Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [65]
“You don’t need to tell me,” he says, finally laughing. “I’ve been listening to you for the past thirty days!”
We hug, and then I go around the room hugging everyone else good-bye. When Robin and Peter left, they sobbed, but I’ve never been a big last-day-of-camp-or-school crier. Still, when Vera wobbles up to me in her spandex and heels, crying that she’s going to miss me, I get a little misty-eyed. World, I think, here I come.
17
“Would you like to have your lawyer look over the contract?” Tim asks me, as he leans back in his Aeron chair and puts his Converse-encased feet on his desk. We’re sitting in Tim’s penthouse corner office on Sunset, which is understated and elegant, and filled with books on media and politics, most of them presumably written by Tim’s good friends, and the fact that he is wearing an adorable striped Armani suit with Converse sneakers is doing nothing to dampen his overall cuteness. Still, now that he’s minutes away from becoming my boss, something in me has switched off—I’m not massively crushed out on him anymore.
I’m flattered that Tim thinks I’m savvy and important enough to even have a lawyer but seeing as I don’t even have a dentist—and I already know that I’d happily sign on the dotted line no matter what the contract says—I simply shake my head and motion for him to hand me a pen.
The publisher, John Davis, comes in. “Can I be among the first to congratulate Chat’s first and only ‘Party Girl’?” he asks, as he gives me a hug.
“John, I can’t thank you guys enough for this opportunity,” I say. Tim had told me that while hiring me had been his idea, John had backed him up immediately.
“No need to thank me,” John says. “I hope I’m going to be the one thanking you when you become world famous.”
Even though this entire situation should make me feel an unbelievable amount of pressure, I am, for some reason, completely calm. It could be that I’m sober thirty-five days—something I never imagined I’d be able to do—but I actually seem to have complete faith in my ability to pull off this column. The fact that they’re going to be paying me $2,500 a month to write essentially off the top of my head—no reporting, no transcribing—feels like a blessing, but a blessing that I deserve.
John starts talking about how the timing is perfect for me to become a sensation through this and how I’ll wipe Candace Bushnell, Helen Fielding, and The Devil Wears Prada chick off the map while I weigh whether or not I should tell them that I’m sober and thus can’t imagine getting up to very many crazy adventures in this new life of mine. Since I’ve been out of rehab, all I’ve done is play with my cats, meet Justin and Rachel for coffee and cigarettes, and go to meetings back at Pledges, but Tim has made it abundantly clear that he’s fine with me dipping into my past for material. “So long as it’s true, I don’t care whether it happened last night or last year,” were, in fact, his exact words.
After I sign my contract and tell Tim that I’ll be turning in copy to him by the end of the week, I feel undeniably like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City—minus the Manolo’s, adorable apartment, and three sex-crazed best friends, not to mention the Cosmopolitans.
“So, there’s something I think I need to tell you,” Justin says over double-shot lattes and Camel Lights. We’re sitting at Starbucks later that day, and each of us is preparing to meet presobriety friends for the first time since being out.
I’m going to be meeting Stephanie, and Justin is planning to have dinner with his old roommate Jason, so we’re doing what Rachel calls “book-ending”—that is, getting together before something challenging, and then planning to talk afterward. I feel strangely calm about seeing Stephanie again but Justin is completely freaking out about seeing Jason.
He talked about Jason a lot in rehab—usually about how much Jason hated it when he used and about how they seemed to always fight—and even though Justin was still at a Sober Living house right near Pledges, he was planning to talk