Filthy Rich Read Online Free

predictable.
    Fair enough. But allow me to say two things in my defense.
    1. I agreed to be his Lifeline only under duress. Neil said that if I helped him win the million, he would take it as a sign that we should get married. He further promised that we would honeymoon at an unnamed exotic locale, and, in a departure from all of our previous vacations together, the trip would not coincide in any way with the annual convention of the American Association of Orthodontists, the unrelievedly dreary professional organization to which Neil is totally devoted.
    2. It never occurred to me that Neil would actually finagle his way into becoming a Filthy Rich! contestant. To be honest, it never occurred to me that Neil’s name and theword “finagle” would ever appear together in the same sentence. I’m totally opposed to stereotypes. But it is well known that orthodontists are better flossers than finaglers. Also, I’m no mind reader. How could I know the show’s producers would toss him a dental-related question in the all-important “Fastest Finger of Fate” qualifying round that decides which of the ten candidates flown in from around the country gets a chance to go for the money? It was the show’s first dental-trivia question ever.
    “Now, group,” Kingman said, “for a chance to compete for $1.75 million, rearrange the following well-known national brands of toothpaste in the order in which they were introduced, going from oldest to most recent.”
    This was the list:
Tom’s of Maine
Colgate
Mentadent
Crest
Pepsodent *
    Sitting there helpless in the audience, I knew I was doomed the moment I heard the question. I knew I’d get dragged into this somehow and I wouldn’t be able to deliver. I even turned to my mother and said so.
    “I think I’m dead, Mom,” I said.
    I don’t think she heard me. By then, Dear Mom was on her feet applauding Neil’s correct answer. That’s how quickly he put the toothpastes in order, leaving all of the other would-be contestants in the dust. They didn’t even bother to guess.
    But, then, Neil had a distinct advantage over the others. Only Neil grew up entertaining his parents’ friends at parties by imitating the latest toothpaste commercials, and only he harbored a feverish ambition by the age of four to earn a living shoving his hands in other people’s mouths when he grew up. For fun, Neil would organize tongue-twister contests, challenging his school chums to quickly recite Crest’s seal of approval from the American Dental Association—“Crest is a decay-preventing dentifrice…” The one who made the fewest mistakes got First Prize.
     
    Neil’s precocious interest in diagnosing, correcting, and preventing irregularities of the teeth and poor occlusion led him to develop the strange habit of turning almost every social conversation back to orthodontics. This offended many of my friends, especially one of my two best friends Norma Ruckenhaus, the famous professor of feminist history at New York University who nearly missed getting tenure due to her lengthy procrastination in completing her bestselling treatise Why Women Don’t Achieve as Much as Men .
    “Marcy,” Norma said to me after meeting Neil for the first time, “you’ve got yourself a clunker.” The setting for this important debriefing was a small, sticky table in the rear of a crowded Starbucks around the corner from Norma’s apartment near Union Square, one of the pretentious java chain’s few grungy outposts.
    Norma, who is nothing if not outspoken, took a sip from her tiny cup of espresso, and then made a prediction. “If you stay with him, one of two things will happen. You’ll end up going back to school to become his dental hygienist. Or, you’ll find out that the mysterious lipstick stains on the collar of his starched white dental shirt belong to some glamorous twenty-something chippy whose frequent appointments are not devoted exclusively to making adjustments to her night brace. You