The Devil Wears Prada (61 page)

 “Alex,
you haven’t given me a single second to sit down, face to face, and try
to explain to you what’s been going on. Maybe you’re right, maybe I
am a completely different person. But I don’t think so—and even if
I’ve changed, I don’t think it’sall been for the worse. Have
we really grown apart that much?”

 Even
more than Lily, he was my best friend, of that I was certain, but he
hadn’t been my boyfriend for many, many months. I realized that he was
right: it was time I told him so.

 I took a
deep breath and said what I knew was the right thing, even though it
didn’t feel so great then. “You’re right.”

 “I
am? You agree?”

 “Yes.
I’ve been really selfish and unfair to you.”

 “So
what now?” he asked, sounding resigned but not heartbroken.

 “I
don’t know. What now? Do we just stop talking? Stop seeing each other? I
have no idea how this is supposed to work. But I want you to be a part of my
life, and I can’t imagine not being a part of yours.”

 “Me
neither. But I’m not sure we’re going to be able to do that for a
long, long time. We weren’t friends before we started dating, and it
seems impossible to imagine just being friends now. But who knows? Maybe once
we’ve both had a lot of time to figure things out…”

 I hung
up the phone that first night back and cried, not just for Alex but for
everything that had changed and shifted during the past year. I’d
strolled into Elias-Clark a clueless, poorly dressed little girl, and I’d
staggered out a slightly weathered, poorly dressed semigrown-up (albeit one who
now realized just how poorly dressed she was). But in the interim, I’d
experienced enough to fill a hundred just-out-of-college jobs. And even though
my résumé now sported a scarlet “F,” even though my
boyfriend had called it quits, even though I’d left with nothing more
concrete than a suitcase (well, OK, four Louis Vuitton suitcases) full of
fabulous designer clothes—maybe it had been worth it?

 I turned
off the ringer and pulled an old notebook from my bottom desk drawer and began
to write.

 My
father had already escaped to his office and my mother was on her way to the
garage when I made it downstairs.

 “Morning,
honey. Didn’t know you were awake! I’m running out. I have a
student at nine. Jill’s flight is at noon, so you should probably leave
sooner than later since there will be rush-hour traffic. I’ll have my
cell on if anything goes wrong. Oh, will you and Lily be home for dinner
tonight?”

 “I’m
really not sure. I just woke up and haven’t yet had a cup of coffee. Do
you think I could decide on dinner in a little while?”

 But she
hadn’t even stuck around to listen to my snotty response—she was
halfway out the door by the time I opened my mouth. Lily, Jill, Kyle, and the
baby were sitting around the kitchen table in silence, reading different
sections of theTimes . There was a plate of wet-looking, wholly unappetizing
waffles in the middle, with a bottle of Aunt Jemima and a tub of butter
straight from the fridge. The only thing anyone appeared to be touching was the
coffee, which my father had picked up on his morning run to Dunkin
Donuts—a tradition stemming from his understandable unwillingness to
ingest anything my mother had made herself. I forked a waffle onto a paper
plate and went to cut it, but it immediately collapsed into a soggy pile of
dough.

 “This
is inedible. Did Dad pick up any donuts today?”

 “Yeah,
he hid them in the closet outside his office,” Kyle drawled.
“Didn’t want your mother to see. Bring back the box if you’re
going?”

 The
phone rang on my way to seek out the hidden booty.

 “Hello?”
I answered in my best irritated voice. I’d finally stopped answering any
ringing phone with “Miranda Priestly’s office.”

 “Hello
there. Is Andrea Sachs there, please?”

 “Speaking.
May I ask who’s calling?”

 “Andrea,
hi, this is Loretta Andriano fromSeventeen magazine.”

 My heart
lurched. I’d pitched a 2,000-word “fiction” piece about a
teenage girl who gets so caught up on getting into college that she ignores her
friends and family. It had taken me all of two hours to write the silly thing,
but I thought I’d managed to strike just the right chords of funny and
touching.

 “Hi!
How are you?”

 “I’m
fine, thank you. Listen, your story got passed along to me, and I have to tell
you—I love it. Needs some revisions, of course, and the language needs
some tweaking—our readers are mostly pre- and early teens—but
I’d like to run it in the February issue.”

 “You
would?” I could hardly believe it. I’d sent the story to a dozen
teen magazines and then wrote a slightly more mature version and sent that to
nearly two dozen women’s magazines, but I hadn’t heard a word back
from anyone.

 “Absolutely.
We pay one-fifty per word, and I’ll just need to have you fill out a few
tax forms. You’ve freelanced stories before, right?”

 “Actually,
no, but I used to work atRunway .” I don’t know how I thought this
would help—especially since the only thing I ever wrote there were forged
memos meant to intimidate other people—but Loretta didn’t appear to
notice the gaping hole in my logic.

 “Oh,
really? My first job out of college was as a fashion assistant atRunway . I
learned more there that year than I did in the next five.”

 “It
was a real experience. I was lucky to have it.”

 “What
did you do there?”

 “I
was actually Miranda Priestly’s assistant.”

 “Were
you really? You poor girl, I had no idea. Wait a minute—were you the one
who was just fired in Paris?”

 I
realized too late that I had made a big mistake. There’d been a sizable
blurb inPage Six about the whole messy thing a few days after I got home, probably
from one of the Clackers who’d witnessed my terrible manners. Considering
they quoted me exactly, I couldn’t figure out who else it could’ve
been. How could I have forgotten that other people might have read that? I had
a feeling that Loretta was going to be distinctly less pleased with my story
than she was three minutes ago, but there was no escaping now.

 “Um,
yeah. It wasn’t as bad as it seemed, really it wasn’t. Things got
totally blown out of proportion in thatPage Six article. Really.”

