The Devil Wears Prada
Rating: G
Length: This is a chain of ten interlocking drabbles. 100 words each.
Disclaimer: They aren’t mine!
A/N: Thanks to my beta, Mercurychkita. Any remaining errors are my own. As usual, for Z.

I

Dr. Hermes pursed her lips, as she prepared to dictate her notes for one of her more difficult clients. She didn’t know this facial expression always made this particular client smile inwardly. She didn’t know why this client had smirked when they’d first met, “Hermes? Dr. Hermes? How perfect.”

She clicked on her recorder. “Ms. Priestly is making limited progress. She has no serious clinical issues but balks at even the slightest suggestion. She doesn’t seem to realize a chronic lack of joy in life can be as crushing as chronic depression. Perhaps a change of tack is in order?”

II

A journal only about her. Not her children. Not Runway. How very…very. She was paying for this? What was there to say? About anything? When she’d asked that Hermes woman the question, the doctor had replied with eyes that said nothing, “Exactly so, Miranda. What is there to say?” Miranda sat staring at the blank page so long that she felt the itching of tears welling in her eyes. She had nothing to say. Nothing at all. She’d stopped asking herself questions years before; any answers she might have had, left with them. She stabbed the page with her pen.

III

“How is your journal going, Miranda?”

“Going?” The voice was cool but Miranda was angry. Good.

“Progressing? Which word would you prefer?”

“I’d prefer to be excused from this juvenile exercise.”

“If it’s so juvenile, it must be quite simple for you, no?”

Miranda blinked her eyes. Dr. Hermes knew she wouldn’t cry, because she was a very experienced and gifted doctor. Which had brought Miranda to her in the first place. 

“You’re hurting, Miranda.”

“No.”

“Yes. When you’re hurting so badly, sometimes you have no words. You have no words, do you?”

“No.”

“Just so. We start with words.”

IV

What were words? Miranda looked again at her blank journal. Words were things that were the right print size, font and color and created the effect she wished to produce. Yet another night and another blank page. What did she feel? There really was no her, just the person she always ensured brought the attitude for exactly the effect she wished to produce.

As she pondered this, Andy arrived with the book and Miranda called her into the den. Andy arrived, as always, with the deer in headlights look she always wore.

“Yes, Miranda?”

“Andrea, do you keep a journal?”

V

Andy looked at the journal in Miranda’s hand and answered softly, “Sometimes I do. Are you thinking of starting one?”

Miranda waved her hand—“I’ve been ordered to by my…doctor. You should know. You make my appointments.” Indeed, Andy was the only person Miranda would allow to make her therapist appointments.

Andy sat down, “Well, that’s good, right? It might help.”

Miranda looked at Andy, her face reflecting fury and a complete vulnerability.

“I don’t know how.”

“Don’t know how to what?”

“To write a journal.”

Andy ran her hands through her hair. “We both need a glass of wine.”


VI

Andy asked, “Why do you think Dr. Hermes wants you to keep a journal?” Moments passed and she felt the sting of the wine in the back of her throat.

“Because she, like everyone else, thinks I have no feelings.”

“That’s not true.”

“Her perception or my lack of ‘affect?’”

“Neither. It sounds like she wants you to…know yourself better.”

Miranda finished her wine. “So many people think I don’t know myself?”

“No. A very few know you want to know yourself.”

“You don’t want to know me at all. You’re merely kind. And I use the word merely advisedly.”

VII

“What’s different today, Miranda? You have written a few pages in your journal. Whether you let me read them or not is immaterial.”

“I have no idea.”

“You have every idea. It’s hardly clinically wise to say, but you’re the smartest client I’ve ever had.”

“Which means what? I’m your prime village idiot?”

“No. You progress.”

“I’ll always progress. I discard what disappoints me.”

“Who or what disappoints you?”

“Nearly everyone. Everything.”

“Hardly a recipe for success.”

“On the contrary, doctor.”  Miranda smiled and said, “My life is one of increasingly diminishing returns—but I win every race I run.”


VIII

“Why do you run, Miranda?”

“From whom?”

“I’ve read the journal entries you’ve made available. Why run?”

“She’s not available.”

“From your journal, Andy seems quite available.”

“For how long?”

“Does that matter?”

“Of course. I want latitude, not longitude.”

“Longitude is deeper.”

“Latitude is longer.”

“And you want someone to give you a longer relationship, not a deeper one?”

“Frankly, I don’t know what to want.”

“You might have both.”

“No. That never happens.”

“Love isn’t GPS, Miranda.”

“Love is ephemeral. Look into the stars, no matter your skill, and you’ll find you never, ever know where you are.”

IX

“And so that’s it?”

“What else could it be, Andrea?”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“But—“

“But what does that matter? You’re half my age. You will leave me. Inevitably. We have nothing in common except that we love each other.”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“You’d think so. But not when you’re half my age. Can we be friends?”

Andy stared at Miranda as if she didn’t recognize her. “Real friends or friends who faux kiss each other at parties every five years?”

“Real friends.”

“If that’s what you really want.”

“It’s what I want more than anything.”

X

Dr. Hermes: Life, as I told you, is a game of diminishing returns. You give up what you want to the people who deserve it. Sometimes, you find you are wrong. And you move on. And moving on adds a layer of your inability to feel. I can’t say what I found wanting or what they found wanting in me but each moving on left me a little less able to feel. I knew this but have paid to know this, yet again, in a couple of ways. 

Thank you, Dr. Hermes. Thank you, Andrea.

Journals are for other people.

~fin~