Chapter 1
ONE
Running in four-inch stilettos is not easy.
But it can be done. In fact, you can get up to a heart-pounding, sweat-trickling, hair-ruining sprint if you need to.
And that day, I really needed to. Nobody was late for Wednesday-morning edit review meetings at StyleList. So I was running east on Fifty-Seventh Street, at damn near full speed, past the store managers swinging open the pearly gates to Gucci and Chanel and Burberry, past the ladies who lunch (and then blame their retail therapy on a two-Chardonnay buzz), past bored limo drivers smoking cigs and talking shit while they wait for their respective Park Avenue princesses, past slow-moving tourists performing the upward gaze-and-point maneuver like bewildered synchronized swimmers.
I was leaping over toy poodles, Chihuahuas, and Yorkies, and narrowly missing Brioni-suited men emerging from breakfast meetings only to watch in amazement as I whipped around them in my high heels.
As a teenager, I developed my style by reading Teen Beat, copying Lisa Bonet, and watching music videos on MTV.
For years, my outfits were an awkward mix of vintage boho, East Village, and the Boogie Down Bronx.
One consistent element had always been a pair of clean sneakers.
I had long since shed the confused outfits of my teens, but at that moment, I sure did miss those kicks.
In the three years post-Alonzo, I’d caught a few people in the Park Ave Pub lobby snickering in my direction and assumed that Alonzo had dropped some choice tidbits about me from afar.
He had few inroads into the high-end fashion world, so StyleList was somewhat insulating, but time had diminished neither the balance on my Visa nor my expectation that he would eventually make good on his threats.
Dressing in neutrals, pulling my hair back, and looking over my proverbial shoulder had become a habit.
But working in the most stylish office in publishing taught me that if I wasn’t going to wear eye-catching outfits, I had better at least have a decent selection of stilettos to give my humdrum wardrobe a modicum of glamour.
I slowed to a trot one block before the marble entrance of Park Ave Pub.
Better to be a couple minutes late than risk running into one of my colleagues while panting and sweating mascara down my cheeks.
I pushed open the heavy glass doors and hurried inside, trying to tuck my frizzing hair back into a flimsy ponytail holder while the security guard calmly watched.
“Please,” I begged him, after searching for and not finding my laminated badge in my overflowing tote. “I am so late. Can you let me through? Just this once?”
“I need your employee ID.”
“I know, I know. Dammit.” Dumping the contents of my tote onto the security desk, I caught sight of a distinctive tornado of red curls.
Lucinda. Just Lucinda. No one used her last name, and no one had to because everyone who was anyone in the fashion industry knew who she was.
Lucinda, StyleList’s editor in chief, was formidable and feared.
Every designer in the industry practically sank to their knees when they saw her coming, to better position themselves for the ass-kissing Lucinda (Lucifer, as some called her) would demand.
To make matters worse, Lucinda was notoriously fickle: One day she loved Dior, the next she adored Balmain, the next she couldn’t live without Lanvin.
She was like that with her employees as well.
Some days she would waltz up to me and pronounce my prose “too, too gorgeous.” Other days she wouldn’t acknowledge me in the elevator.
I ducked my head, hoping Lucinda wouldn’t recognize me today. No such luck.
“Nikki, right? Ah, Nicole Rose,” she intoned, bending to pick up my employee ID that had conveniently dropped off the security desk to land inches from her feet.
Lucinda handed me the ID while I took in her outfit: a ballet tutu worn with motorcycle boots and a black blazer buttoned over a bright fuchsia bra.
Lucinda was known for her excessive jewelry, and on every finger of both hands she’d stacked silver and emerald rings.
The whole thing was a little Cyndi Lauper for my taste, but since Lucinda was always way ahead of the trends, I assumed fashionistas across the country would soon be rocking tutus, boots, and bras-as-blouses.
Ignoring my stare, Lucinda fluffed her enormous hair and watched me try to casually stuff my unpaid bills, taxi receipts, and gym shorts back into my tote before she could take inventory. “Aren’t you due in my edit meeting? Right now?” she asked.
