Summer and the City (The Carrie Diaries 2)

My eyes follow their gestures. The lights swaying over Seventh Avenue are dark.

I look uptown. Smoke is billowing from somewhere near the river.

“What’s happening?” I scream.

Miranda crosses her arms and gives me a tangled, triumphant smile. “It’s a blackout,” she declares.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Okay. Let me get this straight,” I say. “The lining from the uterus migrates to other parts of the body, and when you get your period, it bleeds?”

“And sometimes, you can’t get pregnant. Or if you do, the fetus can actually develop outside the uterus,” Miranda says, proudly displaying her knowledge.

“Like in your stomach?” I ask in horror.

She nods. “Or in your butt. My aunt had a friend who couldn’t poop. Turns out there was a baby growing in her lower intestine.”

“No!” I exclaim, and light another cigarette. I puff on it thoughtfully. The conversation is getting out of hand, but I’m enjoying the perversity. I figure it’s a special day—a day that’s outside of all other days and is therefore exempt from the normal rules.

The entire city is without power. The subways aren’t running and the streets are a mess. Our stairwell has been plunged into darkness. And there’s a hurricane outside. Which means Samantha, Miranda, and I are stuck. For the next few hours, anyway.

Samantha arrived unexpectedly minutes after the blackout began. There was a lot of shouting in the stairwell, and people coming out of their apartments to compare notes. Someone said the ancient telephone building was struck by lightning, while another resident claimed the storm knocked down the phone lines and all the air conditioners caused a power outage. Either way, there are no lights and no phone service. Enormous black clouds rolled over the city, turning the sky an eerie grayish green. The wind picked up and the sky flashed with lightning.

“It’s like Armageddon,” Miranda declared. “Someone is trying to tell us something.”

“Who?” Samantha asked with her usual sarcasm.

Miranda shrugged. “The Universe?”

“My uterus my Universe,” Samantha said, and that’s how the whole conversation began.

Turns out Samantha has endometriosis, which is why she’s always in so much pain when she gets her period. But it wasn’t until she got to LA that the pain became unbearable and she started throwing up, right in the middle of a photography shoot. When the photographer’s assistant found her nearly passed out on the bathroom floor, they insisted on calling an ambulance. She had to have her insides scraped out, and then they sent her back to New York, to rest.

“I’m going to be scarred for life,” Samantha moans now. She pulls down the top of her jeans to reveal two large Band-Aids on either side of her ridiculously flat stomach, and peels away the adhesive. Underneath is a large red welt with four stitches. “Look,” she commands.

“That’s awful,” Miranda concurs, her eyes shining with strange admiration. I was worried that Miranda and Samantha would hate each other, but instead, Miranda appears to have accepted Samantha’s position as top dog. She’s not only impressed with Samantha’s worldliness, but is doing her level best to get Samantha to like her. Which consists of agreeing with everything Samantha says.

Putting me in the position of being the disagreer. “I don’t care about scars. I think they add character.” I can never understand why women get so worked up about these tiny imperfections.

“Carrie,” Miranda scolds, shaking her head in accordance with Samantha’s distress.

“As long as Charlie never finds out,” Samantha says, leaning back against the cushions.

“Why should he care?” I ask.

“Because I don’t want him to know I’m not perfect, Sparrow. And if he calls, I need you to pretend I’m still in LA.”

“Fine.” It seems weird to me, but then again, the whole situation is weird, with the blackout and all. Perhaps it’s even Shakespearean. Like in As You Like It when everyone takes on different personas.

“Sparrow?” Miranda asks, jokingly.

I give her a dirty look as Samantha starts talking about my sex life with Bernard. “You have to admit, it’s odd,” she says, propping her feet on the pillows.

“He must be gay,” Miranda says from the floor.

“He’s not gay. He was married.” I get up and pace around in the flickering candlelight.

“All the more reason to be horny,” Samantha laughs.