School had been easy, and he remembered laughing at the idiots who had to study, to work so hard when it was so easy. It was all just showing up. He didn’t get perfect grades, true, but he passed, and he thought it was a good trade, to skip all the hard work and have the same piece of paper as everyone else at the end. He’d always been smart. So it had been a dismaying mystery that he was also so damn unlucky. He remembered ducking into Keens on Thirty-sixth Street after the blowout with Roger—the pompous ass who didn’t understand what he brought to the company, the spark he contributed. His numbers were low but so were everyone’s! It was a tough time, and Roger had been riding him harder than everyone else because they didn’t get along. If the Swanson swap had gone the way it was supposed to, Roger would have been forced to eat crow and suck up to him a little. Instead, bad luck had shot the deal to hell, and he was out of a job. Bad luck. It followed him everywhere. He wandered into Keens—an odd choice, since he didn’t like steakhouses or their fussy wood-and-brass bars, and he was getting a little thick around the middle, a little jowly.