Shit, there was no way out of this one. “Morning, Lucinda. Yes, sorry. I was having trouble locating my ID and security wouldn’t allow me through.” I figured I’d peg it on the asshole security guard, but Lucinda wasn’t letting me off so easy.
“You should have been there already, doll,” she replied crisply.
I didn’t say a word, just nodded with what I hoped was the appropriate amount of deference and prayed for an express elevator.
Pissing Lucinda off was not a good career move.
First of all, the woman’s nickname was Lucifer.
The second reason? I was a features-department peon with the rest of the cerebral bookworms. Within the StyleList hierarchy, features was near the bottom of the pecking order—after the fashion, beauty, art, and entertainment departments.
The one department we trumped was research, and that was only because those pesky fact-checkers insisted on verifying with a doctor or a manager before allowing StyleList to print that a big-name actress was bulimic even though the accessory editor’s best friend like, totally heard her hurling in a bathroom at a restaurant.
The third reason was that I was a senior associate editor.
Although I’d been excited for my recent promotion, even I didn’t know what that title meant.
When I was offered the slight upgrade from associate editor, I called Marie in HR and said, “So I’m a jumbo shrimp now! ”
“What are you talking about?”
“My new title is senior associate editor.”
“Oh, your promotion.” She’d laughed. “Congrats, jumbo shrimp!”
Of course, that association stuck; Marie’s emails to me were always addressed to J.S., and every time I told someone my title, the image of a fried shrimp dangling from Lucinda’s fingers popped into my mind.
The fourth reason not to get on Lucinda’s bad side—which should probably be the first—was that both the fashion industry and StyleList were known for being whiter than white.
In Park Ave Pub’s one hundred years of existence, they had never named a Black EIC.
While street looks from Harlem and Brooklyn were showing up on high-fashion runways, the StyleList team felt astonishingly free to dismiss and mock Black people in everything from team meetings to casual hallway conversations.
Aside from the receptionist, a couple executive assistants, and our six-foot-eight male bookings director whose head wraps smelled like lemongrass and cocoa butter, I was the only Black person on the staff—though I wasn’t entirely convinced that everyone at StyleList had processed the fact that I was Black.
I thought I clearly looked African American, especially when I wore my curls out, but throughout my life people had questioned what my tawny, freckled skin and penny-colored eyes and hair meant.
If I had a dime for every white guy at a bar who exclaimed, “What? No, you’re not!
” I’d have been retired. The one time I’d given my dad—a wavy-haired, green-eyed Irishman—a tour of my office, he’d confused the matter even more.
I could have worn a dashiki to work, and they might have all thought it was just a retro-cool fashion statement.
When the elevator doors slid open on the thirty-ninth floor (or, as some of Lucifer’s more jaded employees referred to it, Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell), Lucinda’s long-suffering assistant, Mary-Kate, was waiting, folders and fruity-looking drink in hand, her expression petrified as usual.
She wordlessly handed the glass to Lucinda, who quickly downed the red concoction (rumored to be acai mixed with some antiaging elixir found only in the chin hair of endangered Sumatran tigers). I was mercifully forgotten.
I dashed to the conference room, hoping for an unobtrusive entrance. But when I swung open the door, all chatter stopped since everyone assumed Lucinda had arrived to deliver her weekly group abuse.
Though I hated to admit it, Mary-Kate and I had something in common: StyleList remained an intimidating place to work.
The magazine was launched decades after venerable titles like Vogue and Elle, but StyleList quickly became the biggest, hottest fashion magazine in the world.
And the fashion fanatics who worked there definitely knew it.
They were, after all, the most influential style editors on the planet.
They could identify a fake Louis Vuitton purse from fifty paces away; they could distinguish whether an unlabeled lipstick smear was MAC’s Viva Glam or Chanel’s Rouge Allure; they could tell if a model had gained or lost a pound just by her runway gait.
And they wielded their power without mercy.
God help anyone wearing last season’s Gucci jacket, scuffed Louboutins, the wrong shape pant leg or—yes—the wrong length skirt.
If you went to the Midtown Salvation Army on the right day, you could score $750 Jimmy Choos that a StyleList editor had dropped off because they were “so last year, ew.”