The Guy Not Taken by Jennifer Weiner Read Free Book Online

the car wash a mile away from her condo, to have it waxed and vacuumed.
    She unlocked the car doors and stared at Nicki, frowning. “Just what’s wrong with the infirmary?” she asked.
    “Well, for one thing, I had to wait for two hours before I saw anyone,” Nicki said. “Then they said there was nothing wrong with my kidney. They didn’t even give me a blood test! They didn’t even ask me the right questions!”
    Nanna pursed her lips. “So you don’t have a kidney infection.”
    Nicki didn’t back down. “I might have one,” she said. I wiped my face and heaved Nicki’s backpack into Nanna’s immaculate trunk, right next to the first-aid kit and emergency gallon of bottled water. “They forgot to ask me if I was experiencing pain upon urination.”
    “Well, are you?” I asked.
    “No, but that’s not the point.”
    Nanna threw up her hands in despair. “Nicki, Nicki, Nicki,” she said. “What are we going to do with you?”
    But Nicki wasn’t listening. Kidney pain forgotten, she opened the heavy car door and flung herself into the backseat, behind the cramped, skinny, bald, Sansabelt-slacks-clad figure of Nanna’s eighty-three-year-old gentleman caller, Horace. “Let the games begin!” she cried. I stowed the rest of our luggage and slammed the trunk shut.
    •   •   •
    My sister’s earliest childhood memories were of torture. She talked frequently, nostalgically, about the happy days of her youth when she’d give Jon his bath and pour alternating pitchers of hot and cold water over his back—never hot enough toburn him, just hot enough to make him extremely uncomfortable. “I liked the noises he made,” she said. She hid my books, stole my diary, listened in on my telephone conversations, and finally found her niche and calmed down a little when she landed a spot as the coxswain for the varsity crew team, where she was actually encouraged to scream insults at people. She’d sit in the tiny seat at the stern of the boat, knobby knees drawn up to her chin, a headband holding a miniature microphone perched on top of her curls, red-faced and cursing inventively, utterly in her element (especially when I was the stroke and she could direct her insults, and her threats to tell our mother about the copy of Delta of Venus she’d discovered under my mattress, specifically at me).
    But high school was over, the crew team was gone, and I sensed that my little sister’s college experience wasn’t turning out as well as her time in high school had. We’d run up a shocking phone bill her freshman year, working through her assignments long distance. Every few weeks she’d mail me a paper to proofread (translation: rewrite), but when we’d been home for Thanksgiving, she’d just shrugged when I asked how her classes were going. Since then, she hadn’t sent anything to read, and when she called it was mostly to complain about her geeky roommate, who used up her hair mousse and slept with a retainer and a night-light. “Fine, fine,” she’d say, every time I asked about her classes and her coursework and whether she’d gotten her grade on her Introduction to Sociology class yet. “Everything’s fine.”
    •   •   •
    “Horace!” Nicki crowed. She flung her arms around his neck and planted a loud kiss on his sun-spotted pate. “My man!”
    “Hello, Nicki!” Horace boomed. He worked his way out of his seat and around the car so that he could hold the door for mygrandmother. He gave me a hug on the way back, and I breathed in his smell of mothballs and Hall’s eucalyptus cough drops. Horace had survived two wives, several strokelets, a heart attack, and quadruple bypass surgery and, along the way, experienced what his doctors and our grandmother politely referred to as a substantial hearing loss. In other words, Horace, despite the finest hearing aids Medicare can buy, was as deaf as a post. But he was a sweet man who loved my grandmother and could put up with my sister (perhaps