ill, stop shouting for your sister!” my mother screamed unhelpfully. “I think she’s still sleeping.” And then, a voice came even louder from the bottom of the stairs.

“Andy, are you still sleeping?” she screamed in the general direction of my room.

I pried open an eye and checked the clock. Quarter after eight in the morning. Dear god, what were these people thinking ?

It took a few times of rocking from side to side before I could muster enough strength to pull myself to sit, and when I finally did, my whole body pleaded for more sleep, just a little more sleep.

“Morning,” Lily smiled, her face coming within inches of my own when she turned to face me. “They sure do get up early around here.” Since Jill and Kyle and the baby were home for Thanksgiving, Lily had been forced to vacate Jill’s old room and move onto the lower half of my childhood trundle bed, which was currently pulled out and nearly level with my own twin-size bed.

“What are you complaining about? You look psyched to be awake right now, and I’m not sure why.” She was propped up on one elbow, reading a newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee she kept picking up and placing down on the floor next to the bed.

“I’ve been up forever listening to Isaac cry.”

“He’s been crying? Really?”

“I can’t believe you didn’t hear him. It’s been incessant since about six-thirty. Cute kid, Andy, but that whole early-morning thing has got to go.”

“Girls!” my mother screamed again. “Is anyone awake up there? Anyone? I don’t care if you’re still sleeping, just please tell me one way or the other so I know how many waffles to defrost!”

“Please tell her one way or the other? I’m going to kill her, Lil.” And then toward my still closed door: “We’re still sleeping, can’t you tell? Fast asleep, probably for hours more. We don’t hear the baby or you screaming, or anything else!” I shouted back, collapsing backward on the bed. Lily laughed.

“Relax,” she said in a very un-Lily-like way. “They’re just happy you’re home, and I, for one, am happy to be here. Besides, it’s only a couple more months, and we’ve got each other. It’s really not so bad.”

“A couple more months? It’s only been one so far, and I’m ready to put a bullet in my head.” I yanked my nightshirt over my head—one of Alex’s old workout ones—and put on a sweatshirt. The same jeans I’d been wearing every day for the past few weeks lay rumpled in a ball near my closet; when I pulled them over my hips, I noticed that were feeling snugger. Now that I no longer had to resort to gulping down a bowl of soup or subsisting on cigarettes and Starbucks alone, my body had adjusted itself accordingly and gained back the ten pounds I’d lost while working at Runway. And it didn’t even make me cringe; I believed it when Lily and my parents told me I looked healthy, not fat.

Lily slipped on a pair of sweatpants over the boxers she’d slept in and tied a bandana over her frizzed-out curls. With her hair pulled off her face, the angry red marks where her forehead had met shards of the windshield were more noticeable, but the stitches had already come out and the doctor promised that there’d be minimal, if any, scarring. “Come on,” she said, grabbing the crutches that were propped against the wall everywhere she went. “They’re all leaving today, so maybe we’ll get a decent night’s sleep tonight.”

“She’s not going to stop screaming until we go down there, is she?” I mumbled, holding her elbow to help her to her feet. The cast around her right ankle had been signed by my entire family, and Kyle had even drawn annoying little messages from Isaac all over it.

“Not a chance.”

My sister appeared in the doorway, cradling the baby, who currently had drool halfway down his chubby chin but was now giggling contentedly. “Look who I have,” she cooed in baby talk, bouncing the happy boy up and down in her arms. “Isaac, tell your auntie Andy not to be such a tremendous bitch, since we’re all leaving real, real soon. Can you do that for mommy, honey? Can you?”

Isaac sneezed a very cute baby sneeze in response, and Jill looked as though he’d just risen up from her arms a full-grown man and recited a few Shakespearean sonnets. “Did you see that, Andy? Did you hear that? Oh, my little guy is just the cutest thing ever!”

“Good morning,” I said, kissing her on the cheek. “You know I don’t want you to leave, right? And Isaac’s welcome to stay as long as he can figure out how to sleep between the hours of midnight and ten A.M. Hell, even Kyle can stick around if he promises not to talk. See? We’re easy here.”

