The Lost Girls (3 page)

Despite what I'd learned about Holly, I was still shocked. “Are you serious? Would you actually come with us, Holly?”

“Would
you
really come with me?” Amanda said, now staring at me intently.

“Oh, please! You love your job more than life itself. You would
never
abandon it or New York,” I said, tormenting her as only a true best friend could. “But I triple dog dare you to quit because it'd be nice if you graced us with your presence at social events again.”

“Okay, so I'm not sure exactly when I would leave or for how long, but it makes me feel better to have an emergency escape route mapped out, just in case,” Amanda shot back, grabbing her pack from the bench and walking over to the railing to get a better view of the sinking sun. “It's either move up or move on, right?”

Although I'd witnessed her frenetic race up the razor-sharp publishing ladder firsthand, I also knew that if Amanda Pressner committed to doing something, nothing would stand in her way—or woe to the innocent bystander who did. For starters, she was the only one out of five of my college friends who hadn't bailed on our postgrad Europe trip. She'd said she was moving to Manhattan afterward to work in entertainment, and she had, all by herself, with no help or nepotistic connections. When everyone had told her it was impossible to get an editorial position at a magazine without being published first, she'd given them the mental middle finger and done it anyway. So if Amanda said she was going to leave to take a trip in the future, I had no doubt that she would.

“You know what? Unless something drastically changes in my life by the time you're ready to leave, I'll nominate myself as your partner in crime,” I announced.

As I spoke, I realized I was serious. For some reason, this particular trip to Argentina had intensified my itch to escape
my New York reality more than ever. And if things didn't get better with Brian, I might feel the need to flee the city anyway.

From the safety of another continent, the idea of leaving everything familiar behind to live like nomads seemed almost possible. If all of our promotions and job transitions happened as planned, we'd have about eighteen months to save—and we could stretch out a trip budget for almost a year if we stuck to cheaper countries. With that much time, we could cross several continents and maybe pick up odd jobs along the way (“My friend made ten dollars a day picking fruit on a farm in Costa Rica,” Holly tossed out) or volunteer with an organization in exchange for lodging (“I could secure some freelance assignments,” Amanda added). And hopefully by then we'd be at a point in our professional lives where we could leave without totally committing career suicide.

“And we're all turning twenty-eight next year, which is the phase of our lives called Saturn Return,” said Holly said, hastening to add, “It's an astrological thing—I used to edit the horoscope section for the magazine.”

She explained that during the years between twenty-eight and thirty, the planet Saturn completes its cycle through your birth chart, which marks the end of youth and start of adulthood. And it brings with it monumental endings and new beginnings.

“So it'd be the perfect time to take a trip together,” Holly said in a low, conspiratorial voice. “I say let's do it, ladies.”

It wasn't the New Age talk that sent shivers up my spine. It was the Age part. The mention of our twenty-eighth birthdays stimulated a memory, an innocuous conversation I'd had with my mom about a year and a half earlier, which suddenly seemed epically relevant. The scene played out in my mind with eerie vividness…

My mom and I were sitting at a sidewalk table at my favor
ite neighborhood cantina, sipping frozen margaritas. In typical fashion, we gabbed for hours, covering all the usual subjects: my job, the extreme importance of maxing out my 401(k) contribution, how I couldn't afford to eat and would be homeless if I maxed out my 401(k) contribution, Dad's latest home improvement project, the dire consequences of not having renter's insurance, and of course, Me, Brian and The Future.

We'd been together barely sixteen months, and I'd already heard questions from people like “Is marriage on the horizon? Shouldn't you date other people if it isn't? You know it's safer to have kids in your twenties, right?”
Great! I'm already a bad mother, and I'm not even pregnant.

As I voiced my frustrations about all of this pressure, my mom offered what, at the time, was a brilliant suggestion: “Maybe you'd feel better if you picked an age, any age you want. And make a pact that you'll just enjoy dating and not overthink anything until then.”

Hmm, it would be a relief to let myself off the hook for a while. After all, still in my midtwenties, I was a mere babe by NYC standards. I could give uncertainty another few years, right? So I threw age twenty-eight out into the ether.

“That gives me plenty of time to relax and have fun. If Brian and I are still together then, we definitely should have things figured out. And if not, I'll have to do something really radical, like move to Colorado to become a ski instructor or join a rock band roadie movement or max out my 401(k) for the first time ever in my life,” I teased.

