"It wasn’t until he’d gone that I realized I’d been clutching a pair of dirty underwear throughout the entire conversation, the same dingy briefs I’d been wearing the night I almost slept with Polly. I shoved them into the duffel bag, then bent to retrieve Max’s wreck of a paper airplane from the floor.
I was about to drop it in the official NFL wastebasket I’d brought from home as a souvenir of my misspent youth when I noticed the drawings. With a blue ballpoint pen, Max had inked four porthole windows in the fuselage. Each window contained a crude but easily recognizable caricature of one of our suitemates, Nancy not included. The plan was apparently headed for a crash, because Sang, Ted and I all had looks of pure terror on our faces. Cartoon bubbles floating overhead detailed our reactions to the impending disaster."
By Tom Perrotta
This is part of a new series of portraits I made, representing different scenes from books. Click here to see how this image was intended to be viewed. More from this series will be posted soon. |
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