Read Adulation for Free Online

watching twenty-five-year-old movies with a single girl and a gay guy in my bed. Georgie seemed to have been reading my mind all this time (and, bless him, wasn’t the least bit offended). He yanked me back into the present moment with a forceful “ Fuck him , Sunrise. Rather, he can go fuck himself. Any man who doesn’t stick by you no matter what never deserved you in the first place. And it’s not too late—you can still adopt. Angelina Jolie hasn’t taken all the orphaned babies in the world. You’re strong enough to be a single mom.”
    “It’s not that,” I started.
    “Then what’s wrong?”
    Tears came to my eyes. “I just...what’s happened to me, Georgie?”
    I made a honking noise as I blew my nose and went to the bathroom to apply a Breathe Right strip. When I returned Georgie and Theo both looked at me, then at each other.
    “ That’s it ,” said Georgie, fed up. He picked up the remote, aimed it at the television like a pistol, and clicked it off, not even bothering to stop the DVD player. He then hastily gathered the spilled popcorn, dumped it back into the bowl, and moved it to the floor next to the bed.
    “We need a pad and pen,” he said. I pointed to the drawer of the night table next to Theo. She opened it and pulled out a legal pad, along with a purple ballpoint pen, and handed both to him. “This is great,” he said, scribbling the words “40 FOR 40” at the top of the page in block caps and underlining it twice. “We’re gonna make a list of forty things you want, and you’re gonna spend the next forty weeks crossing everything off the list.”
    Theo squealed. “Ooooh, that is a fab ulous idea!”
    “Are you kidding me?” I said.
    “I have never been more serious in my life,” said Georgie.
    “Shouldn’t we watch Ferris Bueller   first?”
    “Screw   Ferris Bueller —this is 2010!   Carpe diem   and all that shit.”
    “What are we supposed to write?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. Be like the song and reach up for the sunrise. Live up to your name.”
    I scoffed and rolled my eyes. Both Georgie and Theo knew how much I hated the name bestowed upon me by my ex-hippie parents.
    “Fine. Change name,” he said as he wrote the words in block caps. “What else?”
    I looked at him, dumbfounded.
    “Oh, come   on   .” He seemed to be genuinely annoyed. “You mean to tell me that you’re so out of touch with  yourself you can’t even think of one thing that you’d like to do or have or be? Whatever happened to getting published? What about buying a house? I mean, geez, Sunny—how could we have let you stray so far?”

    “Georgie, those things take   years   to happen, not forty weeks. And some of them never happen. For one thing, I can barely save enough for an IRA—forget about buying a house! And you know that finding a literary agent is about as difficult as getting a part in a movie or a play.”
    He ignored my objections. “Never stopped you before. Now, what’s number two on the list? Just call ’em out as they come to you—they don’t have to be in any particular order of importance.”
    I let out a loud sigh, and they went ahead without me. “Publish novels,” said Theo as Georgie wrote. “And don’t bother with the lame-ass excuse about getting an agent, ’cause you know you can selfpublish.”
    “You know, I don’t even know if that’s such a priority anymore,” I said. “Getting published, I mean.”
    He eyed me for a second, knowing I was full of shit, before returning to the pad. “We’ll edit later. What’s next?”
    I shrugged. Georgie flinched with delight as the next idea came to him. “Ooh, I know.” He giggledas he scrawled the next item, blocking the pad with his forearm so I couldn’t see it. That giggle was thesound of mischief.
    “What?” I asked. “What are you writing?”
    He turned the pad to Theo, who let out an even more sinister laugh as she read it, before revealingit to me: SLEEP