“You're not funny,” my mom replied with a laugh. “You should really put the full ten percent of your paycheck toward savings,” she added, unable to resist.

Now, standing in the middle of an Argentinean rain forest, I couldn't shake the sense that the whole round-the-world trip idea had come up for a reason: the three of us winding up on
vacation together; talking about the possibility of leaving to travel abroad
right after my twenty-eighth birthday
; remembering an impromptu pact I had made over Tex-Mex food. Considering the turbulent state of my love life and my overwhelming inability to make a decision, it was clear that I was nearing a critical fork in the road. Well, let's be honest: I'd set up camp there ages ago and was still sitting on my ass roasting marshmallows.

I'd secretly hoped a sign would appear to point me in the right direction, but I'd never expected it to be a trip around the world. It was an odd, inexplicable feeling deep in my gut, but everything seemed fated somehow, as if any path I'd chosen would've led me to this exact point. Maybe this was something I was meant to do.

Sitting there with Amanda and Holly at the top of a waterfall, in the middle of the jungle, I had a vision of what our life on the road together would be like. It was a lightning flash of the future waiting just an arm's length away, daring us to reach out and grab it.

C
ould I really spend an entire year traveling around the world with these girls?

As crazy as it seemed, I knew the answer was yes.

NEW YORK CITY
MARCH–AUGUST

M
ost “real” New Yorkers claim that you don't become one of them until you've lived in the city for at least ten years. Some say it takes a lifetime. According to the New York State Unified Court System, I'd managed to become a New Yorker in less than seven years, and it was time to show my appreciation by paying a visit to the courthouse.

For months, I'd been boomeranging jury notice slips back downtown, convinced that if I deferred enough times, the powers that be would give up on me altogether. But the government, as it turned out, was no sleazy day trader at happy hour who—eventually—took the hint. No matter how often I rejected the offer for a date, Uncle Sam wouldn't take no for an answer.

Our little courting ritual came to an end one Tuesday night in March. I arrived home to the cramped apartment Jen and I shared with our friend Beth and swept up the stack of mail threatening to slip-slide off our front table. There, wedged between a Vietnamese delivery menu and our latest cable bill, was a red-and-black envelope marked
URGENT
—
FINAL NOTICE
.

Ripping open the letter, I flung myself onto the futon and tried to figure out how I could possibly get out of going one
more time. That's when I heard the key twisting in the lock. Jen didn't even get the chance to dump the three bags she was carrying on the ground before I pounced.

“There's just no way!” I railed, pacing the length of our ten-foot living room while Jen calmly hung up her pink wool coat with the patent leather trim. “I
can't
miss work right now. I'm already so overloaded that I'm starting to make really stupid mistakes. Misspelling words when I have to make changes on-screen. Our research chief pulled me aside today to remind me how to annotate copy.”

“Ooh, that sucks. But I'm sure they know you're just busy. What'd you misspell?” she asked, shaking the snow out of her honey-colored hair.

“Safety. Can you believe that? I spelled it saf-tey, and the proofreader almost didn't catch it until it went to press. Claire was definitely
not
impressed with that one.”

My new boss, Claire, a veteran women's magazine editor, had taken over the nutrition section after my previous supervisor, Kristen, had moved over to head the new sexual health department. Whereas Kristen had worked with me one-on-one to help me grow as a newbie writer and assigned me feature stories rather than busy work, Claire seemed to believe that assistants should pay their dues in messages taken and paperwork filed. To say that she and I hadn't exactly clicked professionally would be a major understatement. I'd always felt that if she could have replaced me instead of inheriting me, she wouldn't have hesitated a second.

“Well, I wouldn't freak out about jury duty too much. Every New Yorker has to do it at some point,” said Jen, prying a microwave burrito from the back of the freezer. “You probably won't even get picked.”

“Yeah, but what if I do? What if I get picked and they think I didn't try hard enough to get out of it and they decide to give the associate editor job to someone else?”

She looked at me in the amused way she does when I spiral from illogical into completely irrational. Which is often. “I promise—in the remote chance that you actually get chosen, there's no way they'd give the job to someone else. You've worked your ass off. And besides, it's not like they can forbid you to serve on a jury. So don't stress.”

I sighed. Jen was probably right. In any case, I didn't appear to have much of a choice. As the notice implied, either I would serve my civic duty—or I could wind up serving time.

