Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection: The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Knowing, Chasing Harry Winston, Last Night at Chateau Marmont
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