Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection: The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Know (86 page)

‘Really?' Part of me knew that this whole conversation was utterly ridiculous – we were, after all, talking about event-planning – but it was still really nice to hear.

‘Sure. The question is, do you like it?'

‘Well,
like
is a strong word for just about anything, don't you think?' He laughed and I had to physically bury my hands in my coat pockets to keep from grabbing his face. ‘It's a far cry from the Peace Corps, for sure, but it's okay for now.'

His face clouded over almost immediately. ‘Yeah' was about all he could manage.

‘So, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?' I blurted out, not realizing that it might sound like I was asking him out when all I really wanted to do was change the subject. ‘Going anywhere with your girlfriend?' I added casually to show him I knew the situation.

He gave me another uncomfortable look, followed by some obvious squirming, sending the message loud and clear: I had overstepped my bounds.

‘I, uh, I didn't mean anything by—'

‘No, no worries,' he cut in, leaning backward against the door as though he felt dizzy. ‘It's just that, well, it's kind of complicated. Long story. Anyway, I'm actually going home this weekend. My old man's not doing so well, and it's been a couple months since I made it up there.'

‘Where's home?'

He looked at me curiously, as though he were trying to read my face, and then said quietly, ‘Poughkeepsie.'

Had he said that he was born and raised in Laos, he could not have shocked me more. Was he toying with me? Kidding? Had he found out that I was from Poughkeepsie and going home this weekend and thought this was funny somehow? A quick check of his face – smiling sweetly as he watched me process this – indicated no.

‘Poughkeepsie, New York?' was about all I could manage.

‘The one and only.'

‘That's crazy. I'm from there—'

‘Yeah, I know. I just didn't ever know if you knew. I remember you,' he said softly, looking out across Twenty-seventh Street at, as far as I could tell, absolutely nothing.

And, of course, it all came back then. Not that there were so many clues, but there had always been the sense that he was familiar. The time we'd stood right here and he'd joked that one of the girls who'd just gone inside needed a lesson in hippie chic since her flowing caftan was all wrong, and that she should head upstate to be schooled by the pros. That day in Starbucks when he'd brushed his hand up the back of his head and I'd sworn I'd seen that before. The very first night at Penelope's engagement party, when he wouldn't let me in and I couldn't shake the feeling that he was staring at me, almost waiting for me to say something. It was all so obvious now. Samuel Stevens, the guy in high school who was too gorgeous for his own good. The guy everyone assumed was gay because he was big and beautiful and didn't play a sport, but who instead kept mostly to himself while working at a few well-known local restaurants. The guy who came across as conceited and arrogant when we were teenagers and too young to realize that he was intensely shy, a loner, someone who didn't feel quite right with any one group of kids. The guy who'd sat at the table diagonally across from me in shop class, always focused on the wooden serving trays or gumball machines we were learning to make, never flirting or spacing or sleeping or whispering with his tablemates. The guy every girl should have loved but actually hated because he was somehow beyond her, already looking ahead, past the idiocy of high school and social hierarchies and seemingly unaware that anyone else existed. I did a quick calculation and realized that I hadn't seen him in nearly twelve years. I was a freshman and he a senior when we had that one shop class together before he graduated and vanished altogether.

‘Mr Mertz's shop class, 1991, right?'

He nodded.

‘Ohmigod, why didn't you say anything before now?' I asked, pulling out another cigarette. I offered him one and he took it, lighting first mine and then his own.

‘I don't know, I probably should've. I just figured you had no idea. I felt kind of weird not saying something at first and then too much time went by. But I remember, when everyone else was sanding and chiseling, you'd always be writing – letters, it looked like – line after line, page after page, and I always wondered how anyone could have so much to say. Who was the lucky guy?'

