“How about this? It would look awesome on you with your cute little butt,” said Gabe, holding up a gold lamé micro-mini.
“Um, I don’t think so,” I said, and continued to plunder through the racks of clothes.
“These are so genius,” said Teagan, pulling brown leather sandals with a cork heel out of the shoe bin and trying them on for size. “Perfect fit!”
It was five o’clock on Teagan’s birthday, and in a few hours we were planning to rage and blow off some serious steam. We were in the fashion closet at Skirt, scanning through all the clothes that had already been photographed and trying to find cool outfits to wear to our first trip to Melt, a hot new club in the Meatpacking District. While technically it was against the rules to borrow from the closet, everyone did it, including all of the top editors and Genevieve herself. Very little fashion was ever returned to the clothing designers who lent them out for shoots, and usually at the end of the season, people were permitted to take what “swag” they wanted. (There was a hierarchy, of course—more senior editors got to go first, then associates, assistants, and what was left went to the interns.)
“Oh my God, I have to have these!” squealed Gabe, trying on some strappy sandals. “They are just too sweet to pass up.”
“Come on, you can’t wear those,” I said.
“Why? Because I’m a guy? Why do the girls get all the good stuff?”
“Here’s a cool leather bracelet—this is unisex. Check it out,” I said, tossing it to him.
“Fits like a charm,” said Gabe. “J’adore Dior.”
“What are you doing?” a voice from the doorway demanded.
We all turned around. It was Daphne.
“Oh, hey, Daph, we’re just messing around, trying on some stuff,” I said casually.
Daphne’s mouth contorted into a frown and she crossed her arms sternly. “You know you’re not supposed to be in here without any editors.”
Gabe and Teagan glanced at each other with looks of disgust, then shrugged.
“Come on, Daph, you know everyone checks out the closet,” I said.
“I certainly hope you weren’t planning on borrowing anything. That’s against the rules and I would have to report you,” she said, staring at me coldly.
I couldn’t believe her. She had no idea that I overheard her bashing me in the closet, and nothing had been said between us about the internship. I’d played it cool and let her glory in her new status, content in the knowledge that the people who mattered to me knew the real situation.
“What’s the deal, Daphne? Is something wrong?” Treat bees with honey, treat bees with honey.
I watched her flex her calf muscles, which she often did when she was wearing really high heels, and then saw her eyes move from me to Gabe to Teagan.
“There’s been some theft of late. Genevieve is really concerned, and she asked me to look into it. In fact, she put me in charge of finding out who it is, and I’m working with management now, trying to crack the case. I would really hate to find out that one of you had something to do with it.”
Oh. My. God. What a raging beeyotch. She’d hinted at something like this that day I’d overheard her, when she and James split up. Was she really going to sink so low?
Teagan and Gabe were too astonished to speak, so I had to.
“Daphne, of course we have nothing to do with it. We’re merely trying on clothes, like you and Jane and Cecilia do all the time,” I said, kind of losing my cool. “So if it’s a problem for you, since you’ve essentially been assigned to be hall monitor, we will leave.”
Teagan and Gabe followed me out. We brushed past her and left her standing on the threshold, arms folded, expression sour.
When we got downstairs we all burst out laughing.
“She is evil!” said Teagan. “What a diva whip cracker!”
“Can you deal with how she said she had to ‘crack the case’? Is she Hercule Poirot now?” I asked.
“She’s a total clam!” pronounced Gabe. “Actually, she’s a quahog.”
“A what?” laughed Teagan between guffaws.
“A quahog is a giant North Atlantic clam. With Daphne Hughes’s spoiled face on it.”
We giggled, picturing the heiress as a bottom-feeding mollusk.
Later that night we all put Daphne out of our mind and went to Melt, which was amazing. I was so nervous about using my fake ID. My cousin Charlotte had given me her driver’s license, and she looked a lot like me, but I wasn’t sure it was going to work. Gabe told me I was being ridiculous and that Charlotte and I were as similar as the Olsen twins, but my heart was pounding as Teagan and I followed a confident Gabe past the crowds of “201’s and 516’s,” as Daphne would say, referring to the New Jersey and Long Island area codes. As we approached the velvet ropes, my hand shook as I retrieved Char, my drink-pounding, 2-D alter ego.
“We work for Skirt,” said Teagan. Trixie and Lilly, the market editors, had alerted us to the fact that it worked magic if we ever wanted to cut a line. Clubs liked to be associated with the hippest publications on the planet, which made sense. It also usually worked for getting reservations at new restaurants and tickets for premieres.
The humongous bald bouncer barely even looked at Teagan or me, stopping only to inspect Gabe’s butt, then shrugging and letting him in.
The club was cool, not like one of those thumping techno music places where you can’t see or hear anyone, but more like a 1940s swanky lounge. The walls were wood-paneled, and leather booths featured on each table cute little lamps with covered lamp shades. I felt like I was in a speakeasy, but I guess that was the point.
