Page 94 of A Storybook Wedding

The drive home is long and kind of slippery, thanks to New England weather being a nightmare and I-95 being an endless sea of brake lights. Without Nate to chat with in my passenger seat, I’m left to my own headspace. Not good for business.

My life is falling apart.

I have been expelled from graduate school; how’s that for an accolade?

My stats this morning included 112 new Instagram followers, but then, out of nowhere, my account got restricted and I couldn’t use it. I must have tried to follow too many people. Somehow, I am now officially failing at social media too.

Other pertinent stats included three new rejections and, yes, zero full manuscript requests.

Zero.

My mentor hates me. This man who represented all hope and possibility of hard work paying off, who treated me like the hardworking student I am (well, was), who invested his personal time reading all of my extra pages, who told me that I had real, honest-to-God talent and that my scribblings were actually worthy of agency representation—well, I screwed the pooch with him also. By coming up with an elaborate lie so that I could get what I wanted.

And if all of that wasn’t bad enough, I went ahead and fell for Nate.

Like a fool.

The worst part is, I know better. The whole point of going for my MFA in the first place was so that I could become something that wasn’t defined by having a boyfriend or a soul mate or a husband or life partner or any of that crap. I was supposed to have a book. The book would complete me.

Because people will only let you down.

I could call Nate back, but it’s pretty clear he only called in response to my pathetic-sounding voicemail message. Instead, I spend five hours in sporadic traffic trying to get out of my head by blasting my music and hard-tapping on my steering wheel. I grab two Boston cream doughnuts and a chocolate milk from a Connecticut rest-stop Dunkin’ because about three hours into the drive, my blood sugar is lower than a gopher hole. So naturally, it spikes back up, getting me back to Queens, and then dips down again the second I walk in the door.

I’m exhausted. Physically, mentally, and emotionally. I don’t have the energy to do anything. I need to grocery shop, do the laundry, make a plan, maybe write a new query letter.

First though? I need a nap.

After three well-deserved hours curled up in my bed, I wake up feeling worse.

I can’t run from life though, and the clothes won’t wash themselves, so I hit the laundromat and put in a load of laundry. While it runs, I head over to Stop & Shop. Then back to the laundromat to switch the clothes into the dryer, home to put away the groceries, and back out to get my clothes. It’s as efficient as I can be in my current state. By the time my clothes are folded neatly in the laundry basket, the sun has set. I swing by the Chinese restaurant and grab takeout for dinner. Back at my place, after unpacking all my groceries, I curl up on the couch with my laptop, eating chicken lo mein directly out of the carton.

I check my email first.

One new rejection. Dear Author, it begins. I don’t even read the rest. Just the fact that they won’t use my name tells me everything I need to know. I put a strikethrough mark over the agent’s name in my spreadsheet, crossing my chances of representation off like an Advent calendar leading up to my inevitable demise.

I’m going to end up a single, unfulfilled, old children’s librarian.

And I can’t stop thinking about Nate.

Shut up, Cecily. Stop being an idiot. He’s obviously not into it anymore, now that his job is kaput.

Instead of checking my other pertinent stats, including my follow-to-follow-back ratio on social media, I decide to google “marriage annulment in New York.” I remember reading about this back at Thanksgiving, when I first came up with the idea of marrying Nate. I didn’t want to have to worry about legal fees later on for a divorce, so I wanted to see if an annulment might be possible.

Of course, the way I read it then seems different from the way I’m reading it now. Google brought me to a website for a law firm called D’Aleo and Strauss—some fancy place in the city, no doubt—and to an article written by one of the partners about marital annulments. Essentially, it said that New York has specific laws about what type of marriage qualifies for an annulment. If you’re married to more than one person (like you got married a second time, but your first marriage hadn’t been dissolved yet), you qualify. If one of the two partners is not physically able to have sex, you qualify. If someone was forced into the marriage, you qualify. If one of the parties was underage at the time of the marriage, you qualify.

And then there’s the bit about fraud. It says, If the marriage was fraudulent, you may qualify for an annulment. Okay, so back when I read that at Thanksgiving, I thought we’d be able to simply file for an annulment when I was done with school. I didn’t think about, oh, I don’t know, reading the remainder of the paragraph at that time.

But now I do.

And I realize that we’re probably fucked.

It goes on to say, An action to annul a marriage whereby the consent of one of the parties involved was obtained by fraud will be granted provided it is within the time frame for enforcing a civil remedy of the civil practice law and rules. However, if the spouses voluntarily cohabitated as husband and wife, and both gave consent to the fraudulent marriage, an annulment will more than likely no longer remain an option.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, consider this a book-length PSA about the importance of reading the fine print.

The fact that I won’t even be able to annul my own fake marriage is sadly on-brand for me at the moment.

I navigate away from the D’Aleo and Strauss website and open up another window in Google. There, I open QueryTracker.net, because I’m going to need to figure out a new query letter and begin to develop a new list of agents to send it out to.

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