Holly Allaire, fifty-one-year-old English professor, had tried to get people to call her by her given name, Hortense, which sounded more professional, more mature, more complicated. Holly regarded herself as complicated in a world that was rapidly slicing and dicing its way to facile simplicity, a novel in a world of tweets. But Hortense had not caught on. Oh well. First world problem. Holly, she supposed, suited her now. Tall and big boned, with a rectangular face, she had of late acquired softer edges that fitted the round Holly better than the angular Hortense.

            Holly sat grading at her desk in her office at Salish State University in Agate, Washington, surrounded by neatly crowded bookshelves, a photograph of her seventeen-year-old daughter, Lily, and a big sash window open to a shady maple and the raucous clatter of students doing student things on the lawn.

            A knock on her open door made her look up to see Python, one of her more talented students, who often came to her office with his troubles. Python had short, green hair, a nose-ring, and a tattoo of a thick, twisting snake down the length of his leg. Thirty years before, in 1988, Holly had dyed her own hair shocking pink and considered herself playful and bold. Python’s expression wasn’t playful.

            “Sit,” Holly said. “And tell me what’s going on.”

            Python sat on the edge of the wooden chair, bit his knuckle, and made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a sob. “He called me a … He kept doing it… It felt like a beating that wouldn’t end….” His words were drowned by sobs.

            “Oh, sweetheart. What happened? Who called you what?”

            “Professor Monroe. Can we shut the door?”

            Holly had a policy about the door, but this moment required privacy and care. She came around the desk, shut the door, and patted Python’s shoulder. “Breathe slowly and deeply. It really helps. Then tell me what happened. At least, tell me as much as you feel comfortable telling.”

            Holly was a mandated reporter. Should she mention this now?

            “He called me a ‘she’. He kept doing it even when my friend told him to stop.” Python gazed at her, his eyes full of tears.

            “It was Jerry Monroe who did this?”

            Python sniffed and nodded. “It felt like a violation.”

            Holly knew the muscle memory of pronouns was very strong, especially in people over fifty. And, in spite of his wispy beard, Python’s high voice and plumpness could easily prompt a person to use a female pronoun. Holly blinked. These were not good thoughts, not thoughts she’d want Python to hear. She remembered a science fiction story she’d read once where everyone’s mind was completely transparent to everyone else. A tired trope, but still interesting. In such a world, would people censor their thoughts until all were pure and righteous, or would we be forced to tolerate inappropriate thoughts in others? These were questions for a different time. Right now, she had to think of how to help Python. “This wasn’t just a slip of the tongue, right?”

            “No. I get that sometimes and if the person apologizes sincerely, I let it go. But this was deliberate and repeated. Even after Teresa pointed it out to him.”

            “That’s not OK.” She handed Python a tissue. “Have you tried talking to him about it?”

            Python shook his head fast, almost a shudder. “That would retraumatize me.”

            “You could talk to the dean of students. He could get you transferred to a different class or get you a hardship withdrawal.”

            “Why should I have to retreat? Leave the space that I have a right to?”

            “You could file a grievance. I could help you draft the complaint.”

            “That would be painful too. Having to relive the trauma in a semi-public setting.”

            Holly thought of Jerry Monroe. At fifty-four, in his straight, white, male prime with a thirty-something girlfriend and a new Chevy Camaro, he had to pick on this sweet, vulnerable person. Why?

            “I was thinking of something with more solidarity…like a group protest.”

            “Do other students have issues with him too?” she asked.

            “Yeah. We’ve been talking. There’ve been lots of micro-aggressions in his classes, and Teresa told me he sexually harassed her.”

            “Oh no! Did she say what happened? Did she report the incident?”

            Python’s eyes narrowed and Holly worried that her questions might suggest that she was on the wrong side. #Believewomen was the mantra.

            Holly was not inclined to believe absolutely every woman, but she was inclined to believe Teresa. She recalled a conversation she’d had with Jerry five years earlier. They’d been talking about seniors in the major they might hire as tutors for English Composition. Jerry was enthusing about how talented a particular student was. “Oh yeah? I’ve never had her,” Holly had said, meaning, of course, I’ve never taught her in a class. And Jerry’s big, shining face had puckered into a smirk. “Neither have I. More’s the pity.”

