Being Audrey Hepburn

Yellow taxis sped by as I approached the street corner at 57th. For the first time, it felt sad to peer up and see the familiar chiseled logo. Not at all like the times Jess and I, as so many girls, would bring our breakfast to eat in front of Tiffany’s windows.

I gazed down Fifth Avenue.

In a few hours, at dawn, the streetlights would still be on when Holly would arrive by taxi. Gazing up at the Tiffany logo, she’ll release an almost imperceptible sigh from her shoulders. Wearing her sunglasses in the morning twilight, she’ll float on tiny steps to the jewelry-showcase window and delicately take a cruller from a white bag with her long black gloves. She’ll gingerly remove the plastic top of her deli coffee cup and let it tumble into the paper bag, not spilling a drop.

Without a soul in sight, she’ll examine the stu

I could see her standing before me in her fragile splendor. I had always assumed she was an early-bird window-shopper with an intimate knowledge of diamonds and pearls returning from some fabulous party.

Now I realized she was outside staring in. She came to Tiffany’s because she needed to make herself feel better. She was endlessly searching for what she never had, sad for whatever she was missing. Just like me.

She went to Tiffany’s that morning to feel safe. She must have been somewhere unsafe that night.

Although it’s hard to find anything bad about Audrey, there must have been a dark side in her life that people don’t talk about. After all, she was a heavy smoker who liked a glass of bourbon. Rumors of affairs with married men and anorexia have been around forever—Audrey’s own version of the mean reds—but she kept her problems discretely hidden in a Givenchy dress where no one would see. I wished we could talk, Audrey and I, and she could tell me if she ever made it feel all right.

It was time to go back to New Jersey.

66

I should have told them right away. Nan, Mom, Courtney, and Ryan were all sitting there waiting for me. I couldn’t imagine how unbelievably fast Dahlia had put her plan into action.

“Pinched Givenchy!” was the headline on the front page of The New York Post lying on the kitchen table in front of them.

My face was on the cover.

I was wearing the dress.

And the tiara.

They had cropped out ZK and Dahlia.

“I’ve done something terrible,” I said, which at the time seemed like a massive understatement. I waited for Nan or Mom’s reaction, but there wasn’t one.

When the NYPD detectives picked me up for interrogation, they asked if I had a lawyer. I knew we couldn’t afford one, so I was given a public defender, who seemed even younger than me, like he was just out of law school. He seemed more terrified than I was of the press and was no help at all.

Without any prior criminal record (I hadn’t even had one day of high school detention) and my name and face plastered on tabloids, I wasn’t considered a flight risk, so they sent me home to Jersey. After all, they didn’t have formal charges—yet.

I had read the article on the PATH train home. The Post gave me the full tabloid treatment, I guess because it was a slow news day in a slow news week, and because their venerable Page Six had been victimized as part of the fraud.

Dahlia slipped the whole story to some intrepid society reporter for The New York Post, who did his best to uncover the sordid details about me and Nan. It hadn’t taken long to search through their photo archive. I should have known that evidence of my Givenchy napping would surface.

Pretty much everything in the article was true: how I had faked and photobombed my way among the Upper East Siders, freeloading in their world of conspicuous consumption—limousines, personal shoppers, weekends in the Hamptons—passing as one of them when I was a wa

It featured a teary-eyed Tabitha Eden with a quote beneath her picture: “I felt devastated and betrayed. She wormed and manipulated her way into every aspect of my life. I regret every moment I knew her.” I assumed someone had written that line for her, but it made me sad regardless. How Dahlia persuaded Tabitha to be in the article I’ll never understand. The reporter discreetly kept Dahlia’s name out. No one would have known she arranged the whole thing.

Back home in the kitchen everyone seemed stu

“Wow,” Courtney finally said over my sobbing, “and I thought I was the bad girl in the family. Totally beats me.” Everyone laughed a little at that.

“So is it true about Dad?” Mom asked, turning to Nan.

Nan ran her hands through my hair. Her head trembled a little as she spoke.

“I knew they would find out eventually,” Nan said almost in a whisper. “I’m just glad Sammy’s not around to see it.”

“Can I tell my friends at school?” Ryan asked. Mom laughed a little.

“Typical Ryan,” she said. “Just keep a lid on it, okay?” Then she turned to me.

“Come here, Lisbeth,” she said. When I got up, I was surprised to see that she was holding out her arms for me. We hugged and I just kept sobbing. I don’t think my mom and I had hugged since I was tiny. Her arms were kind of flabby because she had lost so much weight, but her skin hadn’t shrunk. It felt good to feel close to her. I couldn’t help thinking that for the first time she didn’t smell of cigarettes and booze.

There’s nothing like having your personal problems and the worst situation you’ve ever been in in your life put on national media for everyone to slice, dice, and dissect. As soon as The Post article came out, that very day, we clocked at least twenty-six threats on our phone at home. Unsurprisingly, my e-mail and phone number leaked out pretty quickly, but it took a little longer for them to find Lisbeth Dulac’s Facebook. The mere success of my blog, Limelight, was my undoing. And it happened almost instantly.

Trolls are angry monsters who live under a bridge and eat goats by snapping their necks and drinking their blood while venting their i

“Liar,” “Fraud,” “Poseur,” “Hoax,” and the most troubling, “Con Artist,” were just some of the non-four-letter words I was called in the various news outlets, although liar and hoax do count, if you’re being technical. On the blog the words were much worse, the kind of sexually violent, unprintable words that only anonymous commenters can get away with.

Misogynists, stalkers, serial harassers, and cyberbullies came to the site in waves. I learned the art of triage and skimmed to find out if there was any actual personally threatening data or just your normal everyday nasty invective. When our address on Pine Street popped up, I knew we were in deeper trouble and stopped looking.

We changed our number a bunch of times, but stuff just happened. Someone using a falsified Uber account thought it was fu

It was raining the morning the police, wearing blue raid jackets, stood outside our house.

“We’re here to execute a search warrant,” the agent said as Mom let them inside. The search warrant gave the government authorization to seize “fruits of a possible crime,” even though I hadn’t been charged with anything. It made me wonder what the “fruits of my crime” were.