Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection: The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Knowing, Chasing Harry Winston, Last Night at Chateau Marmont. Lauren Weisberger
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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.’
‘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’s all 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