““Still, I didn’t want to show up for the meeting empty-handed, so that night at my parents’ house I holed up in my room, resolving not to come out until I completed my Father Johnson “How Well Do You Know Your Fiancé?” collage. I dug around in the upstairs storage room of my parents’ house and grabbed the only old magazines I could find: Vogue. Golf Digest. The Phoebe Cates issue of Seventeen. Perfect. I was sure to find a wealth of applicable material. This is so dumb , I thought just as my bedroom phone rang loudly. It had to be Marlboro Man. “Hello?” I answered. “Hey,” he said. “What’re you doing?” He sounded pooped. “Oh…not much,” I answered. “What about you?” “Well…,” he began, his voice sounding heavy…serious. “I’ve got a little bit of a problem.” I didn’t know everything about Marlboro Man. But I knew enough to know that something was wrong.””
