2. I just can’t understand why you wouldn’t rather be home.

<<Beth to Jennifer>>

1. The other best friend. The white guy. With the crinkly eyes and the interesting nose. His sister was on Family Ties.

2. I like to work late because I don’t like to work early—and I have to work sometime.

If I get here first thing in the morning, I feel like I have to iron my clothes. But by 2 o’clock, nobody cares. And by 7, nobody’s here. (Well, except copy editors, and they only half count.) Besides, it’s kind of cool, being here at night. It’s like being in the mall after it closes. Or at school on a Saturday. Plus, sometimes I legitimately have to work late. Like, if I have to write a review on opening night or something.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> I guess I just don’t like being here that late. The year I worked on the nightside desk was the loneliest year of my life.

And I guess I know who Jason Bateman is. I’ve just never thought of him as cute.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Well, think again. And My Cute Guy is even cuter.

CHAPTER 39

NO, NO, NO, Lincoln thought.

CHAPTER 40

NO.

It couldn’t be …

She couldn’t mean …

He stood up from his desk, walked around the empty information technology office. Sat back down.

Reread the e-mail. Cute, she’d said. Massive, she’d said. Oh my God, she’d said.

Handsome.

No. It must be a mistake, she couldn’t have meant …No.

He stood up again. Sat down. Stood up. Started walking toward the men’s bathroom. Was there a mirror in there? What did he need to look at, anyway? To see if he still looked like himself? There was a mirror. Full-length. He looked at his reflection. Massive, he asked himself. Really? Massive?

Definitely big. In high school, the football coach was always trying to recruit him, but Lincoln’s mother had forbidden it. “No, you’re not joining the head-injury team,” she’d say. He laid his hand on his stomach. You’d call it a beer gut if Lincoln drank beer more often than once a month. Massive.

But cute, she’d said. Handsome, she’d said. Crinkly eyes.

He leaned his forehead against the mirror and closed his eyes. It was embarrassing to see himself smile like that.

CHAPTER 41

THE NEXT MORNING, Lincoln joined a gym. The person on the treadmill next to him was already watching Quantum Leap on one of the big televisions. It felt like a sign.

On his way home he stopped by the bank where Eve worked. She had one of those offices in the lobby with the glass cubicle walls.

“Hey,” she said, “do you need to open a savings account? Yuck. Why are you all sweaty?”

“I joined a gym.”

“You did? Well, good for you. Does that mean you’re listening to my advice now? I wish I would have told you to get your own apartment. Get your own apartment!”

“Can I ask you a weird question?”

“If you make it quick,” she said. “All those people sitting over there on the couches actually do want to open savings accounts.”

“Do I look like Jason Bateman?”

“Who’s Jason Bateman?”

“The actor. He was on Silver Spoons and The Hogan Family.”

“The guy who played Teen Wolf?”

“That’s Michael J. Fox,” Lincoln said. “Never mind. This wasn’t supposed to be a whole conversation.”

“The guy who played Teen Wolf in Teen Wolf Too?”

“Yes,” Lincoln said. “Him.”

Eve squinted.

“Yeah,” she said. “Actually, you do kind of look like him. Now that you mention it, yeah.”

Lincoln smiled. He hadn’t stopped smiling.

“Is that a good thing?” Eve said. “Do you want to look like Jason Bateman?”

“It isn’t good or bad. It just confirms something.”

“You’re a lot bigger than he is.”

“I’m leaving,” Lincoln said, walking away.

“Thanks for choosing Second National,” she called after him.

IT TOOK FOREVER for the IT office to clear that night. Everyone was getting pretty intense about the millennium bug. Kristi, Lincoln’s desk-mate, wanted to stage a practice New Year’s Eve, to see if their code patch would work. But Greg said that if they were going to shut down the newspaper and maybe cause a six-block blackout, they might as well wait until the real New Year’s Eve when it would be less embarrassing. The members of the International Strike Force stayed out of the argument. They just sat in the corner, coding, or maybe hacking into NORAD.

Lincoln was still trying to monitor their progress and to help, but they avoided him. He was pretty sure they knew he wasn’t one of them, that he’d never actually taken a computer course, and that he’d scored higher on the verbal section of the SAT. The IT kids all wore off-brand Polo shirts and New Balance tennis shoes and the same smug look. Lincoln refused to ask for their help with the digital color printer upstairs, even though he was at his wit’s end with the damn thing. Every few days it would have a crazy spell and start spitting out page after page of bright magenta.

“How can we prepare for the worst-case scenario,” Kristi was saying, “if we don’t understand the worst-case scenario?”

Lincoln was itching to open the WebFence folder. Dying to open it.

Greg said he didn’t have to drive his Nissan into the river to know it would be a f**king disaster.

“That doesn’t even compare,” Kristi said, and then she said she wished Greg wouldn’t curse. Right at the moment, Lincoln was wishing that the system really would fail at 12:01, January 1. That it would fail spectacularly. And that he’d be fired and replaced by one of the Strike Force, probably the Bosnian. But first, he wanted to check the WebFence folder. Now.

Maybe he didn’t have to wait for everyone to leave …It wasn’t a secret that he checked the WebFence folder. It’s nothing, he told himself, checking WebFence is my job. Which was such a lame rationalization that he decided not to let himself check it, even after everybody else went home.

When he finally opened the folder, sometime after midnight, he told himself not to expect a revelation like last night’s. What were the chances that Beth would be talking about him again? What were the chances that she’d seen him again? If she had seen him, would she have noticed that he was wearing a nice shirt and that he’d spent twenty minutes that afternoon combing his hair?