I'd mostly forgotten about the letter-writing; I hadn't written one of those in years. It was easier now that I no longer heard my parents asking me what I had done for the world that day. They'd taught me how to write letters when I was old enough to put sentences on paper, and I'd instantly loved it. I wrote to congressmen, senators, CEOs, lobbyists, environmental organizations, and, occasionally, the president. Each night at dinner we'd discuss some great injustice and the following day I'd write my letter, letting someone know my outrage about capital punishment or deforestation or foreign-oil dependence or contraception for teenagers or prohibitive immigration laws. They were always chock-full of self-importance and read like the obnoxious, self-righteous missives they were, but my parents were so lavish with their approval that I couldn't stop. They tapered off at the end of high school, but it wasn't until some guy I was hooking up with freshman year in college picked one off my desk and made some offhand comment about how adorable it was that I was trying to save the world that I stopped entirely. It wasn't what he said so much as the timing. My parents' lifestyle was already less appealing. I had traded the alternative, peace-on-earth persona for a significantly more mainstream college social life pretty damn fast. Sometimes I wondered if I'd been just a little too thorough in my rejection. There was probably a happy medium somewhere, but banking and – let's be honest – party-planning hadn't exactly put me back on the track to selflessness.

I realized that Sammy was watching me intently as I recalled that time and said, ‘Guy? Oh, they weren't to a boyfriend or anything like that. Guys didn't exactly dig the dreadlock/espadrille thing I had going back then. They were just, you know, letters to … I don't know, nothing special.'

‘Well, I always thought you were pretty cute.'

I immediately felt myself blush.

For some reason, this made me happier than if he'd announced his undying love for me, but there was no time to savor it because my cell phone bleated with a 911 text message:
Doll, where R U? Need Cristal ASAP.

Why Philip couldn't just ask one of the three dozen male model/waiters wandering around for that very reason was beyond me, but I knew I should check on things.

‘Listen, I've got to get back in there and make sure everyone is drunk enough to have fun but not so trashed that they'll do anything stupid, but I was wondering: do you need a ride home tomorrow?'

‘Home? To Poughkeepsie? You're going?'

‘I couldn't possibly miss the annual Harvest Festival.'

‘Harvest Festival?' He once again paused to open the velvet rope, this time to let in a couple who weren't coordinated enough to walk but still seemed in possession of enough faculties to grope each other.

‘Don't ask. It's something my parents do every year on Thanksgiving Day, and my presence is required. I'm pretty positive my uncle will bail – he always comes up with some pressing obligation at the last minute – but he'll lend me his car. I'd be happy to give you a ride,' I said, fervently praying that he'd accept and not want to invite his aging significant other.

‘Uh, sure. I mean, if you don't mind, that'd be great. I was just planning on taking the bus up Thursday morning.'

‘Well, I was planning to go tomorrow after work, so if you could go Wednesday instead of Thursday, I'd love to have the company. I always want to drive the car off the road right around Peekskill.' I cheered myself silently for finally managing to maintain a normal exchange with this boy.

‘Yeah, I'd really like that,' he said, looking pleased. Of course, I'd be pleased, too, if I didn't have to endure a four-hour Greyhound ride for a trip that normally takes two hours. I assured myself it was my companionship that convinced him and not just the chance to escape the gross stickiness and claustrophobia of the bus.

‘Great. Why don't you meet me at my uncle's apartment at, let's see, maybe around six? He's on Central Park West, northwest corner of Sixty-eighth Street. Is that okay?'

He had just enough time to say that he was really looking forward to it before Philip materialized outside and literally dragged me back inside by the arm. I didn't much mind, though, considering what I had to look forward to the next day. I floated happily around the room, accepting compliments from everyone on staff and listening as guests talked about what a ‘great scene' we had going on that night. When the party began to wind down around two, I pleaded yet another headache to Philip, who seemed happy to remain behind with Leo and a bottle of Cristal. At home, I curled up in bed with a Slim Jim and a brand-new Harlequin. It was the most perfect evening I could remember.

