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  The rest of the kitchen was similarly déclassé: warped black and white linoleum, appliances from the middle of a former century, a sink permanently stained by antibiotic-resistant life forms. It was a long, long way from Prune.

  Still, when I brought the mashed potatoes and braised asparagus to the table, James gave me a huge smile. I had remembered his all-time favorite meal. It was still a piss-poor excuse for a surprise, but what choice did I have? After the cop had complimented me on my powers of observation, he’d cheerfully added that the odds of finding the kid who had ripped me off weren’t great, and even if they did find him, my backpack and its contents would be long gone. Meanwhile, Craigslist Pete insisted that a deal was a deal, refused to return my T-shirt, and took off before I gave the cop my statement.

  I’d decided not to tell James that I’d lost both the money for dinner at Prune and the front-row tickets to the Strokes. Why make him feel guilty? Instead, I withdrew forty more bucks from my calamitously low bank account and bought the makings of a great dinner. As birthday surprises went, it pretty much sucked, but I figured I could liven things up with dessert.

  “Oh, man, that’s perfect.” James closed his eyes in rapture as he chewed the medium-rare steak. “You canceled your credit cards, all that?” he asked.

  “Credit card, singular,” I reminded him. Not that the kid could have used it anyway—my Visa had a two-thousand-dollar limit that I was already over. I tasted my steak. Delish. It was one of the few things I could cook well. “What did your parents give you?”

  The night before, his parents had taken him to Bouley. I hadn’t been invited, despite the fact that last year Heather the Perfect had joined them at Five Hundred Blake Street, arguably the best restaurant in New Haven.

  Truthfully, I didn’t know Heather very well, but I had of course looked her up on Facebook. She was the youngest daughter of a rich Rhode Island family that traced its roots back to Roger Williams, and she was currently a first-year law student at Harvard. Not only did Heather have a brain, she had straight blond hair, a swanlike neck, and the kind of pouty lips I longed to have. A mere mortal who writes photo captions for a living and is a size larger on the bottom than on the top could not possibly compete.

  “My present?” James’s voice pulled me out of my musings. “My mom got John Updike to sign first editions of all the Rabbit novels for me.”

  I took a bite of steak and tried to smile. The only collectible I used to have was the Woodstock T-shirt.

  For the next few minutes, I ate while James regaled me with tales from East Coast. He’d been assigned to edit the short stories of a half-dozen well-known young singer-songwriters. According to James, they all sucked, and he’d had to rewrite every word while they got the credit.

  “I hate it when that happens,” I teased, refilling our glasses with an Australian Shiraz that I’d found in the bargain bin. “Like, why don’t I get credit for what I rewrote about Jessica and Ashley’s dueling lip injections?”

  He reached across the table for my hand. “You won’t be stuck there for long.”

  Easy for a guy working at East Coast to say. I made little circles with my fork in what was left of my mashed potatoes. “If I could just pitch one really great idea that Debra would like . . .”

  Debra Wurtzel was my editor in chief. She knew pop culture the way James knew Salinger. Editorial meetings were Monday mornings, and assistants like me attended only at the mercurial behest of an immediate boss—in my case, Latoya Lincoln, who’d invited me exactly twice. The first time Debra hadn’t even glanced in my direction. But the second time she’d fixed her gaze on me and asked, “Megan? Your ideas?”

  When Debra looked at me, everyone else did, too. I think I’ve already established that the center of attention is not my favorite place to be. For one thing, I blush. Seriously. The conference room fell silent as my face turned the color of an overripe tomato. Finally, I pitched a piece about a new study correlating celebrities’ weights with dips and spikes in the average weight of sixteen-to-twenty-year-old women.

  Debra’s assistant, Jemma Lithgow, a recent Oxford grad in size-nothing Seven jeans, reminded the room that we had recently done a cover story on diet secrets of the stars, so we couldn’t very well turn around and rip that which we had just lauded. She didn’t need to add “you size-ten asshole” because, really, her look said it all.

  Ever since that meeting, I’d been relegated to Scoop purgatory. Ambitious peers no longer sat with me for lunch in the fourth-floor commissary, clearly afraid of being tainted by my loser status. At least the risk of being asked back to the Monday editorial meeting was slim. I was okay avoiding further public humiliation for a while, thanks very much.