 

S
itting in the courtroom a few weeks later, I tried to look as pathetic as possible. I'd made it a point to toss on sweats, leave my hair unwashed, and avoid makeup completely. Maybe the judge would think, “This girl can't even be bothered to use mascara—how can she possibly be qualified to sit on a jury?”

Glancing at the bored New Yorkers around me, I wondered who among us would get chosen to serve. I'd narrowly escaped the day before and hoped to shimmy through the cracks a second time. Every hour I sat here, trying to avoid attracting attention, was one more that I wasn't answering e-mails, which no doubt had already mutated and multiplied in my inbox like some resistant strain of flu virus. By now the pile of glossy proofs I'd yet to read had probably toppled and slid under my desk.

Maybe I shouldn't have gone to Argentina.

As that traitorous thought whined around my head, I tried to squash it senseless. What good was taking the trip of a lifetime if you were just going to regret it once you got home? Back in Iguazú, when we'd contemplated turning our dream vacation into a yearlong adventure, I'd been high on the idea of unplugging from my cell phone, my computer, and in fact, my entire life. But almost the second I'd dived back into my desk chair, reality had sledgehammered down. Somehow, during the ten days
that I'd been away, I'd managed to fall at least a month behind on my assignments. Go away for a year? Yeah, right. By the third weekend spent shivering inside an empty office tower trying to get caught up, I understood why more experienced editors joked that it wasn't worth the hassle to take a vacation at all.

As winter faded and spring edged in, the pace at work never slacked. If anything, it grew even more intense. Ad sales were up, and we had more pages to write and assign. The hole I'd dug while in Argentina grew into a ditch, then a bottomless trench.

The same stress that had once motivated me to spring out of bed in the morning now chased me under the covers at night. I lay awake, heart racing and guts churning as I scribbled to-do lists in the back of my head. Stress became my chronic companion, an ugly, overcaffeinated little goblin that used my chest as a trampoline and my head as a boxing ring and laid off only when I was exhausted enough to pass out.

Despite advice from friends to set boundaries (“Tell your boss you can't take on any more work. Just walk out the door every day at 6 p.m., no matter what”), admitting I'd bitten off more than I could chew would be a huge mistake. I worked with five other ambitious assistants just as eager to prove themselves as I was. We all knew that to reach the coveted level of associate editor (and if you didn't want that, you might as well just get out now) we'd have to go way above and beyond our job descriptions, taking on any extra responsibilities we could convince the department heads to dish out.

The competition among the six of us was friendly but fierce. When the pressure got to be too intense we'd commiserate, but we still fought for assignments the way hyenas might scrap over felled antelope. Ironically, perhaps through the shared experience, the late nights, and the intensity of the situation, we forged a tight friendship, a bond built over blood, sweat, and take-out soy sauce.

Of those young women, Holly was always my closest confidante. Even though she had even more to do than the rest of us—she assisted three executives in addition to editing her own pages for the Happiness section—I'd never seen Holly break down or sob in the women's bathroom the way almost every other junior staffer had. She fielded the demands of the job with good humor and a can-do attitude (at least, when our bosses were around) but was never too busy to go on a caffeine run or join me in a gripe session. She even managed to break me out of the office a few times for yoga and Pilates classes, saying we'd end up being more productive mentally if we took care of ourselves physically.

When the to-do list got really long, both Holly and I would work late, taking breaks to vent over California rolls and fantasize about doing something on Friday nights other than partying at our desks. Running the editorial hamster wheel could be almost fun with Hol around—except that as soon as we got back from Argentina, she scored a job at a kinder, gentler women's magazine. I was thrilled for her (and, yes, slightly jealous) but mostly just perplexed when she started inviting me to hit the gym or designer sample sales at lunch. Had she already forgotten where she'd worked?

As the weeks ticked by, the anxiety I hid while at the office started to bubble over. I snapped at the deli guy if he accidentally put mayo on my sandwich or if someone cut me off going through a subway turnstile. I'd always been a tad feisty, but some days I felt as if I were one annoyance away from climbing the art installation in Union Square and opening fire on the skateboarders below.

Then, just before spring finally broke, two things happened: The magazine's sole associate editor spot, the position directly above mine, became vacant. And I was forced to leave the office to serve jury duty.

 

D
espite my every intention to perjure myself, when the judge finally locked his eyes on mine and started asking questions, I heard the terrible, awful truth spilling out. I'd never been placed under arrest. I'd never been the victim of a hate crime. I'd never been stalked (unless you could count years of ex-boyfriend drama). And yes, I lived in Manhattan and had no immediate plans to leave the area.

