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15

‘Andrea, it’s Emily,’ I heard a voice croak from the phone. ‘Can you hear me?’ It had been months since Emily had called me at home late at night, so I knew it had to be serious.

‘Hi, sure. You sound like hell,’ I said, bolting upright in bed, immediately wondering if Miranda had done something to make her sound that way. The last time Emily had called this late was when Miranda had called her at eleven on a Saturday night to demand that Emily charter her and Mr Tomlinson a private jet to get home from Miami since bad weather had canceled their regularly scheduled flight. Emily was just getting ready to leave her apartment to attend her own birthday party when the call came in, and she’d immediately called me and begged me to deal with it. I hadn’t gotten the message until the next day, though, and when I called her back, she was still in tears.

‘I missed my own birthday party, Andrea,’ she’d wailed the second she picked up the phone. ‘I missed my own birthday party because I had to charter them a flight!’

‘They couldn’t get a hotel room for one night and come back the next day like normal people?’ I’d asked, pointing out the obvious.

‘Don’t you think I thought of that? I had penthouse suites reserved for them at the Shore Club, the Albion, and the Delano within seven minutes of her first phone call, figuring she couldn’t possibly be serious – I mean, my god, it was a Saturday night. How the hell do you charter a flight on a Saturday night?’

‘I’m guessing she wasn’t so into that idea?’ I’d asked soothingly, feeling genuinely guilty that I hadn’t been around to help her out and simultaneously ecstatic that I’d dodged that particular bullet.

‘Yeah. Not so into it at all. She called every ten minutes, demanding to know why I hadn’t found her anything yet, and I had to keep putting these people on hold to answer her call, and when I went back to them, they’d hang up.’ She gulped air. ‘It was a nightmare.’

‘So what finally happened? I’m almost scared to ask.’

‘What finally happened? What didn’t finally happen? I called every single private charter company in the state of Florida and, as you might imagine, they weren’t answering their phones at midnight on a Saturday. I paged individual pilots, I called domestic airlines to see if they had any recommendations, I even managed to talk to some sort of supervisor at the Miami International Airport. Told him I needed a plane in the next half hour to fly two people to New York. Know what he did?’

‘What?’

‘He laughed. Hysterically. Accused me of being a front for terrorists, for drug smugglers, everything. Told me I had a better chance of getting hit by lightning exactly twenty times than I did of securing a plane and a pilot at that hour – regardless of how much I was willing to pay. And that if I called back again, he’d be forced to direct my inquiry to the FBI. Do you believe it?’ She was screaming at this point. ‘Do you fucking believe it? The FBI!’

‘And I assume Miranda didn’t like that, either?’

‘Yeah, she loooooved that one. She spent twenty minutes refusing to believe that there wasn’t a single plane available. I assured her that it wasn’t that they were all taken, just that it was a difficult time of night to be attempting to charter a flight.’

‘So what happened?’ I didn’t see this one ending happily.

‘At about one-thirty in the morning she finally accepted that she wasn’t going to get home that night – not that it mattered whatsoever, since the girls were with their father and the nanny was around all day Sunday if they needed her – and she had me buy her a ticket for the first flight out in the morning.’

This was puzzling. If her flight had been canceled, I’d assumed the airlines would’ve rescheduled her for the first flight out in the morning, especially considering her premier-advantage-plus-gold-platinum-diamond-executive-VIP mileage status and the original cost of her first-class tickets. I said as much.

‘Yeah, well, Continental scheduled them for their first flight out, which was at six-fifty A.M. But when Miranda heard that someone else had managed to get on a Delta flight at six-thirty-five A.M., she went ballistic. She called me an incompetent idiot, asked me over and over what good an assistant was if I couldn’t do something as simple as arrange for a private plane.’ She’d sniffed and took a sip of something, probably coffee.

‘Ohmigod, I know what you’re going to say. Tell me you didn’t!’

‘I did.’