I could barely contain my excitement as I waited for Sammy in the lobby of Will's building. That day had dragged on interminably. Never mind that Kelly had bought the entire office breakfast in celebration of the previous night's success, or that she'd brought me into her jungle lair to tell me that she was so impressed with the evening that she was officially making me second-in-command of the
Playboy
party, reporting directly to her. Elisa's face tightened when the announcement was made; she'd been there a year and a half longer than me and clearly had expected to oversee the company's biggest event. But after a few remarks about how she was happy to ‘give someone else a chance' at overseeing what would surely be total chaos, she plastered on a happy face and proposed celebratory drinks. Newspapers and websites that weren't even at the party had covered it, breathlessly writing how the ‘slew of celebs and socialites' had come out to fete the ‘hottest new urban accessory.' It almost didn't register when a box arrived directly from Mr Kroner's office with enough BlackBerries to stock an entire wireless store, the note sounding so effusive I was almost embarrassed. I barely even noticed the few lines in New York Scoop that announced I'd been spotted sobbing in a corner as Philip made out with a Nigerian-born soap star, and I didn't get the least bit upset when Elisa confided to me that she'd ‘accidentally' gotten a ride with Philip on his Vespa because ‘she was so drunk and she and Davide had gotten in a fight but that nothing –
nothing, I swear on your life and mine
– had happened.' No, none of that had even really registered because none of it made the minutes any shorter or got me in the same car with Sammy any faster. When he walked through my uncle's lobby's door wearing a pair of broken-in jeans and a very snuggly sweater, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, I didn't know if I'd be able to keep my eyes on the road long enough to get us out of the city.

‘Hey,' he said when he saw me sitting on the bench, pretending to examine the paper. ‘I can't tell you how much I appreciate this.'

‘Don't be ridiculous,' I said, standing on tiptoe to kiss him hello on the cheek. ‘You're the one doing me the favor. Hold on a sec, I'll have my uncle come down with the keys.'

Will had agreed to lend me his Lexus for the weekend only after I'd sworn to uphold the story he'd fabricated to explain his absence. Even though I was just giving Sammy a lift to his parents' house, he insisted that Sammy be fully apprised of the cover story as well.

‘You promise you've got the details down, darling?' he'd asked nervously upon relinquishing the keys as the three of us stood in his underground garage.

‘Will, stop stressing. I promise I won't give you up. I shall endure the suffering alone. As always.'

‘Humor me. Let's go through it one more time. When she asks you where I am, what do you say?'

‘I simply explain that you and Simon couldn't bear the idea of spending an entire weekend in a solar-powered house where there's never enough hot water and the all-natural, undyed sheets are itchy and nothing's really ever clean since chemicals aren't used, so instead you decided you'd rather admire the harvest from your comped beachfront suite in Key West. Oh, yeah, and that you find it quite dull when the dinner-table conversation consists solely of ecopolitics. Is that about right?' I smiled sweetly.

He looked helplessly at Sammy and coughed a few times.

‘Don't worry, sir, Bette's got the story down,' he assured him, climbing into the passenger seat. ‘Simon had a last-minute request to fill in for one of the missing musicians, and you felt it wouldn't be right to leave him alone on the holiday, as much as you'd like to see everyone. You would've called them yourself, but you're on a tight deadline for your bastard of an editor and will call next week. I'll get her up to speed on the ride.'

Will released the keys into my open palm. ‘Sammy, thank you. Bette, I want you to pay close attention to the empowerment lectures – women can do anything, you know – and try not to feel too bad for little old me, kicking back poolside with a daiquiri and a paperback.'

I wanted to hate him, but he looked so happy with his alibi and his sneaky plans that I didn't do anything but hug him and turn on the car. ‘You owe me for this. As usual.' I tucked Millington's Sherpa Bag in the backseat and tossed a Greenie inside so she wouldn't cry or whine while we drove.

‘You know it, darling. I'll bring you back one of those kitschy fringed T-shirts, or maybe a coconut candle or two. Deal? Drive safely. Or don't. Just don't call me if anything happens, at least not for the next three days. Have fun!' he called, blowing kisses in the rearview mirror.