It came as almost no surprise when, at a quarter to five, the court officer read my name off the list of selected jurors.

The judge assured the dozen of us that our case wouldn't last long, a week or so at most. Once we'd passed judgment on a relative stranger, we'd be free to go back to our regularly scheduled lives. Sounded easy enough.

As he spoke, it struck me that my new courthouse workday would be an unthinkably brief eight hours long—and for once I could actually leave the building for lunch. I couldn't remember the last time I had gone anywhere but the company cafeteria. Two years spent inhaling its greasy buffalo chicken wraps and oil-soaked pasta salads had caused me to gain fifteen pounds and a pretty substantial muffin top. Considering I was simultaneously instructing millions of women how to “Lose a dress size in 10 days!” and “Slim down in your sleep!” the irony hadn't escaped me. Nor, I figured, had my extra flab escaped the hawkeyed editors with whom I shared my office tower. As I headed out to grab a bite that first day, I wondered if jury duty might actually be a blessing in disguise.

 

D
espite the incredible amount of carrying on I'd done beforehand, I was surprised to find that I actually loved serving on a jury. I slid from bed each morning on the third
snooze rather than the tenth, dressed quickly (who'd care if I wore cargo pants and a hoodie?), and jammed out to my new iPod mini as I zipped downtown on the express subway line.

The trial, as it turned out, was nothing like those in
Ally McBeal
or
Boston Legal
, but I didn't care. Boredom was so unfamiliar a feeling that I actually welcomed it. During my hours in the jury box, my attention warbled in and out like an AM radio signal, my thoughts inevitably drifting back uptown.

As testimony played faintly in the background, I recalled how intense it felt, after years spent shifting between internships and jobs that weren't quite right, to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. The moment I finally hit upon that realization, I'd been almost manic about my quest to get into magazines. I'd interviewed for what felt like hundreds of positions before finally convincing my boss that, at twenty-five, I wasn't already too old and too experienced to take on the grunt work required of an editorial assistant (and make $24,000 a year while doing it).

It was just as my career began to get on track that my relationship with Baker—the first and only guy I'd ever fallen truly, deeply in love with—hit the skids. We'd had a passionate, tumultuous start, and over the course of three years, he and I had shredded ourselves apart so many times it was a wonder we had ever managed to stitch ourselves back together again. When we finally ended things after a roller coaster of a vacation in Mexico and a subsequent screaming match in the middle of Times Square, I think both he and I knew that this breakup had to be the last. He disappeared into the throng of pedestrians on 42nd Street that day, and I didn't talk to him again for months.

Still, I knew exactly where he was headed. Baker had been planning a multicountry backpacking trip in the years before we'd met and had grounded himself in Manhattan only long enough to give our blossoming relationship a fighting chance. Eventually, though, he'd grown restless, eager to move on.
“Let's get out of New York already,” he'd urged. “Just hand in your notice, pack a bag, and let's go.”

It was such a far-fetched plan—who abandons everything in her midtwenties to become a vagabond?—but a part of me ached to leave and see the world with him, to determine if the problems plaguing our relationship had everything to do with the extreme pressure of life in New York rather than some irreconcilable failure between the two of us.

I loved the possibility of adventure. I was still in love with him. But in the end, he couldn't commit to a future in the city and I couldn't bring myself to leave. So I let him go. After all that time, I didn't need a plane ticket or a stamp-riddled passport to know that he and I weren't meant to make certain journeys together.

Once Baker left, I wondered: How could I have ever considered leaving New York when I'd just gotten started?

The embers of my relationship still smoldering, I threw myself headlong into the new position I'd lobbied so hard to get. I couldn't work enough hours or take on enough tasks—no matter how mundane or unrelated to my career they might have been—to capture my attention and fill the void in my life. My higher-ups seemed delighted that their new nutrition assistant had little else to do besides spend her nights and weekends helping out at work.

Over time, the pain subsided, but my dedication to the magazine didn't. It occurred to me along the way that, unlike a relationship with a man, the more time and energy I poured into my job, the greater the satisfaction and reward I got out of it. It took only a year for me to get my first promotion (a subtle but important title change from editorial assistant to assistant editor), and when my boss broke the good news, she suggested it wouldn't be long before I got the next bump up—as long as I kept exceeding everyone's expectations.