While I was disappointed I hadn’t been able to snag a cool outfit from the closet, I had made do in a very thin white leather shirt slash jacket and a diaphanous layered lilac skirt that was from agnès b. like twenty years ago. I had also splurged on cool dangling earrings from an up-and-coming designer in NoLita.
Gabe and I had just finished singing “Happy Birthday” to Teagan over the DJ’s remixes when Gabe’s jaw dropped as he grabbed my arm.
“Okay, ten o’clock there is the hottest guy!” squealed Gabe.
“Ten o’clock? Where the hell is that?” asked Teagan, who was already a bit tipsy from the mojitos.
“Over there,” said Gabe, abandoning his code and flagrantly pointing to a guy at the bar.
He was hot. He looked like Brad Pitt when he was still with Jennifer Aniston but right before their divorce, when he had that short cropped blondish haircut pre-Troy, but not as blond as it was when he was with Gwyneth Paltrow, and also about twenty years younger. And his clothes were cool, kind of black on black (shirt, pants) that were more thrown on than contrived to be a badass. Just as I was staring at him he turned and caught my eye and smiled, holding up his beer bottle as if to say “cheers.”
“He just smiled at me! Oh my God, heart palpitations,” said Gabe, fanning himself.
Wait, wasn’t he smiling at me?
“Really?” I asked, confused.
“Go talk to him! Go talk to him!” commanded Teagan, waving her mini-drink-straw in the air. I stayed out of it.
“Should I?” asked Gabe, turning and stealing a glance at the guy again.
“Totally!” urged Teagan.
Gabe took a swig of his drink and got up, emboldened. I watched him walk over to the Brad Pitt guy and say something. God, this was either going to be amazing for Gabe or really mortifying. I saw Gabe throw his head back and laugh, then point to our table, put his hand on Brad Pitt’s, really flirty, then guide him toward us. So I was wrong. He had smiled at Gabe. But as Gabe sat down, his eyes widened.
“Guys, this is Matt,” said Gabe.
“Hey,” said Matt, staring at me as I greeted him. Up close he looked less like Brad but was still gorgissimo. He had amazing hazel eyes, with brown and green flecks. “Mind if I join you?”
He slid into the booth without waiting for our response.
“So Matt here is drowning his sorrows cause he just broke up with his girlfriend,” said Gabe, enunciating the last word.
Girlfriend? So I was right! Ha.
“So I told him he had to come over to our table right away if he wanted to be cheered up. He thought I was hitting on him, silly boy, but I told him I was sitting with two very lovely ladies,” said Gabe quickly.
“And he was right,” said Matt, again staring at me.
“Great, well, nice to meet you,” I said.
“So what’s your number, Matt?” asked Teagan bluntly.
Instead of being put off by her brusque manner, Matt smiled. “My number? Eleven.”
I laughed and Gabe giggled.
“Seriously, I just graduated from Georgetown, headed to law school in the fall, and am taking the summer off. I did some traveling for two months, and now I’m just hanging.”
“Where are you going to law school?” I asked. Columbia, please!
“Harvard?” he said, as if he wasn’t sure I’d heard of it.
“Why is it that people who go to Harvard always say it like it’s a question? Harvard? Do you know it?” said Teagan, mocking him.
But Matt laughed in agreement. “You’re right, so lame.” Then he deepened his voice dramatically. “I’m going to Harvard.”
I liked a guy who had a sense of humor about himself.
“That’s better,” said Teagan.
“Now tit for tat. Tell me who you guys are and what you’re doing here,” he said, looking at me again.
We spent the next forty-five minutes downloading our lives and filling him in on Skirt and the recent Daphne debacle. Matt listened intently and laughed at all the right places. He even offered relationship advice to Gabe, who was bemoaning the lack of male attention. That was cool. So often straight guys are totally squeamish and immature when it comes to gay men. But Matt seemed not to care that Gabe was gay, earning bonus points in my book. By the end of the conversation, Matt was even pointing out potential suitors to Gabe, which had us all in fits of laughter.
Later, Teagan and Gabe got up to dance, and Matt and I were left alone.
“Your friends are funny,” he said.
“I know,” I said. I had really lucked out with these roomies.
“Do you want to dance?” he asked. Wow. Bold! I got a wave of that nervous excitement when you know someone seems into you. Too bad I sucked at dancing.
“I’d love to, but I’m inept,” I said.
“Come on,” he said. “No one is worse than me.”
“Alright,” I said, finally agreeing.
He was right about being a pretty bad dancer, but actually I didn’t care, because before long we weren’t really dancing, just kind of swaying closely for what seemed like hours. When Gabe and Teagan decided they’d had enough, we all left together. It was kind of a shock to be out on the street after so many hours in the dark club. Teagan and Gabe walked a bit ahead of us toward the subway, and Matt put his arm around me.
“So can I call you?” asked Matt at the subway steps.
“Sure,” I said, scribbling my number on a scrap piece of paper. Butterflies!
“Great,” he said, leaning in to give me a small kiss on my lips. A perfect kiss, not too long, not too short, but lip to lip. I slept very well.