How I Became a Famous Novelist Read Online Free Page B

she toyed with in her younger days. Then they’d kiss, full on the mouth, as the entire assembly applauded.
    I’d end up carried home by my two remaining college friends, Lucy and Derek. They’d haul me back to the Marriott as I alternated between begging them to stop for pancakes and passing out.
    Polly would win. The whole event, from the reading of First Corinthians 13 to the dainty little chocolate tarts with raspberry filling and the creepy old guy who dances with the little kids, it wouldn’t just be a wedding. It would be a celebration of how Polly defeated me.
    That’s how I thought about it at the time.
    Now, you might suggest that I could’ve just declined Polly’s invitation. But that would be admitting defeat. I’m lazy, but I’m no quitter. I wouldn’t let her have the satisfaction of telling her friends, “I wish Pete had come,” and later sending me a little note about how “unfortunate” it was that I “couldn’t make it.”
    Again, I’m not proud of feeling this way. I’m just trying to let you know where my head was at.
    After work, on the way back to Somerville, I stopped at a liquor store and picked up a case of Upstream Ale. I don’t even like Upstream Ale. It tastes spiky like it’s brewed from a mixture of club soda and creamed corn.
    But the label features a grinning cartoon salmon. He’s flinging himself into the air from a rocky stream. He’s smiling like he loves the challenge. That was the spirit I needed.
    A few hours later I was sitting on the couch in my apartment, watching TV with seven empty bottles of Upstream Ale in front of me, eating some smoked almonds I’d found in the bowels of our kitchen cabinets.
    Next to me was my roommate, Hobart. He was eating instant mashed potatoes right out of the pot. This was the only thing he ever ate.
    Hobart had hair that looked like a nest made by an incompetent bird. He seemed not to know how to shave quite right, so tufts of fur were always lingering on his face.
    But lifewise, he seemed to have me beat. Hobart was a grad student at Harvard, studying for a joint MD/double PhD in chemistry and economics. The only books on his shelves were volumes of medical reference and a thin guidebook called The Gentleman’s Code : Etiquette for the 21st Century Man. This was produced by “MacAllister Distillers, Crafters of Fine Spirits Since 1818.” Hobart had gotten it for free with a bottle of whiskey he bought one night after a pained conversation with his girlfriend back home in upstate New York. At least half of his conversations with this woman were followed by hours of piercing sobs. This was his major flaw as a roommate. On the plus side, he was rarely home. When he wasn’t studying, he was a research assistant at Lascar Pharmaceuticals, where they made medicines to control attention deficit disorder.
    Hobart and I sat on a secondhand beige couch that sagged and slumped like an old lady’s bosom. We watched our TV, which had had a green tint ever since an incident three months ago when I threw my shoe at a commercial for a Zach Braff movie and scored a solid hit.
    I’d like the reader here to really get a sense of how pathetic our apartment was. It’s important, storywise. Just know that there was a scratchy gray carpet splotched with Rorschach stains, random bolts and things sticking out of the walls, and deep fault lines in the plaster. There were no posters. I’ve never had a poster I wasn’t later embarrassed by, so why bother? Some US Postal Service crates held my old paperbacks. A review copy of Peking, a novel Lucy had sent me, had been on the coffee table for months. We used it as a coaster.
    I opened another beer.
    Hobart had only one vice, and he was indulging it now. It was a show on CBS called Summer Camp . If you never saw it, it was a reality show—basically a Survivor rip-off—where there’d be four teams of “campers” and they’d compete in canoeing and making s’mores with, like, Mario Batali as the