‘You didn’t. You’ve got to be kidding. For fifteen minutes?’

‘I did! What choice did I have? She was really unhappy with me – at least this way, it seemed like I was actually doing something. It came to another couple thousand bucks – not exactly a big deal. She was bordering on happy when we hung up. What else can you ask for?’

By this point we’d both started laughing. I knew without Emily’s telling me – and she knew I knew – that she’d gone ahead and purchased two additional business-class tickets on the Delta flight for Miranda just to shut her up, to make the incessant demands and insults finally, blissfully, cease.

I was nearly choking at this point. ‘So, wait. By the time you arranged for a car to take her to the Delano—’

‘—it was just before three in the morning, and she’d called my cell phone exactly twenty-two times since eleven. The driver waited while they showered and changed in their penthouse suite and then took them right back to the airport in time for their earlier flight.’

‘Stop! You’ve got to stop,’ I howled, doubled over at this charming series of events. ‘This did not really happen.’

Emily stopped laughing and tried to feign seriousness. ‘Oh, really? You think all of this is good? I haven’t even told you the best part.’

‘Oh, tell me, tell me!’ I was positively gleeful that Emily and I had, for once, managed to find something funny at the exact same time. It felt good to be part of a team, one half in the battle against the oppressor. I realized then for the first time what a different year it would have been if Emily and I could’ve truly been friends, if we could have covered and protected and trusted each other enough to face Miranda as a united front. Things probably wouldn’t have been quite so unbearable, but, except for rare times like these, we didn’t agree on just about everything.

‘The best part of all of it?’ She was silent, dragging out the joy we shared a few moments longer. ‘She didn’t realize this, of course, but even though the Delta flight took off earlier, it was actually scheduled to land eight minutes after her original Continental!’

‘Shut up!’ I’d howled, delighted with this delicious new nugget of information. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’

When we finally hung up, I was surprised to see that we’d been talking for more than an hour, just like a couple of real friends would. Of course, we immediately reverted back to just-contained hostility on Monday, but my feelings for Emily were always a bit more affectionate after that weekend. Until now, of course. I sure didn’t like her enough to hear whatever surely irritating or inconvenient thing she was preparing to dump on me.

‘Really, you sound horrible. Are you sick?’ I tried valiantly to interject a touch of sympathy in my voice, but the question came out sounding aggressive and accusatory.

‘Oh yeah,’ she rasped before breaking into hacking coughs. ‘Really sick.’

I never really believed it when anyone said they were really sick: without a diagnosis of something very official and potentially life-threatening, you were well enough to work at Runway. So when Emily finished hacking and reiterated that she was really ill, I didn’t even consider the possibility that she wouldn’t be at work on Monday. After all, she was scheduled to fly to Paris to meet Miranda on October 18 and that was only slightly more than a week away. And besides, I’d managed to ignore a couple strep throats, a few bouts of bronchitis, a horrific round of food poisoning, and a perpetual smoker’s cough and cold and hadn’t taken a single sick day in nearly a year of work.

I’d sneaked in a single doctor’s appointment when I was desperate for antibiotics with one of the cases of strep throat (I ducked into his office and ordered them to see me right away when Miranda and Emily thought that I was out scouting for new cars for Mr Tomlinson), but there was never time for preventative work. Although I’d had a dozen sets of highlights from Marshall, quite a few free massages from spas that felt honored to have Miranda’s assistant as a guest, and countless manicures, pedicures, and makeovers, I hadn’t seen a dentist or a gynecologist in a year.

‘Anything I can do?’ I asked, trying to sound casual while I racked my brain thinking of why she’d called to tell me that she didn’t feel well. As far as we were both concerned, it was completely and entirely irrelevant. She’d be at work on Monday whether she felt well or not.

She coughed deeply and I heard phlegm rattling in her lungs. ‘Um, yeah, actually. God, I can’t believe this is happening to me!’

‘What? What’s happening?’

