Excerpt from In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

As quietly as she could, she reached for the portable phone and crept into the bathroom. Amy answered on the first ring. "Wassup?" she asked. In the background, Rose could hear Whitney Houston wailing, which meant that her best friend was watching Waiting to Exhale for the hundredth time. Amy wasn't black, but that didn't stop her from trying.

"You won't believe it," Rose whispered.

"Did you get laid?"

"Amy!"

"Well, did you? I mean, why else would you be ringing me now?"

"Actually," said Rose, flicking on the light and studying her glowing face in the mirror, "actually, I did. And it was..." She paused, and gave a little hop in the air. "It was so good!"

Amy whooped. "Way to go, girlfriend! So who's the lucky guy?"

"Jim," Rose breathed. Amy whooped even louder.

"And it was unbelievable!" said Rose. "It was...I mean, he's so..."

Her call waiting beeped. Rose stared at the phone unbelievingly.

"Ooh, popular girl," Amy said. "Call me back!"

Rose clicked over, glancing at her watch. Who'd be calling her at almost one in the morning? "Hello?" She could hear loud music, voices -- a bar, a party. She slumped against the bathroom door. Maggie. Big surprise.

The voice on the other end was young, male, and unfamiliar. "Is this Rose Feller?"

"Yes. Who's this, please?"

"Um...well, my name's Todd."

"Todd," Rose repeated.

"Yeah. And, um...well, I'm here with your sister, I guess. Maggie, right?"

In the background, Rose could hear her sister's drunken shout. "Little sister!" Rose scowled, grabbing a bottle of shampoo"specially formulated for thin, limp, lifeless hair" and tossed it under the sink, reasoning that if Jim stayed for a shower, he didn't need to be confronted with evidence of her problem hair.

"She's...um. Sick, I think. She had a lot to drink," Todd continued, "and she was...well...I don't know what else she was doing, really, but I found her in the bathroom and we were kind of hanging out for a while, and then she kind of passed out, and now she's, um, getting kind of loud. She told me to call you first, though," he added. "Before she passed out." Rose could hear her sister shouting, "I'm King of the World!" She closed her eyes.

"How nice of her," said Rose, throwing her prescription zit cream and a box of pantyliners in after the shampoo. "Why don't you just take her home?"

"I don't want to really get involved...."

"Tell me, Todd," Rose began pleasantly, in the voice she'd practiced in law school, the one she imagined using to sucker witnesses into telling her what she needed to know. "When you and my sister were hanging out in the bathroom, what exactly was going on?"

There was silence on the other end.

"Now, I don't need to know specifics," said Rose, "but I'm inferring that you and my sister are already, to use your word, 'involved.' So why don't you be a stand-up guy about it and take her home?"

"Look, I think she needs help, and I've really got to go...I borrowed my brother's car, I've got to get it back..."

"Todd..."

"Well, is there someone else I should call?" he asked. "Your parents? Your mother or something?"

Rose felt her heart stop again. She closed her eyes again. "Where are you?"

"The Cherry Hill Hilton. The high school reunion." Click. Todd was no more.

Rose leaned against the bathroom door. Here it was -- her real life, the truth of who she was, barreling down on her like a bus with bad brakes. Here was the truth -- she wasn't the kind of person Jim could fall in love with. She wasn't what she'd made herself out to be -- a cheerful, uncomplicated girl, a normal girl with a happy, orderly life, a girl who wore pretty shoes and had nothing more pressing on her mind than whether ER was a rerun this week. The truth was in the exercise tape she didn't have time to unwrap, let alone exercise to, the truth was her hairy legs and ugly underwear. Most of all, the truth was her sister. The truth was that her sister, Maggie, her gorgeous, messed-up, fantastically unhappy and astonishingly irresponsible sister. Only why tonight? Why couldn't Maggie have let her enjoy this one night?

Copyright © 2002 by Jennifer Weiner.