CHAPTER 42

From: Beth Fremont

To: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder

Sent: Thurs, 11/18/1999 10:16 AM

Subject: You.

Hey, how are you feeling?

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Fine. Normal. The same.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Really?

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Really? No.

Really, I feel a little bit like a suicide bomber. Like I’m walking around pretending to be normal, all the while knowing that I’m carrying something that is going to change—possibly destroy—the world as I know it.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> “Destroy” seems like kind of a strong word.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Everyone keeps telling me that everything is going to change when the baby gets here, that my whole life will be different. That, I think, implies that the life I have now will be gone. Destroyed.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> When you fell in love with Mitch, he changed your whole life, right? He didn’t destroy it.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Sure, he did, but that was okay. My life before Mitch sucked.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> So gloomy. If you had bunked next to the Little Orphan Annie, Annie wouldn’t have been a musical.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Would anyone really miss it?

CHAPTER 43

OKAY, SO SHE hadn’t written more about him. But at least she hadn’t written, “I got a better look at that guy, and he’s not as cute as I thought. Not by half.” He played online Scrabble until his shift was up and fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

“You’re up early,” his mother said, when he came downstairs the next morning at nine.

“Yeah, I think I’m going to go work out.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“Where are you going to do that?” she asked suspiciously, as if the answer might be “the casino” or “a massage parlor.”

“The gym,” he said.

“Which gym?”

“Superior Bodies.”

“Superior Bodies?” she asked.

“It’s right up the street.”

“I know. I’ve seen it. Do you want a bagel?”

“Sure.” He smiled. Because that was all he did lately. And because he’d given up on asking her not to feed him, especially after the confrontation with Eve. Food had always been something good between him and his mom. Something without strings. “Thanks.”

She started fixing him a bagel, thick with cream cheese, smoked salmon, and red onions. “Superior Bodies,” she said again. “Isn’t that one of those meat markets?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve only been there once, and there were mostly elderly people there.

Maybe the meat market starts when people get off work.”

“Hmmm,” his mother said, looking obviously thoughtful. Lincoln pretended not to notice.

“It’s just,” his mother said, “that name. It puts so much emphasis on the body. As if that’s why people should exercise, to have a good body. Not even a good body. A superior body. As if people should go around looking at each other and thinking, ‘My body is so far superior to yours.’”

“I love you, Mom,” he said. He meant it. “Thanks for breakfast. I’m going to the gym.”

“Do you shower there? Don’t use the shower. Imagine the fungus, Lincoln.”

“I will now.”

IT WASN’T HARD going to the gym, as long as he went as soon as he woke up, before he had time to think about not going. Those morning workouts made him feel like he was starting his day like a pinball, with a giant shot of momentum. The feeling sometimes didn’t wear off until six or seven at night (when it was usually overtaken by the feeling that he was just bouncing haplessly from one situation to the next without any real purpose or direction).

Lincoln liked all the machines at the gym. He liked weights and pulleys and instructional diagrams.

It was easy to spend an hour or two going from machine to machine. He thought about trying the free weights, just to live up to Beth’s impression of him. But he would have had to ask someone for help, and Lincoln didn’t want to talk to anyone at the gym. Especially not the personal trainers who were always gossiping at the front desk when he picked up a towel.

He liked how clean he felt when he left. How loose his legs and arms were. How cold the air felt when his hair was wet. He found himself moving even when he didn’t have to, running across the street even if there wasn’t a car coming, bounding up the steps just because.

THAT WEEKEND, AT Dungeons & Dragons, Lincoln made Rick laugh so hard that Mountain Dew came up his nose. It was an orc joke, hard to explain, but Christine giggled for the rest of the night, and even Larry laughed.

Maybe Lincoln was the Funny One.

CHAPTER 44

From: Beth Fremont

To: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder

Sent: Mon, 11/29/1999 1:44 PM

Subject: The next time my sister gets married …

Remind me that I hate weddings. And my sister.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> I happen to know that you love weddings—that you give movies a one-star upgrade for even having a wedding scene. Wasn’t that the rule that forced you to give Four Weddings and a Funeral four stars even though you thought Andie MacDowell was a disaster?

<<Beth to Jennifer>> You’re right. I love weddings. I hate my sister.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Why?

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Basically …because she’s getting married before me. I’m like the petty older sister in a period drama. “But Papa, she can’t get married before me. I’m the eldest.”

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Oh, I love period dramas, especially period dramas starring Colin Firth. I’m like Bridget Jones if she were actually fat.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Oh …Colin Firth. He should only do period dramas. And period dramas should only star Colin Firth. (One-star upgrade for Colin Firth. Two stars for Colin Firth in a waistcoat.)

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Keep typing his name, even his name is handsome.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> I think we’ve discovered the only guy we’d ever fight over at an airport bar.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> You’re forgetting about Ben Affleck.

You’re also forgetting to complain to me about your sister’s wedding.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Ben Affleck! Are you sure I can’t talk you into Matt Damon? We could double-date …

I didn’t forget. I just figured you were trying to change the subject because I was being ridiculous. I don’t have anything real to complain about. My complaint is: I always thought I’d be married by now.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> That’s not so ridiculous.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> No, it is. I had this whole plan when I graduated from high school: I was going to go to college, date a few guys, and then meet the guy at the end of my freshman year, maybe at the beginning of my sophomore year. We’d be engaged by graduation and married the next year. And then, after some traveling, we’d start our family. Four kids, three years apart. I wanted to be done by the time I was 35.