Read Joe College: A Novel for Free Online

but I’m gonna save you a lot of trouble. You want to know what happens at the end of Middlemarch ?”
    “I’d prefer not to.”
    “Ha, good one. You know the main character? What’s her name?”
    “Dorothea?”
    “Yeah, her. She throws herself under a train.”
    “That’s Anna Karenina, asshole.”
    “Oh, right. Sorry. I got confused. There’s a big sword fight. Everybody dies.”
    “Goodbye, Matt.”
    “You’re not gonna do this? You’re gonna make me go to bed hungry?”
    “Go yourself. You don’t need me to hold your hand.”
    “Yeah, right. I’ll really go to Naples by myself at this time of night. First I’ll have to make a sign that says,”I’m Pathetic,” so I can wear it around my neck.”
    “That won’t be necessary,” I assured him.
    “Touché,” he said, grimly conceding defeat. “Enjoy your reading, weenie boy.”
     
     
    Cindy and I had ended the summer on bad terms. I came back to school and threw myself into my classes with renewed passion, thanking God every chance I got for releasing me from the bondage of the lunch truck, though my happiness was diluted by the hot flashes of guilt I felt for abandoning my father. Now that I knew what his days were really like, I had to trade in the sustaining illusion of him as a happy and prosperous businessman on wheels for the more accurate and distressing image of him as captain of a sinking ship, an angry, itchy, dyspeptic man tailgating some terrified geezer as he tried to make up for lost time between the perforating company and the lumberyard.
    That fall turned out to be a breakthrough semester for me, the first time I ever really felt at home in college. As thrilled as I’d been by the intellectual challenges, my freshman and sophomore years had been emotionally and socially difficult. I felt trapped and resentful a lot of the time, marooned within a small circle of friends and acquaintances, cut off from the wider life of the college, which seemed to be dominated by overlapping prep school cliques I
wouldn’t have known how to penetrate if I’d wanted to. Junior year, though, the whole place just cracked wide open.
    Two changes were responsible for my new sense of excitement and belonging. I got hooked up with Reality and went to work in the dining hall. Reality was a new undergraduate literary magazine founded by Liz Marin, whom I’d met the previous spring in a class on the epic tradition. Liz was the kind of person I’d never met before coming to Yale. She’d grown up in New York and Paris and had taken a year off after high school to go backpacking through Latin America. She was tall and beautiful and multilingual and fiercely opinionated. One of her opinions held that the rags that passed for literary magazines on campus were so smug and tame and insular that it was hopeless to even try to reform them; they simply needed to be replaced. Her idea was to create a magazine devoted to everything but college, one that focused on exploited workers, violent crime, urban poverty, and moral squalor—the whole wide hardscrabble world spread out like a dirty rug at the foot of our ivory tower—in a word, Reality.
    “No more sonnets about menstruation!” she proclaimed at our organizational meeting, with what seemed like genuine anguish. “No more wacky stories about summer jobs!”
    Our first issue, published that December—the cover photo featured a stray dog with some sort of skin condition straining really hard to take a shit—made a surprisingly big splash on campus. The articles included profiles of a prison guard and a heroin-addicted prostitute, and the poems explored difficult subjects like incest and drug addiction and prison life. There were two short stories—one about a pyromaniac priest, the other about a thirteen-year-old nymphomaniac who poisons her family’s dog for reasons the author chose to leave deliberately vague. Liz herself was a talented photographer, and her unflinching portraits of the homeless, the