  When James and I had finished eating, I piled the dishes in the sink, put in the stopper, and added water and dish soap. My prewar—meaning, pre–World War I—building had not come with plumbing fixtures suitable for a dishwasher. James came up behind me and lifted my hair to kiss the back of my neck.

  “Hey,” he murmured as he nuzzled. “I was just thinking about the holidays.”

  This was an interesting development. Thanksgiving and Christmas were practically upon us, and we’d spoken about them only in passing. “Yeah?”

  He kissed me again, then his hands snaked around my waist. “My parents want us to go to Florida, to our place in Gulf Stream.”

  Us?

  “So I thought . . . maybe you’d like to come?” James asked. “For Thanksgiving?”

  Thanksgiving was only ten days away. It wasn’t what you would call a lot of notice. Still, I felt like pumping my fist in the air.

  I cocked my head back far enough so that I could see his eyes. “Your parents invited me?”

  “Well, not yet,” he hedged. “I wanted to check with you first.”

  Not good. Wasn’t this kind of invitation supposed to work the other way around?

  “What do you think?” James prodded, sneaking a forefinger under the bottom of my T-shirt. He kissed me again, then pulled my T-shirt up over my head.

  “I think . . .” I said, trying to concentrate on what it would be like to miss Thanksgiving with my own family. But then James slid his hand into my jeans, and all I could say was “Oh” and then “Okay” and then “Yes.”

  I reached for James’s pants, unbuttoning them with one hand and tugging them to his knees with the other. I should mention here that in addition to writing, I do have one other talent—at least that’s what I’ve been told. Let’s just say growing up on the dark side of my sister’s celestial glow made me try harder.

  I whispered to James that he should go wait for me in bed, I had a birthday surprise for him. He was only too eager to oblige.

  I opened the fridge and pulled out a chocolate cake with mocha frosting from the Edelweiss pastry shop on Second Avenue. Maybe I didn’t have front-row Strokes tickets anymore, but I was hoping that frosting some of his favorites of my body parts would make up for it.

  “Hey, where’s your Woodstock T-shirt?” he called from the living room/bedroom.

  Shit. “I decided to store it at my parents’ house,” I called back, anointing myself with mocha frosting.

  You might ask yourself at this point if I felt even slightly ridiculous. The answer is yes. Frankly, I had never frosted my nipples before. Nor any other body parts. But I was determined, in spite of everything, to make this a birthday that James would remember.

  I was just putting the finishing touches on the lower portion of my anatomy and kind of wishing that his favorite flavor were vanilla or strawberry, because mocha brown is not really the most becoming color for a nude and edible seduction, when I smelled smoke.

  I checked the broiler, but I’d turned it off. Yet the smell was getting stronger. I cautiously padded to the front door and peered through the peephole. The hallway was black. A split second later, the old-fashioned fire alarm above my head began to clang loudly.

  “Fire!” I ran into the bedroom, completely forgetting my nu
dity and the frosting. “Fire! There’s a fire! The hallway is full of smoke!”

  James sprang from the bed, his enthusiasm deflating, his eyes wide with fright. He grabbed his boxers.

  “The fire escape!” I commanded, knowing we couldn’t get through the smoke to the stairs.

  I grabbed the first thing I saw—a bed sheet—and wrapped it around myself. As it turned out, frosting serves as a reasonable adhesive. Who knew? It took precious seconds for James to manhandle the window that opened to the fire escape. When he was finally able to shove it upward, he pushed me through, then followed. I could already hear fire engines in the distance.

  Did I mention that physical education was never my strong suit? Well, it turns out that if I’m highly motivated, I can really haul ass. Down and down and down we went. By the time we reached the base of the escape at the second floor, a huge crowd had gathered, staring straight up at us.

  It was then that the realization hit me: I was draped in a white sheet stuck to me with brown frosting; I was not wearing anything underneath; and I still had to climb down the rungs of a ladder to the sidewalk. I looked back at James for guidance.

  “Go, baby,” he ordered. “Just go.”

