One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

by B.J. Novak

Were we, in fact, really still friends—like we said we were, and thought we were, and which comforted us as we each staked out new lives in cities where we didn’t really know anyone at all? Or, I wondered, were we just slowly transforming into simpler and more easily digestible fictional characters to one another—in other words, becoming our profile pictures: cool, expressionless Dave, unfazed even at majestic Mount Fuji, his much-remarked-upon good looks defiantly hidden behind sunglasses; sweetheart Josh, playfully presenting a prom corsage in a cookbook-filled suburban kitchen to his overjoyed six-year-old sister, standing on a table, playing along; me, as a preposterously anti-Semitic cartoon depiction of Woody Allen at a typewriter, drawn of me at the insistence of my girlfriend, Sarah, by a caricature artist in Times Square who knew only that I wanted to be a writer and that I looked, apparently, extremely Jewish; and Willie, drinking simultaneously from a handle of vodka and a handle of Jack Daniel’s beneath a U-Haul at a tailgate party, surrounded by friends that didn’t include us, screaming at someone or something, the photo filtered to look like an image that belonged in any era.