            Holly had hidden the profound discomfort she felt in this moment. The first sensation had felt like jealousy. Not, of course, that she lusted after Jerry—God forbid—but it made her uncomfortable when men breathed their fervid enthusiasm for other women in front of her. A rebuke somehow. She also, then and now, heard the insult and potential threat to the student. How he had objectified her, in that brief double-entendre, and revealed his own immoral inclinations. Yes. Holly could definitely see Jerry as a sexual predator. He might not think of it as sexual harassment, just a few salivating compliments that made a young woman uneasy and unable to focus on her work. Jerry definitely needed to be taken down a peg.

            “We’re thinking of a protest,” Python repeated, recalling Holly from her reverie. “Go to his house and make noise and make him uncomfortable. Give him some of his own medicine. Shake him free of some of his privilege. But we can’t find his address. Can you give it to me?”

            “It’s not in the phone book?”

            “No.”

            “It wouldn’t be ethical for me to give it to you.”

            “I thought you were an ally so you would be willing to help us.”

            Somehow, that sentence was ambiguous, hinting at some doubt about Holly’s allyship. She glanced toward the corkboard half-hidden behind the shelf to her left that held photos of Lily as a child, lists, and a group photo of the department. She recalled department meetings when she would say something she considered profound and Jerry would say he didn’t understand, and she would be covered with confusion. Her words, the implication was, were nonsensical because they didn’t—he said—make sense to him.

            “Listen, Python. Don’t cry.” She reached out to the corkboard, undid a tack that held up one of the lists, and laid the piece of paper on her desk. “Let me make you a cup of mint tea. That will soothe your nerves.”

            Python shrugged. Would he be too absorbed in his pain to notice the list? She pushed it forward on her desk to within a foot of him—and tapped it.

            Then she left the room. It was such a little thing. A small blow against the patriarchy. And she hadn’t really done anything, just rearranged the paperwork in her office and left to make a cup of tea.

            When she returned, the piece of paper appeared unmoved, but Python seemed more relaxed. She tried to redirect his attention to a story collection by Carmen Maria Machado, and she allowed her mind to wander to Saturday when she would meet Lily’s boyfriend, Bryson. He was joining them for the weekend at an Airbnb on the coast and she would have to be the perfectly hip professor mom who would not embarrass Lily.

***

            Bryson Stevens dropped his backpack and lowered his long, lean form to the leather armchair. The room smelled of incense. Some sort of perpetual water machine made lapping noises. A framed poster on the wall jauntily declared: Leave your shoes and your inhibitions at the door. All thoughts and feelings welcome here! He’d been coming to this office for over a year, since the trouble with the police over the trespassing incident. He was pretty sure he didn’t need therapy, but talking to the tiny, pixie-faced, stout-hearted Carolyn was fun.

            “Hello, Bryson,” said Carolyn. Before he met Lily, Bryson had fantasized about Carolyn. Now he saw her more like a young mother—to replace the mom he’d never known, or a young aunt or a much older sister.

            “How was the visit with Lily’s family?”

            “What? No small talk? No delicate approach. You just jump right into the most painful topic.” He often pretended to scold, and she would play along.

            “It was painful?” she asked in that low, slow voice, like she wanted to prompt him to speak without noticing her, just to give her his unfiltered thoughts.
            “Lily’s parents are divorced. So, it’s just her mother, Holly—but she called me a lightweight, said she didn’t think I was worthy of her daughter. Me: a lightweight! I have a 1700 chess rating. I read dictionaries. I plan to become a college professor myself. Lightweight is not the right word for me. I was just trying to be polite and respectable.”

            Carolyn leaned forward. “She called you a lightweight and said you weren’t worthy of Lily?” She tipped her head, just the slightest hint that this story didn’t make sense.

            “Well, not exactly but…the mode doesn’t matter. What matters is what she thinks.”