  And so I went. But climbing down a ladder wearing nothing but a frosting-spackled sheet, all while keeping my legs together in a ladylike fashion, proved . . . impossible.

  Which is how I ended up beavering the entire East Village.

  Not wishing to appear __________, the junior magazine staffer kept her __________ well concealed.

  (a)unsophisticated; ignorance

  (b)desperate; trembling hands

  (c)cocky; brilliant ideas

  (d)fat; size-ten booty

  (e)overqualified; pedigree

  Chapter Three

  Early Monday morning found me sipping coffee and enjoying my second jelly doughnut at a small cafeteria table across from my sister, Lily, who daintily spooned a bite of fat-free yogurt into her pouty-lipped mouth. Of course, that’s what I should have been eating. But I figured that the events of the weekend entitled me to a full-fledged sugar infusion.

  My apartment was uninhabitable. According to our barely decipherable Serbian landlord, Charma and I wouldn’t be able to return for quite a while—three weeks, at least. We were allowed one trip inside after the blaze to salvage a few personal effects but had to don mouth-and-nose masks that made us look like invading aliens from a C-grade horror flick. The masks proved necessary, because everything in our apartment was covered in a layer of soot.

  During that salvage mission, I shed my sheet and donned the first things I found in my closet—jeans, a sweatshirt, and chunky black loafers that hadn’t been stylish even when I’d bought them freshman year. I took my iBook—praying that it had survived—and a garbage bag of clothes, plus the twenty emergency bucks I kept stashed inside a copy of A Brief History of Time, knowing that even if a junkie wedged his way under our kitchen-window security grate, he’d never steal that book.

  Saturday night I slept at James’s place and didn’t attempt a return to birthday-seduction mode. Trust me, if you had an army of sidewalk strangers give you a visual gynecological exam, you’d lose your sex drive, too. His parents’ condo had a mini washer and dryer discreetly placed behind accordion doors, but my attempts to wash the soot and fumes from the clothes I’d salvaged proved fruitless.

  Sunday afternoon, James lent me his smallest jeans, an old sweatshirt, and a hundred bucks. I went straight to the 70-percent-off clearance rack at Century 21. This being mid-November, it held nothing but summer clothes and a handful of items clearly left over from last winter because they were too hideous to be purchased by anyone who could actually see.

  My hundred dollars bought a gauzy lavender and purple prairie skirt, a white cotton shirt, navy stretch pants with pockets over both hips that pretty much screamed WIDE LOAD, a brown sweater, and two summer T-shirts in the oh-so-palatable shades of vomit yellow and puke green. Sweet. I couldn’t enlist even Lily in this mission—she had a matinee and then a photo shoot for the Gap; they were doing a Stars of the Future ad campaign that would launch the following spring. The shoot went well into the night, which was why my sister had met me for coffee at my corporate cafeteria before her Monday-morning spinning class. Even without makeup and in gym clothes, she looked depressingly flawless.

  “When can you get back into your apartment?” Lily asked.

  My landlord had left another update on my cell voice mail. “Christmas. Maybe the week after.”

  Lily swallowed another baby-size mouthful of yogurt. “I’m sure you want to stay with James, but you can always stay with me if you want.”

  I had never actually informed Lily that living with James long-term was not an option due to his parents’ mandate. It just seemed too pathetic.

  See, here’s the thing about my sister. I knew she’d offer to share her airy brownstone apartment on West Seventy-fifth near Amsterdam Avenue, and I knew she’d do it with grace. One of the worst things about Lily is that in addition to being stunning and disgustingly accomplished, she is also genuinely nice. If she were a self-centered asshole, I could loathe her. But since she isn’t an asshole and I still detest her for all the things she is that I’m not, being around her kind of makes me hate myself.

  “Oh, I’ll work something out,” I said breezily, then polished off the second jam-filled doughnut.

  “Umm . . . you’ve got a little . . .”

  Lily motioned to her chest. I looked down. My new white shirt was smeared with strawberry jam between buttons three and four. I dabbed at it with a napkin, which only expanded the pinkish stain. Swell.