Lily had managed to hobble down the stairs and greet my parents, who were both dressed for work and saying their good-byes to Kyle.

I made my bed and tucked Lily’s back underneath, making sure to fluff her pillow before sticking it in my closet for the day. She’d come out of the coma before I even got off the plane from Paris, and after Alex I was the first one to see her awake. They ran a million tests on every conceivable body part, but with the exception of some stitches on her face, neck, and chest, and the broken ankle, she was perfectly healthy. Looked like hell, of course—exactly what you’d expect for someone who’d danced with an oncoming vehicle—but she was moving around just fine and even seemed almost annoyingly upbeat for someone who’d just lived through what she did.

It was my dad’s idea that we sublet our apartment for November and December and move in with them. Although the idea had been less than appealing to me, my zero-sum salary left me with few arguments. And besides, Lily seemed to welcome the chance to get out of the city for a little while and leave behind all the questions and gossip that she’d have to face as soon as she saw anyone she knew again. We’d listed the place oncraigslist.org as a perfect “holiday rental” to enjoy all the sights of New York, and to both our shock and amazement, an older Swedish couple whose children were all living in the city paid our full asking price—six hundred dollars more per month than we ourselves paid. The three hundred bucks a month was more than enough for each of us to live on, especially considering my parents comped us food, laundry, and the use of a beat-up Camry. The Swedes were leaving the week after New Year’s, just in time for Lily to start her semester over again and for me to, well, do something.

Emily had been the one who officially fired me. Not that I’d had any lingering doubts as to my employment status after my little foul-mouthed temper tantrum, but I suppose Miranda had been livid enough to drive home one last dig. The whole thing had taken only three or four minutes and had unfolded with the ruthless Runway efficiency that I loved so much.

I’d just managed to hail a cab and pry the left boot from my pulsating foot when the phone rang. Of course my heart instinctively lurched forward, but when I remembered that I’d just told Miranda what she could do with her You remind me of myself when I was your age, I realized it couldn’t be her. I did a quick tabulation of the minutes that had passed: one for Miranda to shut her gaping mouth and recover her cool for all the Clackers who were watching, another for her to locate her cell phone and call Emily at home, a third to convey the sordid details of my unprecedented outburst, and a final one for Emily to reassure Miranda that she herself would “see to it that everything was taken care of.” Yes, although the caller ID simply said “unavailable” on international phone calls, there wasn’t a doubt in the world who was ringing.

“Hi, Em, how are you?” I practically sang while rubbing my bare foot and trying not to let it touch the filthy taxi floor.

She seemed to be caught off-guard by my downright chipper tone. “Andrea?”

“Hey, it’s me, I’m right here. What’s up? I’m kind of in a hurry, so . . .” I thought about asking her directly if she’d called to fire me but decided to give her a break for once. I braced myself for the verbal tirade she was sure to let loose on me—how could you let her down, me down,Runway down, the wide world of fashion, blah, blah, blah—but it never came.

“Oh yeah, of course. So, I just spoke to Miranda . . .” Her voice trailed off as though she was hoping I’d continue and explain that the whole thing had been a big mistake and not to worry because I’d managed to fix it in the last four minutes.

“And you heard what happened, I’m assuming?”

“Um, yeah! Andy, what’s going on?”

“I should probably be asking you that, right?”

There was silence.

“Listen, Em, I have a feeling that you called to fire me. It’s OK if you did; I know it’s not your decision. So, did she tell you to call and get rid of me?” Even though I felt lighter than I had in many months, I still found myself holding my breath, wondering if maybe, through some dumb stroke of luck or misfortune, Miranda had respected my telling her to fuck off instead of been appalled by it.

“Yes. She asked me to let you know that you have been terminated, effective immediately, and she would like you to be checked out of the Ritz before she returns from the show.” She said this softly and with a trace of regret. Perhaps it was for the many hours and days and weeks she was now facing of finding and training someone all over again, but there sounded like there might be something even more behind it.

“You’re going to miss me, aren’t you, Em? Go on, say it. It’s OK, I won’t tell anyone. As far as I’m concerned, this conversation never happened. You don’t want me to go, do you?”

