The Guy Not Taken by Jennifer Weiner Page A

get. My eyebrows weren’t lopsided, my complexion was clear, my teeth and hair were shiny. If I were a horse, I’d do just fine on the auction block.
    I pulled on my ugliest, oldest, most comfortable flannelnightshirt, tiptoed through the darkened bedroom, made sure the comforter was free of food and dishes, and slipped into bed next to my sister.
    She rolled over instantly and tried to spoon me.
    “Get off!” I whispered, wriggling away.
    “Oh, Josie,” she giggled, her skinny arms around my neck, “your nightshirt is driving me wild!”
    “Stay on your side of the bed or you’ll be sleeping in the closet,” I said.
    Nicki was quiet for all of thirty seconds. “Do you think Leon was a virgin before he met Mom?” she asked.
    “Nicki,” I said, “that is really not what I need to be thinking about right now.”
    My sister was undeterred. “I mean, he was her student.”
    “Student teacher,” I said. It was a distinction I’d made many times in the two years since our fifty-six-year-old mother had taken up with a twenty-four-year-old.
    “So young,” said Nicki. “Too young.”
    “Not another word,” I told her.
    “Fine,” she grumbled, rolling on her side and falling almost instantly asleep.
    I shifted around in the big, high bed. It was 11:03 at night. T minus sixteen hours until my date with the white, tight, fitted satin, ridiculously expensive dress that hung over the back of the closet door like a ghost.
    By 11:36 I had heartburn. By 11:38 I had doubts. By midnight I’d convinced myself that marriage in general, and David in particular, were bad ideas, and that the true love of my life was really Craig Patterson. I’d gone to high school with Craig, but we’d never actually spoken until our fifth reunion, when he’d followed me into the coatroom and slurred that I had the prettiest tits of all the girls in our class. Then he’d shoved hisphone number in my pocket and lurched off toward the ballroom where, I heard later, he’d gotten sick in a potted plant.
    At 12:15 I crept out of bed and stared at the empty streets around Rittenhouse Square, watching the lone traffic light tint the pavement green and yellow and red and green again. The treetops bent in the wind, and rain spattered against the windows. Was rain on a wedding day good luck? Bad luck? Nothing special? I couldn’t remember.
    At 12:30 I picked up the telephone. Craig’s number was still in my wallet, on the napkin where he’d written it. I held my breath as I dialed his number. The telephone rang twice, then a woman picked it up. “Hello?”
    My tongue turned to lead. “Hello-ooo?” the woman called. “Anybody there?”
    “Sorry, wrong number,” I blurted. I hung up the phone and took a few minutes to get my heart rate under control. Then I got back into bed and lay there, staring at the elaborate swags of the canopy, thinking about happy endings. Did I know anyone who’d had one? Not my parents, although these days my mother did seem pretty blissed out with young Leon. Not David’s, either, I suspected. His father’s eyes lingered on any woman older than fourteen and younger than forty, and his mother started sipping Sancerre at around four o’clock every afternoon and continued drinking right up until dinner, when she’d switch to vodka, toy with her food, and surreptitiously tug the flesh under her chin or pinch the skin of her upper arms, as if she was already planning her next plastic surgery.
    But even so. I’d been at David’s parents’ thirty-fifth anniversary party, where they’d danced to “Fly Me to the Moon.” His father had dipped his mother backward on her high heels, whispering into her ear, and she’d thrown her head back, laughing, and I’d thought, maybe a little sentimentally, that that waswhat love looked like. Even my parents, before my father had left and my mother had spent years in a chlorine-scented fog before emerging on Leon’s arm, once had their moments. I remembered my father