  We walked to the elevators. Scoop occupied floors seven and eight of a magnificently renovated fifteen-story building on East Twenty-third Street, overlooking Madison Square Park. Other magazines owned by the same European publishing conglomerate—including Rockit, a new Rolling Stone competitor I desperately wanted to write for but couldn’t even get an interview with—took up the rest of the building, except for the sleek floor-through cafeteria where we stood. I pushed both the up and the down buttons. Guess which one came first.

  “If you change your mind, just call me.” Lily gave me a little hug and stepped into the empty down elevator.

  A minute later, I stepped out of a jammed one heading up to Scoop and beyond. I waved to Brianna, the receptionist who had started only the week before. The walk to my cubicle took me past Latoya’s open office door.

  “Megan!” she called. “Editorial meeting in ten minutes.”

  I hoped the horror of her announcement didn’t show on my face. I’d been a bit too preoccupied with the smoked-out-no-place-to-live-purse-ripped-off-no-money thing to plan a pitch for a meeting to which I’d been entirely positive I would not be invited again.

  Ha.

  Debra Wurtzel, my editor in chief, managed to be both totally cool and completely intimidating at the same time. She was in her early forties, with jet-black blunt-cut hair that fell just above her shoulders. Her severe bangs drew attention to her piercing blue eyes, which were, as usual, rimmed in blue-black kohl. There were five tiny platinum loop earrings lining her right ear and one in her left. Today she wore black wool trousers, a fitted black blazer, and layered black tees. When the last straggler arrived for the editorial meeting—thank God it wasn’t me—she took off her cat’s-eye reading glasses. I’d figured out at my first meeting that this was her signal to begin.

  We were in the eighth-floor conference room, whose windows overlooked Twenty-third Street. I sat between Debra’s assistant, Jemma, and Latoya. Always stylish, Jemma sported a gossamer white blouse under a black Betsy Johnson corset top, a red-and-white-checked miniskirt, and round-toed heels that reminded me of Minnie Mouse. The only suggestion that she wasn’t as perfect as she looked were the raggedy cuticles lining her ballet-slipper-pink manicure. Evidently pressure got to her, too.

  Latoya wore a thick gray cashmere sweater, a straight black skirt, and pil
es of oversize black beads around her neck. She looked like Debra’s style protégée, which of course she was. In my own jelly-stained shirt and absurdly out-of-season skirt, I looked like the protégée of a bag lady.

  “Let’s start with Hooking Up/Breaking Up.” Debra fixed her gaze on Lisa Weinstock, the plump and brilliant editor whose department handled celebrity couples. “What’s coming up, Lisa?”

  Lisa brushed her magenta-streaked bangs away from her eyes. “Totally fresh scoop, including trouble in paradise for Jen and you-know-who. We’ve also got cell-phone pix of Ashlee flirting with Nick at Bungalow 8—nothing like hitting on your sister’s ex to make a splash.”

  “Excellent,” Debra said as heads bobbed in agreement all around the table. Of course, if Debra had agreed that a pictorial on donkey sex was “totally fresh,” heads would’ve bobbed.

  “Latoya?” Debra asked. “Center story?”

  This was the department for which I was an underling. Scoop did one weekly four-page “article” in the center of each issue.

  “I’m working on a piece with Demi’s daughter Rumer,” Latoya reported. “An inside look at her mom, Bruce, Ashton, blah blah blah. Her photographs; she’ll write captions.”

  “Excellent, Latoya.” Debra’s head turned slightly until I was squarely in her gun sights. “Megan? What’s your best new story idea?”

  A dozen sets of eyes swung in my direction. I willed my face to remain this side of vermilion, but apparently, biofeedback wasn’t working.

  “Well . . . I was thinking about a story on . . .” Think, Megan, think. “Some new studies are suggesting that a decline in breast cancer may be connected to a decline in menopausal women’s use of hormone replacement therapy.”

  Someone snickered, but Debra’s face was inscrutable. She rolled a forefinger, indicating that I should continue.

  “And that had me wondering what the connection might be to other forms of, um, hormones.” I felt my face flaming. “Like the pill,” I finished.

  Debra raised her eyebrows at Latoya. “Did Megan discuss this with you?”