By the end of the summer, my role as "campaign manager" was practically non-existant. We had all these other people on board now, all trying to get as close to taking the credit for this thing as possible. There were two guys from Harvard, two guys from MIT, a girl from BU (who kept hitting on Eric), two girls from BC (one of whom liked the other), and a few high school kids who were doing it to get on their college application. Nothing like student revolution to make a great essay.

But with all these people around, I was kind of a tag along. I mean, they respected me, but I had run out of ideas for how to get Eric elected. It seemed like we were just gonna hope our publicity picked up after all these kids were theoretically gonna register in September. So we were preparing for that event, those first few critical weeks of September when college came back in session. It was gonna be a hectic time, with a pretty crazy speaking schedule for about two weeks, each of which would be covered by the press. And of course, the debate...

But I still felt pretty shitty, as though Eric didn't really need me. The days of our dreaming about what it would be like to win were long gone with the winter's thaw, and it was now approaching the end of the summer, with the temperature reaching into the nineties, along with the humidity. I was getting pretty fried, and it looked like Eric was too.