The Best of Enemies Read Online Free PDF

Bode Meowler) perches on top of some manner of detritus. Bobby gently moves his cat and digs until he finds what he’s seeking. He holds up a newspaper article in front of his webcam. “Check it out.”
    While I give him points for actually reading a newspaper, it’s too blurry for me to see on my end.
    “You understand I can’t actually read that, right? Summarize, Bob.”
    “The story’s about Trip. Spoiler alert—he just got richer. The article says his returns are topping off in the twenty percent range.”
    “No surprise there.” (Save for that Bobby understands what “topping off in the twenty percent range” means.)
    Sars’s husband—James Preston McArthur Chandler III, aka “Trip”—is no ordinary businessman. A
Fortune
magazine reporter once said that Trip “possesses the bravado of Donald Trump and the swagger of Jay Z.” To me? Swagger’s not a selling point. I personally prefer Toby Keith—he’s done so much for the troops. But because Trip’s such a force of nature, Wall Street absolutely worships him and the media follows suit. Last year,
People
magazine included him on their annual
World’s Most Beautiful
roundup.
    Trip’s a dynamic presence, perpetually swanning about in one of his hundreds of pastel cashmere sweaters. He always looks as though he just stepped off a yacht . . . generally having just stepped off his yacht,
The Lone Shark.
Chandler Financial Group, CFG if you’re in the biz, practically has a license to print money, despite the current financial climate. I’ve always speculated that his success stems from listening to Sars back when she helped him establish the company. But he’s far too arrogant to give her the props she deserves and she’s too modest to request it.
    Honestly?
    I’m the only one not riding the Trip Love Train, but I keep that information to myself. Sars radiates contentment whenever I visit her at Steeplechase Manor (yes, her home has a name), so I bite back my scorn and mistrust on the rare occasion we’re all together.
    But my feelings toward Trip are a
benign
contempt. At least he’s always pleasant. My dislike for him doesn’t keep me awake at night. Plus, I do my best not to fight with people anymore because I’ve found it’s never worth it.
    Working as a war reporter has definitely refined my perspective on conflict. The entire news cycle is dictated by rivalries, whether it’s the box scores from the Midtown Classic or the number of gang members shot on the south and west side in my home base of Chicago on any given summer weekend.
    My theory is that sometimes enemies are beneficial because that relationship forces each party to improve. Just look at Maverick and Iceman; I maintain they were both better pilots due to said rivalry.
    When I was in sixth grade, Miss Meyer assigned us our first real essays. The assignment was to write five pages on anything we wanted. Most of my other classmates penned themes about dogs or their soccer team or what they did over summer vacation. Sars turned in a theme called “The Benifits of a Single World Curency.” Funny, but even then she had a head for business, if not for spelling.
    Anyway, I explored the War of the Currents in my essay, which refers to the feud between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. I speculated that their mutual hatred drove their success. Personally, I joined Team Tesla the second I read how Edison electrocuted an elephant using high-voltage AC to prove how dangerous it was. (Thanks for the lightbulb, pal, but you’re still deplorable.)
    There are so many famous rivalries in history, all of them with a story I’d love to have told. Shedding light on the roots of conflict is what drove me to journalism in the first place. What would it have been like to cover the story of Alexander Hamilton versus Aaron Burr? How fascinating to have been a beat reporter when rivals settled tiffs with duels.
    Or what if I’d been around when Stalin faced off against Trotsky over control