Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection: The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Know by Lauren Weisberger Read Free Book Online Page A

and taxes would take the rest. Oh, and my parents were confiscating the emergencies-only credit card, now that I was an ‘adult.’ Sweet.
    Lily pulled through after three straight days of letdowns. Since she had a vested interest in getting me off her couch for good, she e-mailed everyone she knew. A classmate from her Ph.D. program at Columbia had a friend who had a boss who knew two girls who were looking for a roommate. I called immediately and spoke to a very nice girl named Shanti, who told me she and her friend Kendra were looking for someone to move into their Upper East Side apartment, in a room that was minuscule but had a window, a closet, and even an exposed brick wall. For $800 a month. I asked if the apartment had a bathroom and kitchen. It did (no dishwasher or bathtub or elevator, of course, but one can hardly expect living in luxury their first time out). Bingo. Shanti and Kendra ended up being two very sweet and quiet Indian girls who’d just graduated from Duke, worked hellishly long hours at investment banks, and seemed to me, that first day and every day thereafter, utterly indistinguishable from each other. I had found a home.

4
    I’d slept in my new room for three nights already and still felt like a stranger living in a very strange place. The room was minute. Perhaps slightly larger than the storage shed in the backyard of my house in Avon, but not really. And unlike most empty spaces that actually looked bigger with furniture, my room had shrunk to half its size. I had naïvely eyed the tiny square and decided that it had to be close to a normal-size room and that I’d just buy the usual bedroom set: a queen-size bed, a dresser, maybe a nightstand or two. Lily and I had taken Alex’s car to Ikea, the postcollege apartment mecca, and picked out a beautiful light-colored wood set and a woven rug with shades of light blue, dark blue, royal blue, and indigo. Again, like fashion, home decorating was not my strong suit: I believe that Ikea was into its ‘Blue Period.’ We bought a duvet cover with a blue-flecked pattern and the fluffiest comforter they sold. She persuaded me to get one of those Chinese rice-paper lamps for the nightstand, and I chose some preframed black-and-white pictures to complement the deep red roughness of my much-hyped exposed brick wall. Elegant and casual, and not a little Zen. Perfect for my first adult room in the big city.
    Perfect, that is, until it all actually arrived. It seems simply eyeing a room isn’t quite the same as measuring it. Nothing fit. Alex put the bed together and by the time he’d pushed it against the exposed-brick wall (Manhattan code for ‘unfinished wall’) it had consumed the entire room. I had to send the delivery men back with the six-drawer dresser, the two adorable nightstands, and even the full-length mirror. The men and Alex did lift up the bed, however, and I was able to slip the tri-blue rug under it, and a few blue inches peeked out from underneath the wooden behemoth. The rice-paper lamp had no nightstand or dresser on which to rest, so I simply placed it on the floor, wedged in the six inches between the bed frame and the sliding closet door. And even though I tried special mounting tape, nails, duct tape, screws, wires, Krazy Glue, double-sided tape, and much cursing, the framed photos refused to adhere to the exposed brick wall. After nearly three hours of effort and knuckles rubbed bleeding and raw from the brick, I finally propped them up on the windowsill. It was for the best, I thought. Blocked a bit of the direct view the woman living across the airshaft had into my room. None of it mattered, though. Not the airshaft instead of a majestic skyline or the lack of drawer space or the closet that was too small to hold a winter coat. The room was mine – the first I could decorate all on my own, with no input from parents or roommates – and I loved it.
    It was the Sunday night before