how it works, Angie.’ I tossed my empty red cup into a nearby trash can, silently whooping as it landed. ‘Most people don’t think too much about other people’s schedules when they’re quitting a job. I guess she wanted to take a nice long break over the holidays before she starts at the new place.’
‘There is no new place,’ Angie said, her face like thunder. ‘She actually quit because she got engaged. Can you believe it?’
‘Only because I’m so jealous.’
Standing up slowly, I stretched my arms over my head. They were still aching from my workout the day before. Until someone appeared to yank me off the shelf and drown me in a life of luxury, I was stuck with the pre-dawn Soulcycle sessions. I still couldn’t work out how they had come up with the name: the only thing soul-related about spinning classes was how quickly they crushed mine.
‘Maybe I should just let Alex knock me up and go on baby vacay,’ she mused, dropping her own Starbucks cup in the trash. ‘I’ve had enough.’
‘Sure you’ve had enough of being editor-in-chief of your own magazine.’ I looked out of the huge windows that surrounded us and hoped against hope that the glass was tinted. Otherwise there was a storm on its way. ‘You could totally walk away tomorrow and spend the rest of your days hanging out in Park Slope with two little rug rats clinging to your apron strings. You wouldn’t go crazy at all.’
‘I’m already crazy,’ Angie said. She pulled two mismatched mittens out of her Marc Jacobs purse to prove her point. ‘I’m working on a Saturday and I can no longer dress myself.’
‘Honey.’ I patted her on the shoulder with love. ‘There are some people who would suggest you’ve never been great at the latter. And the former is the price of success. I’ve got to work today too, remember?’
‘You’re going to the launch of a new handbag,’ Angie retaliated. ‘And it’s not even your launch.’
‘Competitor research. I have to check out what the other PR companies are up to.’
‘And get a free handbag?’
‘I gave up my freaking Saturday afternoon for this shit,’ I replied. ‘If they aren’t tossing purses around like confetti, I’m going to kick someone’s ass.’
Even though I’d spent almost all my adult life in Manhattan, nothing readied me for the bitter sting of the winter wind. I scrunched up my face, as best as the neurotoxins in my forehead would allow, and winced. My Latin blood was not meant for this shitty weather.
‘So, Thursday, what’s the plan?’
‘Come over whenever?’ Angela shrugged and wrapped a black scarf shot through with glitter round her face. ‘I’ll get food in.’
‘Angela Clark,’ I said, stamping my foot and punching her maybe a little too hard in the arm. ‘We are not talking about getting sushi and bitching out the girls on America’s Next Top Model. It’s Christmas Day. It’s me and you. It’s champagne for breakfast and dinner with our nearest and dearest and gifts that we can’t really afford because our rents are crazy, and you getting wasted and singing that dumb carol from Sleepless in Seattle over and over and over until I get just as wasted and start crying. There are traditions to uphold.’
‘And you did a fantastic job of selling them,’ she said, rubbing her arm. Huh. Maybe those Soulcycle classes were starting to pay off after all. ‘I’m sorry, I’m just mad that I’ve got to go into work and that Alex is away and all the rest of it.’
‘Your folks couldn’t come this year?’ I asked, mustering up as much sympathy as I could in sub-zero temperatures.
‘I told them not to because I thought I was going out to Japan to meet Alex,’ she said, swiping her already runny nose. It was ball-shrinkingly cold. ‘And now they’ve booked to go to The Crown.’
‘The Crown?’
‘Local pub.’
‘They can’t cancel?’
‘Clearly not.’
I knew Angie found her parents frustrating, but I would still trade hers for mine. Mine were only upstate − hardly another country − but they might as well have been on the other side of the planet for how often we spoke. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to see what they were doing for the holidays; Christmas had never been a big deal for our family. I figured they’d be off on vacation. Vacation had been their default setting since my dad had retired.
‘Okay, since you’re clearly determined to play the Grinch this year, I’m taking over,’ I announced. ‘So you leave your holly jollies with me, and I will figure out the best damn Christmas you ever did see.’
Angela raised an entirely mobile eyebrow.
‘Or, I don’t know, I’ll buy as many bottles of champagne as I can carry and we’ll have a True Blood marathon?’ I suggested, quietly smug in the knowledge that I’d already secured the best Christmas present she would ever get in her entire adorable little life.
Angela smiled.
‘Trust me,’ I said, kissing her on the cheek and squeezing her sad little shoulders in a bear hug. ‘It’s gonna be the best Christmas yet, I promise.’
*
As much of a consumer whore as I was, it was hard to get excited about a handbag launch in the week before Christmas on a Saturday afternoon. If it weren’t for the fact that my flatmate, Sadie Nixon, was being paid an obscene amount of money to walk around the room waving said handbag under people’s noses, I totally wouldn’t have been there. But she had promised me boozing and schmoozing, and (I hadn’t wanted to rub Angie’s nose in it too much) a new designer handbag of my very own if I showed up, oohed and ahhed and waited around for her afterwards.
For a relatively famous model, Sadie had huge self-esteem problems. When we’d first met, she was one of the most in-demand models in America − in the world, really − but the last year or so she’d been way more interested in taking vacations with her super-rich boyfriend. Until he unceremoniously dumped her ass three months ago for a younger model. Literally, in this case. I’d seen photos of him tramping all over town with some 22-year-old tramp from a Pharrell video, and there was no one on earth who could spin that into a positive story, not even me. Now she was taking every job she could get and hanging onto me like a limpet. Oh, the joy.
No one could have called the room at the St Regis crowded, but given the weather and the time of year, I was pretty impressed that anyone had shown up. Unless they’d all been lured in by the promise of a free purse. Shimmying out of my fur-trimmed parka (I hadn’t bothered to ask whether it was real or faux in the store, and now I loved it so much I was scared to know the answer), I peeled off my blood-red leather gloves as the coat-check girl handed me a ticket. According to the quick glance in my powder compact in the cab, my eyeliner was still in place, my nude lipstick hadn’t smudged all over my face and my olive complexion glowed from the wind-whipping it had taken. On the whole, I was a pass. Smiling graciously, I tossed the coat-check coupon into my bag, never to be seen again, and surveyed the room.
‘Jenny, darling!’
Death and taxes may be the only certainties in life, but in PR we add the absolute certainty of running into
