, Em? Go on, say it. It’s OK, I
won’t tell anyone. As far as I’m concerned, this conversation never
happened. You don’t want me to go, do you?”

 Miracle
of miracles, she laughed. “What did you say to her? She just kept
repeating that you were crass and unlady-like. I couldn’t get anything
more specific out of her than that.”

 “Oh,
that’s probably because I told her to fuck herself.”

 “You
did not!”

 “You’re
calling to fire me. I assure you, I did.”

 “Oh
my god.”

 “Yeah,
well, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t the single most satisfying
moment of my pathetic life. Of course, I have now been fired by the most
powerful woman in publishing. Not only do I not have a way to pay off my nearly
maxed-out MasterCard, but future jobs in magazines are looking rather dismal.
Maybe I should try to work for one of her enemies? They’d be happy to
hire me, right?”

 “Sure.
Send your résumé over to Anna Wintour—they’ve never
liked each other very much.”

 “Hmm.
Something to think about. Listen, Em, no hard feelings, OK?” We both knew
that we had absolutely, positively not a single thing in common but Miranda
Priestly, but as long as we were getting on so famously, I figured I’d
play along.

 “Sure,
of course,” she lied awkwardly, knowing full well that I was about to
enter into the upper stratosphere of social pariah-dom. The chances of Emily
admitting she had so much as known me from this day forward were nonexistent,
but that was OK. Maybe in ten years when she was sitting front and center at
the Michael Kors show and I was still shopping at Filene’s and dining at
Benihana, we’d laugh about the whole thing. But probably not.

 “Well,
I’d love to chat, but I’m kind of screwed up right now, not sure
what to do next. I’ve got to figure out a way to get home as soon as
possible. Do you think I can still use my return ticket? She can’t fire
me and leave me stranded in a foreign country, can she?”

 “Well
of course she would be justified in doing so, Andrea,” she said. Ah-hah!
One last zinger. It was comforting to know that things never really changed.
“After all, it’s really you who are deserting your job—you
forced her to fire you. But no, I don’t think she’s a vengeful kind
of person. Just charge the change fee and I’ll figure out a way to put it
through.”

 “Thanks,
Em. I appreciate it. And good luck to you, too. You’re going to make a
fantastic fashion editor someday.”

 “Really?
You think so?” she asked eagerly, happily. Why my opinion as the biggest
fashion loser ever to hit the scene was at all relevant, I didn’t know,
but she sounded very, very pleased.

 “Definitely.
Not a doubt in my mind.”

 Christian
called the moment I hung up with Emily. He had, unsurprisingly, already heard
what happened. Unbelievable. But the pleasure he took from hearing the sordid
details, combined with all sorts of promises and invitations he offered up,
made me feel sick again. I told him as calmly as possible that I had a lot to
deal with right now, to please stop calling in the meantime, that I’d get
in touch if and when I felt like it.

 Since
they miraculously didn’t yet know that I’d flunked out of my job,
Monsieur Renaud and entourage fell all over themselves on hearing that an
emergency at home demanded I return immediately. It took only a half hour for a
small army of hotel staff to book me on the next flight to New York, pack my
bags, and tuck me into the backseat of a limo stocked with a full bar bound for
Charles de Gaulle. The driver was chatty, but I didn’t really respond: I
wanted to enjoy my last moments as the lowest-paid but most highly perked
assistant in the free world. I poured myself one final flute of perfectly dry
champagne and took a long, slow, luxurious sip. It had taken eleven months,
forty-four weeks, and some 3,080 hours of work to figure out—once and for
all—that morphing into Miranda Priestly’s mirror image was probably
not such a good thing.

 Instead
of a uniformed driver with a sign waiting for me when I exited customs, I found
my parents, looking immensely pleased to see me. We hugged, and after they got
over the initial shock of what I was wearing (skintight, very faded D&G
jeans with spike-heeled pumps and a completely sheer shirt—hey, it was
listed in category, miscellaneous; subcategory, to and from airport, and it was
by far the most plane-appropriate thing they’d packed for me), they gave
me very good news: Lily was awake and alert. We went straight to the hospital,
where Lily herself even managed to give me attitude about my outfit as soon as
I walked in.

 Of
course, there was the legal problem for her to contend with; she had, after
all, been speeding the wrong way down a one-way street in a drunken stupor. But
since no one else was seriously hurt, the judge had shown tremendous leniency
and, although she’d always have a DWI on her record, she’d been
sentenced to only mandatory alcohol counseling and what seemed like three
decades’ worth of community service. We hadn’t talked a lot about
it—she still wasn’t cool with admitting out loud that she had a
problem—but I’d driven her to her first group session in the East
Village and she’d admitted that it wasn’t “too
touchy-feely” when she came out. “Freakin‘ annoying”
was how she put it, but when I raised my eyebrows and gave her a specialty
withering look—à la Emily—she conceded that there were some
cute guys there, and it wouldn’t kill her to date someone sober for once.
Fair enough. My parents had convinced her to come clean to the dean at
Columbia, which sounded like a nightmare at the time but ended up being a good
move. He not only agreed to let Lily withdraw without failing in the middle of
the semester, but signed the approval for the bursar’s office saying that
she could just reapply for her tuition next spring.

 Lily’s
life and our friendship seemed to be back on track. Not so with Alex.
He’d been sitting by her side at the hospital when we arrived, and the
minute I saw him I found myself wishing my parents hadn’t diplomatically
decided to wait in the cafeteria. There was an awkward hello and a lot of
fussing over Lily, but when he’d shrugged on his jacket a half hour later
and waved good-bye, we hadn’t said a real word to each other. I called
him when I got home, but he let it go to voice mail. I called a few times more
and hung up, stalker-style, and tried one last time before I went to bed. He
answered but sounded wary.

 “Hi!”
I said, trying to sound adorable and well adjusted.

 “Hey.”
He clearly wasn’t into my adorableness.

 “Listen,
I know she’s your friend, too, and that you would’ve done that for
anyone, but I can’t thank you enough for everything you did for Lily.
Tracking me down, helping my parents, sitting with her for hours on end.
Really.”

 “No
problem. It’s what anyone would do when someone they know is hurt. No big
deal.” Implied in this, of course, was that anyone would do it except
someone who happens to be phenomenally self-centered with whacked-out
priorities, like yours truly.

 “Alex,
please, can we just talk like—”

 “No.
We really can’t talk about anything right now. I’ve been around for
the last year waiting to talk to you—begging, sometimes—and you
haven’t been all that interested. Somewhere in that year, I lost the Andy
I fell in love with. I’m not sure how, I’m not exactly sure when it
happened, but you are definitely not the same person you were before this job.
My Andy would have never even entertained the idea of choosing a fashion show
or a party or whatever over being there for a friend who really, really needed
her. Like,really needed her. Now, I’m glad you decided to come
home—that you know it was the right thing to do—but now I need some
time to figure out what’s going on with me, and with you, and with us.
This isn’t new, Andy, not to me. It’s been happening for a long,
long time—you’ve just been too busy to notice.”