‘I can’t go to Europe with Miranda. I have mono.’

‘What?’

‘You heard me, I can’t go. The doctor called today with the blood results, and as of right now, I’m not allowed to leave my apartment for the next three weeks.’

Three weeks! She had to be kidding. There wasn’t time to feel badly for her – she’d just told me she wasn’t going to Europe, and it was that thought alone – the idea that both Miranda and Emily would be out of my life – that had sustained me through the past couple months.

‘Em, she’s going to kill you – you have to go! Does she know yet?’

There was a foreboding silence on the other end. ‘Um, yeah, she knows.’

‘You called her?’

‘Yes. I had my doctor call her, actually, because she didn’t think that having mono really qualified me as sick, so he had to tell her that I could infect her and everyone else, and anyway …’ Her sentence trailed off, and her tone was suggestive of something far, far worse.

‘Anyway what?’ My self-preservation instincts had kicked into overdrive.

‘Anyway … she wants you to go with her.’

‘She wants me to go with her, huh? That’s cute. What’d she really say? She didn’t threaten to fire you for getting sick, did she?’

‘Andrea, I’m—’ a deep, mucousy cough shook her voice and I thought for a moment that she might very well die right there on the phone with me ‘—serious. Completely and totally serious. She said something about the assistants they give her abroad being idiots and that even you’d be better to have around than them.’

‘Oh, well, when you put it like that, sign me up! Nothing quite like some over-the-top flattery to convince me to do something. Seriously, she shouldn’t have said such nice things. I’m blushing!’ I didn’t know whether to focus on the fact that Miranda wanted me to go to Paris with her, or that she only wanted me to go because she considered me slightly less brain-dead than the anorexic French clones of, well … me.

‘Oh, just shut up already,’ she croaked in between fits of now annoying coughing. ‘You’re the luckiest fucking person in the world. I’ve been waiting two years – over two years – for this trip, and now I can’t go. The irony of this is painful – you realize that, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do! It’s one giant cliché: this trip is your sole reason for living and it’s the bane of my existence, yet I’m going and you’re not. Life is funny, huh? I’m laughing so hard I can barely stop,’ I deadpanned, sounding not the least bit amused.

‘Yeah, well, I think it sucks, too, but what can you do? I already called Jeffy to tell him to start calling in clothes for you. You’ll have to bring a ton since you’ll need different outfits for each of the shows you attend, any dinners, and, of course, for Miranda’s party at the Hotel Costes. Allison will help you out with makeup. Talk to Stef in accessories for bags and shoes and jewelry. You only have a week, so get on it first thing tomorrow, OK?’

‘I still don’t really believe she expects me to do this.’

‘Well, believe it, because she sure wasn’t kidding. Since I’m not going to be able to come to the office at all this week, you’re also going to—’

‘What? You’re not even going to come into the office?’ I might not have taken a sick day or spent a single hour outside the office while Miranda was there, but Emily hadn’t, either. The one time it had been close – when her great-grandfather had died – she’d managed to get home to Philadelphia, attend the funeral, and be back at her desk without missing a minute of work. This was how things worked. Period. Short of death (immediate family only), dismemberment (your own), or nuclear war (only if confirmed by the U.S. government to be directly affecting Manhattan), one was to be present. This would be a watershed moment in the Priestly regime.

‘Andrea, I have mononucleosis. I’m highly infectious. It’s really serious. I’m not supposed to leave my apartment for a cup of coffee, never mind go to work for the day. Miranda understands that, and so you’ll need to pick up the slack. There will be a lot to do to get both of you ready for Paris. Miranda leaves on Wednesday for Milan, and then you’ll be leaving to meet her in Paris the following Tuesday.’

‘She understands that? C’mon! Tell me what she really said.’ I refused to believe that she’d accepted something as mundane as mono for an excuse to not be available. ‘Just give me that small pleasure. After all, my life will be hell for the next few weeks.’

