The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger

Spicy tuna rolls and seaweed salads certainly
felt like an emergency, and so I silently thanked Mom and Dad for treating Lily
and me so well.
     
     “He
said, ‘Welcome to the dollhouse, baby.’ I swear. How cool is
that?”
     
     She
looked at me, mouth hung open, spoon suspended in midair.
     
     “You
have the coolest job I’ve ever heard of,” said Lily, who always
talked about how she should’ve worked for a year before going back to
school.
     
     “It
does seem pretty cool, doesn’t it? Definitely weird, but cool, too.
Whatever,” I said, digging in to my oozing chocolate brownie.
“It’s not like I wouldn’t rather be a student again than
doing any of this.”
     
     “Yeah,
I’m sure you’d just love to work part-time to finance your
obscenely expensive and utterly useless Ph.D. You would, wouldn’t you?
You’re jealous that I get to bartend in an undergrad pub, get hit on by
freshmen until fourA .M. every night, and then head to class all day, aren’t
you? All of it knowing that if—and that’s a big, fat if—you
manage to finish at some point in the next seventeen years, you’ll never
get a job. Anywhere.” She plastered on a big, fake smile and took a swig
of her Sapporo. Lily was studying for her Ph.D. in Russian Literature at
Columbia and working odd jobs every free second she wasn’t studying. Her
grandmother barely had enough money to support herself, and Lily wouldn’t
qualify for grants until she’d finished her master’s, so it was
remarkable she’d even come out that night.
     
     I took
the bait, as I always did when she bitched about her life. “So why do you
do it, Lil?” I asked, even though I’d heard the answer a million
times.
     
     Lily
snorted and rolled her eyes again. “Because I love it!” she sang
sarcastically. And even though she’d never admit it because it was so
much more fun to complain, she did love it. She’d developed a thing for
Russian culture ever since her eighth-grade teacher told her that Lily looked
how he had always pictured Lolita, with her round face and curly black hair.
She went directly home and read Nabokov’s masterpiece of lechery, never
allowing the whole teacher-Lolita reference to bother her, and then read
everything else Nabokov wrote. And Tolstoy. And Gogol. And Chekhov. By the time
college rolled around, she was applying to Brown to work with a specific
Russian lit professor who, upon interviewing seventeen-year-old Lily, had
declared her one of the most well read and passionate students of Russian
literature he’d ever met—undergrad, graduate, or otherwise. She
still loved it, still studied Russian grammar and could read anything in its
original, but she enjoyed whining about it more.
     
     “Yeah,
well, I definitely agree that I have the best gig around. I mean, Tommy
Hilfiger? Chanel? Oscar de la Renta’s apartment? Quite a first day. I
have to say, I’m not quite sure how all of this is going to get me any
closer toThe New Yorker, but maybe it’s just too early to tell.
It’s just not seeming like reality, you know?”
     
     “Well,
anytime you feel like getting back in touch with reality, you know where to
find me,” Lily said, taking her MetroCard out of her purse. “If you
get a craving for a little ghetto, if you’re just dying to keep it real
in Harlem, well, my luxurious two-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot studio is all
yours.”
     
     I paid
the check and we hugged good-bye, and she tried to give me specific
instructions on how to get from Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street to my own
sublet all the way uptown. I swore up and down that I understood exactly where
to find the L-train and then the 6, and how to walk from the 96th Street stop
to my apartment, but as soon as she left, I jumped in a cab.
     
     Just
this once,I thought to myself, sinking into the warm backseat and trying not to
breathe in the driver’s body odor.I’m a Runwaygirl now .
     
      
     
     I was
pleased to discover that the