The Knockoff by Lucy Sykes, Jo Piazza Read Free Book Online Page A

friends, who was closer to fifty than forty (if you stole a peek at her driver’s license), referred to forty as the “rush hour of life.” Victor Hugo called it the “old age of youth.” Imogen still felt reasonably young, but beyond that she was certain that she was in the prime of her life.
    “It used to drive me crazy too, when my mother popped across the pond unexpectedly,” Imogen chimed in. “My mum always arrived bearing some kind of English gift—Waitrose tea bags, sacks of lavender or a hot water bottle. She would never knock before coming into the apartment since she managed to get a key from the super, so I was always in some embarrassing state when she arrived.”
    She recounted to the group of gathered co-workers how, when she was their age, she once worked a celebrity shoot for four days straight in Los Angeles. She returned to New York City on the night of her birthday, having smuggled a silver sequined Versace minidress from the set. She donned it, along with a pair of strappy silver dancing shoes, in the cab, putting a sheer pashmina between her and the cabbie as she stripped down in the backseat. All the other assistants from
Moda
met her at a smoky lounge in the Village, the name of which she could no longer recall. At the end of the evening Imogen stumbled home with a Hugh Grant look-alike. When her mum walked through the door carrying scones and a handmade patchwork quilt the next morning, the floppy-haired gentleman had his very white backside poking up toward the ceiling.
    The group of women at the table laughed appreciatively at her story but Imogen could tell they were not entirely sure who Hugh Grant was.
    “Where are your parents from?” Imogen asked Ashley, bring the conversation back to the irritating mother.
    “We’re on Eighty-Fifth and Park,” the girl replied. “At least you had an ocean between you and your mom. Try being with your parents all the time.”
    Ashley lived with her parents? Imogen tried to conceal a look of surprise.
    “Are you staying with them until you find your own place?”
    “Yeah, I figure I’ll be there a couple more years.” Ashley spoke around a bit of asparagus wrapped in a thin layer of prosciutto she had selected from the appetizers the waiter brought out, along with several plates stacked high with arugula covered in finely shaved Parmesan. “The building is getting a new gym next summer.”
    As the other girls at the table nodded in unison, Imogen grew more confused.
    “You don’t want your own place sooner than that?”
    “Why would I? We all live with our parents.” The others nodded again. “Well, Mandi doesn’t, but that’s because her parents live in, like, Idaho.”
    “Virginia,” Mandi interjected.
    “Or something,” Ashley finished her sentence. “Your parents still pay for your loft in Williamsburg. Why would we get our own apartments when we get everything we need at our parents’ places? They have all the right food. There is laundry service. Besides. Who can afford to live in Manhattan on our salaries?”
    The jumbo, matching Chanel 2.55 bags the girls all slung over their shoulders made sense now. Imogen herself had survived on $35,000 a year when she first came to the city, living with two young women in a railroad apartment on the Upper East Side she’d found in the back-page listings of
The Village Voice
. The walls had been painted a prominent purple and the stairs always smelled vaguely of illicit sex. The place was so small that if someone took a hot shower in the narrow bathroom, the window in the kitchen on the apartment’s far side would fog up with steam.
    “We wouldn’t be able to afford anything with a doorman,” Perry said. “And who wants to have to walk up stairs?”
    Imogen found their conversation fascinating. They were not unlike the Spaniards she had met one summer in Madrid who flocked to public parks and crowded subways to make out and sometimes more because they lived with their parents