Emily sighed, and I could feel her eyes roll over the phone. ‘Well, she wasn’t thrilled. I didn’t actually talk to her, you see, but my doctor said she kept asking if mono is a “real” disease. But when he assured her that it was, she was very understanding.’

I laughed out loud. ‘I’m sure she was, Em, I’m sure she was. Don’t worry about a thing, OK? You just concentrate on feeling better, and I’ll take care of everything else.’

‘I’ll e-mail you a checklist, just so you don’t forget anything.’

‘I won’t forget anything. She’s been to Europe four times in the past year. I’ve got it down. I’ll get the cash from the basement bank, change a few grand into euros, buy a few more grands’ worth of traveler’s checks, and triple confirm all of her hair and makeup appointments while she’s there. What else? Oh, I’ll make sure the Ritz gives her the right cell phone this time, and I’ll speak to the drivers ahead of time to make sure they know they can’t ever leave her waiting. I’m already thinking of all the people who’ll need copies of her itinerary – which I’ll type up, no problem – and I’ll see to it that it gets passed around. And of course she’ll have a detailed itinerary as to the twins’ classes, lessons, practices, and play dates, and full listings of the entire household staff’s work schedules. See! You don’t have to worry – I’ve got it all under control.’

‘Don’t forget about the velvet,’ she chided, singing the last couple words as if on autopilot. ‘Or the scarves!’

‘Of course not! They’re already on my list.’ Before Miranda packed for anything – or rather, had her housekeeper pack her – either Emily or I would purchase massive rolls of velvet at a fabric store and bring them to Miranda’s apartment. There, we’d work with the housekeeper to cut them in the exact shape and size of every article of clothing she was planning to bring, and individually wrap each item in the plush material. The velvet packages were then neatly stacked in dozens of Louis Vuitton suitcases, with plenty of extra pieces included for when she inevitably threw the first batch out upon unpacking in Paris. In addition, usually one half of a suitcase was occupied by a couple dozen orange Hermès boxes, each containing a single white scarf just waiting to be lost, forgotten, misplaced, or simply discarded.

I hung up with Emily after making a good effort to sound sincerely sympathetic and found Lily stretched out on the couch, smoking a cigarette and sipping a clear liquid that was definitely not water from a cocktail glass.

‘I thought we weren’t allowed to smoke in here,’ I said, flopping down next to her and immediately putting my feet on the scuffed wooden coffee table my parents had handed down to us. ‘Not that I care, but that was your rule.’ Lily wasn’t a full-time, committed smoker like yours truly; she usually smoked only when she drank and wasn’t one to even buy packs. A brand-new box of Camel Special Lights peeked out of the chest pocket of her oversize button-down. I nudged her thigh with my slippered foot and nodded toward the cigarettes. She handed them over with a lighter.

‘I knew you wouldn’t care,’ she said, taking a leisurely drag off her cigarette. ‘I’m procrastinating and it helps me concentrate.’

‘What do you have due?’ I asked, lighting my own cigarette and tossing back the lighter. She was taking seventeen credits this semester in an effort to pull up her GPA after last spring’s mediocre showing. I watched as she took another drag and washed it down with a healthy gulp of her nonwater beverage. It didn’t appear that she was on the right track.

She sighed heavily, meaningfully, and let the cigarette hang suspended from the corner of her mouth as she spoke. It flapped up and down, threatening to fall at any moment and, combined with her wild, unwashed hair and smeared eye makeup, made her look – just for a moment – like a defendant on Judge Judy (or maybe a plaintiff, since they always looked the same – lack of teeth, greasy hair, dull eyes, and propensity for using the double negative). ‘An article for some totally random, esoteric academic journal that no one will ever read but I still have to write, just so I can say I’m published.’

‘That’s annoying. When’s it due?’

‘Tomorrow.’ Total nonchalance. She looked completely unfazed.

‘Tomorrow? For real?’