 “Well,
I hope not! Someone needed to tell that woman to go fuck herself, and if it was
you, well, then, hats off! That woman made my life a living hell for the year I
worked there, and I never even had to exchange a single word with her.

 “Look,
I’ve got to run to a press lunch right now, but why don’t we set up
a meeting? You need to come in and fill out some of these papers, and I’d
like to meet you anyway. Bring anything else you think might work for the
magazine.”

 “Great.
Oh, that sounds great.” We agreed to meet next Friday at three, and I
hung up still not believing what had happened. Kyle and Jill had left the baby
with Lily while they went to dress and pack, and he had commenced a sort of
crying-whimpering thing that sounded as though he was two seconds away from
all-out hysteria. I scooped him out of his seat and held him over my shoulder,
rubbing his back through his terry-cloth footie pajamas, and, remarkably, he
shut up.

 “You’ll
never believe who that was,” I sang, dancing around the room with Isaac.
“It was an editor atSeventeen magazine—I’m going to be
published!”

 “Shut
up! They’re printing your life story?”

 “It’s
not my life story—it’s ‘Jennifer’s’ life story.
And it’s only two thousand words, so it’s not the biggest thing
ever, but it’s a start.”

 “Sure,
whatever you say. Young girl gets super caught up in achieving something and
ends up screwing over all the people who matter in her life. Jennifer’s
story. Uh-huh, whatever.” Lily was grinning and rolling her eyes at the
same time.

 “Whatever,
details, details. The point is, they’re publishing it in the February
issue and they’re paying me three thousand dollars for it. How crazy is
that?”

 “Congrats,
Andy. Seriously, that’s amazing. And now you’ll have this as a
clip, right?”

 “Yep.
Hey, it’s notThe New Yorker, but it’s an OK first step. If I can
round up a few more of these, maybe in some different magazines, too, I might
be getting somewhere. I have a meeting with the woman on Friday, and she told
me to bring anything else I’ve been working on. And she didn’t even
ask if I speak French. And she hates Miranda. I can work with this
woman.”

 I drove
the Texas crew to the airport, picked up a good and greasy Burger King lunch
for Lily and me to wash down our breakfast donuts with, and spent the rest of
the day—and the next, and the next after that—working on some stuff
to show the Miranda-loathing Loretta.

19

 “Tall
vanilla cappuccino, please,” I ordered from a barista I didn’t
recognize at the Starbucks on 57th Street. It had been nearly five months since
I’d been here last, trying to balance a whole tray of coffees and snacks
and get back to Miranda before she fired me for breathing. When I thought about
it like that, I figured it was far better to have gotten fired for screaming
“fuck you” than it was to get fired because I’d brought back
two packets of Equal instead of two raw sugars. Same outcome, but a totally
different ballgame.

 Who knew
Starbucks had such huge turnover? There wasn’t a single person behind the
counter who looked remotely familiar, making all the time I’d spent there
seem that much farther away. I smoothed my well-cut but nondesigner black pants
and checked to make sure that the cuffed bottoms hadn’t collected any of
the city’s muddy slush. I knew there was an entire magazine staff of
fashionistas who would emphatically disagree with me, but I thought I looked
pretty damn good for only my second interview. Not only did I now know that no
one wears suits at magazines, but somewhere, somehow, a year’s worth of
high fashion had—by simple osmosis, I think—crammed itself into my
head.

 The
cappuccino was almost too hot, but it felt fantastic on that chilly, wet day.
The darkened, late-afternoon sky seemed to be misting the city with a giant Snow-Cone.
Normally, a day like this would’ve depressed me. It was, after all, one
of the more depressing days in the year’s most depressing month
(February), the kind when even the optimists would rather crawl under the
covers and the pessimists didn’t stand a chance of getting through
without a fistful of Zoloft. But the Starbucks was warmly lit and just the
right state of crowded, and I curled up in one of their oversize green
armchairs and tried not to think of who had rubbed his dirty hair there last.

 In the
past three months, Loretta had become my mentor, my champion, my savior.
We’d hit it off in that first meeting and she’d been nothing but
wonderful to me ever since. As soon as I’d walked into her spacious but
cluttered office and saw that she was—gasp!—fat, I had a weird
feeling that I’d love her. She sat me down and read every word of the
stuff I’d been working on all week: tongue-in-cheek pieces on fashion
shows, some snarky stuff on being a celebrity assistant, a hopefully sensitive
story about what it takes—and doesn’t take—to bring down a
three-year-long relationship with someone you love but can’t be with. It
was storybook-like, nauseating, really, how well we’d instantly hit it
off, how effortlessly we shared our nightmares aboutRunway (I was still having
them: a recent one had included a particularly horrid segment in which my own
parents were shot dead by Parisian fashion police for wearing shorts on the
street and Miranda had somehow managed to legally adopt me), how quickly we
realized that we were the same person, just seven years apart.

 Since
I’d just had the brilliant idea of dragging all myRunway clothes to one
of those snooty resale shops on Madison Avenue, I was a wealthy woman—I
could afford to write for peanuts; anything for a byline. I had waited and
waited for Emily or Jocelyn to call to tell me they were sending a messenger to
pick it all up, but they never did. So it was all mine. I packed up most of the
clothes but set aside the Diane Von Furstenburg wrap-dress. While going through
the contents of my desk drawers that Emily had emptied into boxes and mailed to
me, I came across the letter from Anita Alvarez, the one in which she expressed
her worship of all thingsRunway . I’d always meant to send her a fabulous
dress, but I’d never found the time. I wrapped the bold-printed dress in
tissue paper, tossed in a pair of Manolos, and forged a note from
Miranda—a talent I was unhappy to discover I still possessed. This girl
should know—just once—how it feels to own one beautiful thing. And,
more importantly, to think there’s someone out there who actually cares.