The Guy Not Taken by Jennifer Weiner

said.
    “Believe me, I’m grateful.” I zipped up the suitcase and laid down beside my sister, who’d flopped on her belly to channel surf.
    “Are you nervous?” she asked.
    “Nah,” I lied. “Piece of cake.”
    The food arrived. Nicki draped a towel over the bed, then set out each of the plates, lifting the silver lids with a flourish. “A prenuptial picnic!”
    I told her I wasn’t hungry. She waved her cheeseburger under my nose, fingers sinking into the soft seeded bun. “Just one bite,” she wheedled, the way my mother used to coax her to eatwhen she was little. I shrugged, tried to take the tiniest bite I could manage, and groaned out loud as my teeth cracked the charred crust of the burger and the rich juices spilled into my mouth.
    “Oh, dear Lord,” I breathed, and gobbled a fistful of crisp french fries dipped in herbed mayonnaise. “If I don’t fit into that dress tomorrow . . .”
    “You’ll fit,” my sister promised. I drank a third of a beer in one gulp, then burped, wiped my lips, and licked salt and melted cheese off my fingertips. Five minutes later, I’d demolished the burger and was slowly spooning fudge over the dish of vanilla ice cream, promising myself that I’d skip breakfast and lunch the next day.
    “How’s work?” Nicki asked.
    “Okay,” I said through a mouthful of ice cream. I was the lowest person on the totem pole at the Associated Press offices, which meant I worked nights and weekends, running off to fires or car crashes or pier collapses, usually in bad neighborhoods where the witnesses were happy to give colorful, profanity-laced quotes about whatever they’d just seen, but clammed up when you asked for their names. “Call me Little Ray,” a guy who’d been the single survivor of a six-car crash on Roosevelt Boulevard said the week before.
    I’d patiently explained that the AP required both a first and a last name—preferably the ones he’d been born with. (“But everybody calls me Little Ray!” he’d insisted.)
    I liked the work, though, and I liked writing, but two weeks into my tenure I’d done the math and realized that if I’d been making five hundred dollars less a year, I would have qualified for food stamps. It was a problem, given the student-loan situation. I dreamed of making more money, but so far the only thing I’d been able to think of doing was dropping out of journalismand going into advertising, where you could do quite well, if you didn’t mind using your talent and creativity to sell tampons (for some reason, I was convinced that, no matter what city I worked in or which agency hired me, I would end up with the word absorbent figuring prominently in my future).
    Of course I’d soon be a married woman, and David was set to start working as a venture capital consultant, which would be considerably more lucrative than my career as a cub reporter. Maybe I’d get promoted. Maybe David would make a killing. Maybe I could get my loans paid off on time. Early, even. Say, when I turned fifty.
    Nicki watched girls in hot pants gyrating to rap songs where every third word was bleeped out while I polished off the ice cream. Then she reached over me for the phone. “Hello, room service? We’re going to need another burger,” she said in the same tone that the ship’s captain in Jaws, upon glimpsing the great white shark, had said, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”
    “No more,” I protested, sucking the last traces of chocolate off the spoon. “Seriously. I might explode.”
    “Fine,” said Nicki. “I’ll eat it myself.”
    In the bathroom, I took a twenty-minute shower in a stall that had half a dozen jets protruding from the tiled walls. I scrubbed myself with lemon-scented soap and washed my hair with rosemary mint shampoo. At the sink, swathed in a hotel bathrobe, I brushed and flossed, rinsed and spat, patted astringent and moisturizer onto my face, and considered my reflection. Things were as good as they were going to