Election by Tom Perrotta Page A

happened?”
    “I told M. and Hendricks I ripped up your posters.”
    “Did you?”
    “No.” It offended her that I even had to ask. “It must have been Tracy.”
    “That's what Lisa thought, too.”
    “Not that I blame her,” Tammy continued. “They were pretty gross.”
    I didn't argue. By that point I was pretty much sick of them myself. It was Lisa who insisted on going to Hendricks and making a big deal out of it. Of course, she'd done all the work in the first place, so I figured she had the right.
    “I don't get it,” I said. “Why would you take the fall for Tracy?”
    My eyes had partly adjusted to the darkness by then. I could barely make out the pale oval of her face.
    “I was serious yesterday. I want to transfer to Immaculate Mary.”
    It was hard for me to imagine anyone, even devout Catholics, actually wanting to go to a school like that—single sex, with dorky uniforms and nuns forteachers. No football team or marching band or senior prom. For a smart-ass atheist like my sister to volunteer for that world seemed totally perverse.
    “Come on,” I said.
    “Go ahead and laugh.”
    “I'm not laughing. I just can't imagine why you'd want to do something like that.”
    Her face snapped into focus just then, wide eyes, a mouth set hard with determination. A whitish hand cast a faint glow against her darkly gleaming hair.
    “I'm like Dad,” she said. “I want to start all over.”

TRACY FLICK
     
    SOMETIMES WHEN I can't sleep and my stomach's all tied up in knots, I think about something I heard on the TV news during last year's presidential election. A panel of experts was discussing the candidates, and one of them said, “The problem with George Bush isn't that he lacks fire-in-the-belly, it's that fire-in-the-belly is all he has.”
    I'd never heard that expression before and it jarred something loose in me. I remembered how Jack used to tell me I had “fever skin.” It seemed to him that I was always running a slight temperature, glowing with extra heat.
    “My God,” he'd say. “You're burning up.”
    So now, when I'm wide awake at three in the morning, wondering why I have no close friends, I comfort myself with the thought that I belong to a secret and powerful club—me, George Bush, Madonna, Dan Rather, plus thousands of people you've never heard of—and we're all lying there in separate beds with our eyes wide open and these tiny bonfires blazing in our stomachs, lighting up the night.

MR. M.
     
    IT'S NOT PLEASANT to wake up in your car like that, cold and confused in yesterday's clothes, some terrible truth swimming up from the deep end of your consciousness. I got out and walked to the bottom of the driveway, ostensibly to check for the Corolla, but really just to stretch my legs and get the blood moving through my system. I knew Sherry hadn't come home. The predawn sky had lightened to a dingy gray and my mouth tasted like despair. I was amazed at the speed with which she'd betrayed me.
    It's true: despite the fact that I was an adulterer, a man who'd fallen in love—lust, infatuation, whatever; all the words were true—with his wife's best friend, the mother of our godchild, I felt betrayed, and still do.
    Emotions won't listen to reason, especially not at five in the morning when there's a damp chill in the air, when your bladder's full and your head seems to have been put on crooked.
    There was no alternative but to go home. I needed to shower, put on some fresh clothes, maybe try to explain myself to Diane. But what was I supposed to say? That our marriage had become a weary farce, our efforts to produce a child heightening rather than relieving the staleness of our union? That making love with Sherry had turned me into a different person, someone endowed with a vision of a new and better life, even if that vision seemed already to have gone up in smoke? My wife wasn't a morning person on the best of days, and I didn't figure she'd be too keen on hearing any of this