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.
‘You’ll never believe who that was,’ I sang, dancing around the room with Isaac. ‘It was an editor at Seventeen 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 not The 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.
‘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