Miracle of miracles, she laughed. “What did you say to her? She just kept repeating that you were crass and unlady-like. I couldn’t get anything more specific out of her than that.”

“Oh, that’s probably because I told her to fuck herself.”

“You did not!”

“You’re calling to fire me. I assure you, I did.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yeah, well, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t the single most satisfying moment of my pathetic life. Of course, I have now been fired by the most powerful woman in publishing. Not only do I not have a way to pay off my nearly maxed-out MasterCard, but future jobs in magazines are looking rather dismal. Maybe I should try to work for one of her enemies? They’d be happy to hire me, right?”

“Sure. Send your résumé over to Anna Wintour—they’ve never liked each other very much.”

“Hmm. Something to think about. Listen, Em, no hard feelings, OK?” We both knew that we had absolutely, positively not a single thing in common but Miranda Priestly, but as long as we were getting on so famously, I figured I’d play along.

“Sure, of course,” she lied awkwardly, knowing full well that I was about to enter into the upper stratosphere of social pariah-dom. The chances of Emily admitting she had so much as known me from this day forward were nonexistent, but that was OK. Maybe in ten years when she was sitting front and center at the Michael Kors show and I was still shopping at Filene’s and dining at Benihana, we’d laugh about the whole thing. But probably not.

“Well, I’d love to chat, but I’m kind of screwed up right now, not sure what to do next. I’ve got to figure out a way to get home as soon as possible. Do you think I can still use my return ticket? She can’t fire me and leave me stranded in a foreign country, can she?”

“Well of course she would be justified in doing so, Andrea,” she said. Ah-hah! One last zinger. It was comforting to know that things never really changed. “After all, it’s really you who are deserting your job—you forced her to fire you. But no, I don’t think she’s a vengeful kind of person. Just charge the change fee and I’ll figure out a way to put it through.”

“Thanks, Em. I appreciate it. And good luck to you, too. You’re going to make a fantastic fashion editor someday.”

“Really? You think so?” she asked eagerly, happily. Why my opinion as the biggest fashion loser ever to hit the scene was at all relevant, I didn’t know, but she sounded very, very pleased.

“Definitely. Not a doubt in my mind.”

Christian called the moment I hung up with Emily. He had, unsurprisingly, already heard what happened. Unbelievable. But the pleasure he took from hearing the sordid details, combined with all sorts of promises and invitations he offered up, made me feel sick again. I told him as calmly as possible that I had a lot to deal with right now, to please stop calling in the meantime, that I’d get in touch if and when I felt like it.

Since they miraculously didn’t yet know that I’d flunked out of my job, Monsieur Renaud and entourage fell all over themselves on hearing that an emergency at home demanded I return immediately. It took only a half hour for a small army of hotel staff to book me on the next flight to New York, pack my bags, and tuck me into the backseat of a limo stocked with a full bar bound for Charles de Gaulle. The driver was chatty, but I didn’t really respond: I wanted to enjoy my last moments as the lowest-paid but most highly perked assistant in the free world. I poured myself one final flute of perfectly dry champagne and took a long, slow, luxurious sip. It had taken eleven months, forty-four weeks, and some 3,080 hours of work to figure out—once and for all—that morphing into Miranda Priestly’s mirror image was probably not such a good thing.

Instead of a uniformed driver with a sign waiting for me when I exited customs, I found my parents, looking immensely pleased to see me. We hugged, and after they got over the initial shock of what I was wearing (skintight, very faded D&G jeans with spike-heeled pumps and a completely sheer shirt—hey, it was listed in category, miscellaneous; subcategory, to and from airport, and it was by far the most plane-appropriate thing they’d packed for me), they gave me very good news: Lily was awake and alert. We went straight to the hospital, where Lily herself even managed to give me attitude about my outfit as soon as I walked in.