She shot me a warning look, a quick reminder that I was supposed to be on her team. ‘Yes. Tomorrow. It really blows, considering that Freudian Boy is the one who’s assigned to edit it. No one seems to care that he’s a candidate in psych, not Russian lit – they’re just short copy editors, so he’s mine. There’s no way I’m getting that to him on time. Screw him.’ Once again, she poured some of the liquid down her throat, making an obvious effort not to taste it, and grimaced.

‘Lil, what happened? Granted, it’s been a few months, but last I heard, you were taking things slow and he was perfect. Of course, that was before that, that thing you dragged home, but …’

Another warning look, this time followed by a glare. I’d tried to talk to her about the whole Freak Boy incident a few dozen times, but it seemed like we were never really alone and neither of us had much time lately for heart-to-hearts. She immediately changed the subject whenever I brought it up. I could tell that more than anything she was embarrassed; she had acknowledged that he was vile, but she wouldn’t participate in any discussion whatsoever about the excessive drinking that was responsible for the whole episode.

‘Yes, well, apparently at some point that night I called him from Au Bar and begged him to come meet me,’ she said, avoiding eye contact, instead concentrating intently on using the remote control to switch tracks on the mournful Jeff Buckley CD that seemed to be on permanent replay in the apartment.

‘So? Did he come and see you talking to, uh, to someone else?’ I was trying not to push her away even more by being critical of her. There was obviously a lot going on inside her head, what with the problems at school and the drinking and the seemingly limitless supply of guys, and I wanted her to open up to someone. She’d never kept anything from me before, if for no other reason than I was all she had, but she hadn’t been telling me much of anything lately. It occurred to me how strange it was that we hadn’t bothered to discuss this until four months after the fact.

‘No, not quite,’ she said bitterly. ‘He came all the way there from Morningside Heights only to find me not there. Apparently he called my cell phone and Kenny answered and wasn’t all that nice.’

‘Kenny?’

‘That thing I dragged home at the beginning of the summer, remember?’ She said it sarcastically, but this time she smiled.

‘Ah-hah. I’m guessing Freudian Boy didn’t take that well?’

‘Not so much. Whatever. Easy come, easy go, right?’ She scampered off to the kitchen with her empty glass and I saw her pour from a half-full bottle of Ketel One. A very small splash of soda, and she was back on the couch.

I was just about to inquire as gently as possible why she was inhaling vodka when she had an article due the next day, but the buzzer rang from downstairs.

‘Who’s there?’ I called to John by holding down the button.

‘Mr Fineman is here to see Ms Sachs,’ he announced formally, all business now that other people were around.

‘Really? Um, great. Send him up.’

Lily looked at me and raised her eyebrows, and I realized that once again we weren’t going to have this conversation. ‘You look psyched,’ she said with obvious sarcasm. ‘Not exactly thrilled that your boyfriend is surprising you, are you?’

‘Of course I am,’ I said defensively, and we both knew I was lying. Things with Alex had been strained the past few weeks. Really strained. We went through all the motions of being together and we did it well: after almost four years, we certainly knew what the other wanted to hear or needed to do. But he’d compensated for all the time I spent at work by being even more angelic at school – volunteering to coach, tutor, mentor, and chair just about every activity someone could think up – and the time we did actually see each other was about as exciting as if we’d been married for thirty years. We had an unspoken understanding that we’d just wait things out until my year of servitude was over, but I wouldn’t let myself think about where the relationship might be headed then.

But still. That made two close people in my life – first Jill (who’d called me out on the miserable state of affairs on the phone the other night), and now Lily – who’d pointed out that Alex and I were less than adorable together lately, and I had to admit that Lily had, in her buzzed but nonetheless perceptive way, noticed that I was not happy to hear that Alex had arrived. I was dreading telling him that I had to go to Europe, dreading the inevitable fight that would ensue, a fight I very much would have liked to put off for a few more days. Ideally, not until I was in Europe. But no such luck, as he was currently knocking on my door.