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 ruthless Runway 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 her You 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.’
‘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 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 the Times. 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 from Seventeen 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 at Runway.’ 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 at Runway. 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 in Page 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 that Page 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.