Of course, there was the legal problem for her to contend with; she had, after all, been speeding the wrong way down a one-way street in a drunken stupor. But since no one else was seriously hurt, the judge had shown tremendous leniency and, although she’d always have a DWI on her record, she’d been sentenced to only mandatory alcohol counseling and what seemed like three decades’ worth of community service. We hadn’t talked a lot about it—she still wasn’t cool with admitting out loud that she had a problem—but I’d driven her to her first group session in the East Village and she’d admitted that it wasn’t “too touchy-feely” when she came out. “Freakin’ annoying” was how she put it, but when I raised my eyebrows and gave her a specialty withering look-à la Emily—she conceded that there were some cute guys there, and it wouldn’t kill her to date someone sober for once. Fair enough. My parents had convinced her to come clean to the dean at Columbia, which sounded like a nightmare at the time but ended up being a good move. He not only agreed to let Lily withdraw without failing in the middle of the semester, but signed the approval for the bursar’s office saying that she could just reapply for her tuition next spring.

Lily’s life and our friendship seemed to be back on track. Not so with Alex. He’d been sitting by her side at the hospital when we arrived, and the minute I saw him I found myself wishing my parents hadn’t diplomatically decided to wait in the cafeteria. There was an awkward hello and a lot of fussing over Lily, but when he’d shrugged on his jacket a half hour later and waved good-bye, we hadn’t said a real word to each other. I called him when I got home, but he let it go to voice mail. I called a few times more and hung up, stalker-style, and tried one last time before I went to bed. He answered but sounded wary.

“Hi!” I said, trying to sound adorable and well adjusted.

“Hey.” He clearly wasn’t into my adorableness.

“Listen, I know she’s your friend, too, and that you would’ve done that for anyone, but I can’t thank you enough for everything you did for Lily. Tracking me down, helping my parents, sitting with her for hours on end. Really.”

“No problem. It’s what anyone would do when someone they know is hurt. No big deal.” Implied in this, of course, was that anyone would do it except someone who happens to be phenomenally self-centered with whacked-out priorities, like yours truly.

“Alex, please, can we just talk like—”

“No. We really can’t talk about anything right now. I’ve been around for the last year waiting to talk to you—begging, sometimes—and you haven’t been all that interested. Somewhere in that year, I lost the Andy I fell in love with. I’m not sure how, I’m not exactly sure when it happened, but you are definitely not the same person you were before this job. My Andy would have never even entertained the idea of choosing a fashion show or a party or whatever over being there for a friend who really, really needed her. Like,really needed her. Now, I’m glad you decided to come home—that you know it was the right thing to do—but now I need some time to figure out what’s going on with me, and with you, and with us. This isn’t new, Andy, not to me. It’s been happening for a long, long time—you’ve just been too busy to notice.”

“Alex, you haven’t given me a single second to sit down, face to face, and try to explain to you what’s been going on. Maybe you’re right, maybe I am a completely different person. But I don’t think so—and even if I’ve changed, I don’t think it’s all been for the worse. Have we really grown apart that much?”

Even more than Lily, he was my best friend, of that I was certain, but he hadn’t been my boyfriend for many, many months. I realized that he was right: it was time I told him so.

I took a deep breath and said what I knew was the right thing, even though it didn’t feel so great then. “You’re right.”

“I am? You agree?”

“Yes. I’ve been really selfish and unfair to you.”

“So what now?” he asked, sounding resigned but not heartbroken.

“I don’t know. What now? Do we just stop talking? Stop seeing each other? I have no idea how this is supposed to work. But I want you to be a part of my life, and I can’t imagine not being a part of yours.”

“Me neither. But I’m not sure we’re going to be able to do that for a long, long time. We weren’t friends before we started dating, and it seems impossible to imagine just being friends now. But who knows? Maybe once we’ve both had a lot of time to figure things out . . .”

I hung up the phone that first night back and cried, not just for Alex but for everything that had changed and shifted during the past year. I’d strolled into Elias-Clark a clueless, poorly dressed little girl, and I’d staggered out a slightly weathered, poorly dressed semi grown-up (albeit one who now realized just how poorly dressed she was). But in the interim, I’d experienced enough to fill a hundred just-out-of-college jobs. And even though my résumé now sported a scarlet “F,” even though my boyfriend had called it quits, even though I’d left with nothing more concrete than a suitcase (well, OK, four Louis Vuitton suitcases) full of fabulous designer clothes—maybe it had been worth it?

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.