Today and tomorrow we are sharing exclusive excerpts from a wonderful bunch of authors with new short stories available for the holidays season. Up next: J. Courtney Sullivan!  *** Not happy? No problem. Fake it. From New York Times bestselling author J. Courtney Sullivan comes the sharp-witted short story, Model Home, about the reality of reality TV. When I was growing up, my family lived in a little house on a busy street in Joliet, across from a gas station and next door to a strip mall. It was like an entire neighborhood had once been there and was demolished but for that one ugly split-level ranch. Maybe that is what happened, I don’t know. We had one tiny bathroom for five people. A galley kitchen with fluorescent lights. Everything was always a mess. Forget a mudroom, we didn’t even have a coat closet. Everyone just walked in the door and tossed their coats onto the arm of the plastic-wrapped sofa. My parents didn’t care about having, nor could they afford, anything nice. They patched broken windows with black garbage bags. When the roof leaked, they’d just put a pot on the carpet to catch the drips, and the pot…