Becoming the Butlers (1990)

Pamela Brandt's first novel is narrated by Rachel Harris, a New York teenager whose mother has run off to Spain with the building's super and whose father responds by moving the super's family into their apartment. Rachel decides to make her way into the family of the perfect Olivia and Edwin Butler, with coaching from her friend Nicole. (Open Library)

Watches

Cartier (unidentified model): Over lunch, after telling Rachel that she must dress and be cut like a Butler, Nicole confesses a story from her London boarding school: wanting an ambassador's daughter named Cecily to like her, she took Cecily's Cartier from her desk while the older girl was playing cricket, let the hullabaloo run (the watch was a sweet-sixteen present from a college boy met in Monte Carlo), then pretended to find it in a garbage bag behind the bushes and became her friend. Rachel later admits that the story inspired her own theft from Olivia's locker. The watch appears only in Nicole's account. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: One day when she was out playing cricket I went into her room and took her Cartier watch from her desk. There was a great hullabaloo about the theft, and Cecily, that was her name, was heartbroken because some college guy she met in Monte Carlo had given it to her as a sweet sixteen present. (Pamela Brandt, Becoming the Butlers, scan cataloged as Bantam, 1990, p. 119, where the OCR renders the pronoun I as a vertical bar; Rachel recalls the story on p. 141 and the copyright page dates the book November 1990; Internet Archive scan OCR)