            “Words can matter. Is it possible you misinterpreted her? You were feeling a little anxious. Could you have projected some of that onto her words?”

            Bryson sat up straight. Carolyn was doubting his integrity or his intelligence or both. She wasn’t supposed to do that. This was supposed to be a safe place. “I read her diary, OK. The place where people confide their deepest secrets. She’s going to stand in the way of our being together next year.” The words tumbled out. He stopped and pushed up his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose. Why did Lily have to matter so much? Just six months ago he was dreaming of getting accepted at McGill to major in linguistics and philosophy, then going to grad school and working in academia. He hadn’t needed women. And then Lily had admired his drawings in art class, and they’d fallen into conversation and just kept talking and not run out of things to talk about. And now he couldn’t bear the thought of living without her.

            “You read Lily’s mom’s diary? Hmm. OK,” Carolyn said, still in that slow, even tone, like she was playing for time, scrambling to think what to say. “And you found out she didn’t like you? Where was the diary? Did she leave it out?”

            “I saw it on her nightstand when I went upstairs to the bathroom.”

            “What did Lily say?”

            “Lily?”

            “When you talked to her about her mom’s diary.”

            “Oh, I haven’t told Lily.”

            “You haven’t talked to Lily about this, and that’s because…?”

            Bryson pushed his hand through his untidy, black hair. Carolyn was tricky. “OK. I shouldn’t have read the diary,” he said, twisting the hem of his sweatshirt into a ball. “That was a dick move, I know, but…”
            “You recognize that reading her diary was wrong, but you were desperate to find out what she really thought?”

            “Yeah.”

            “There are other ways to get to know a person,” Carolyn said, her voice like bathwater, soothing him. “If you want to have a relationship with someone, she has to be able to trust you. You have to treat her the way you’d want her to treat you.”

            Bryson knew Carolyn was right. He wanted her to trust him; he wanted to be completely open with her. “It’s not like she’d have any right to complain about violations of privacy. I mean…” And he blurted out the story that had taken up ten times as many lines in Holly’s diary as the comments about himself and Lily, the story of how Holly had doxxed her colleague.

***

            Carolyn Davis, thirty-eight, BS, MFT, arrived at her butter yellow bungalow ready for a shower and a light supper. Her husband met her at the door wearing his blue apron. At forty-three, clean-shaven with thick, curly dark hair and a slight build, Nick could easily pass for thirty.

            “You look exhausted,” he said. “Come in, have a bath and then we can eat on the deck. I’m making glazed tilapia with roasted vegetables.”

            “Where are the kids?”

            “I dropped them off with your sister for a sleepover. I thought we could enjoy an evening alone.”
            It had been a long day, but a lavender-infused bath, a delicious meal and a reprieve from the drawn-out bedtime ritual with two seven-year-olds could possibly put Carolyn in the mood for romance.

            “How about a glass of wine? Red or white?”

            Carolyn was trying to give up alcohol—which added pounds and wrecked one’s sleep. But wine would relax her, and she’d had a hard day. “I guess white would go better with fish.”

            She finished the glass of chardonnay as the bath water cooled and then toweled herself dry, tied up her frizzy yellow hair with an elastic band, pulled on a pink and white striped sundress, and returned to the kitchen. Late September evening light struck the copper pans, the butcher’s block island, and the shiny lemons. She inhaled scents of garlic and rosemary, browning butter and honey. Her favorite album was playing. She swayed to Brandi Carlile and Sam Smith singing Party of One.

            He served the meal. They carried plates and glasses, a bottle and cutlery out onto the deck that gave them a glimpse of Mount Baker through the screen. He refilled the glasses.

            They talked about the news and Nick’s work. Carolyn listened with half her mind. After they’d moved to the swing-seat, she said, “Something happened today that bothered me a bit.”

            “Talk about it if you like.” He stroked her hair.

            Carolyn found Nick trustworthy and insightful and confided in him often about her cases—no names, obviously, as protocol dictated, except sometimes an initial. “There’s this teenager I work with. Actually, one of my favorite clients. I’ll call him B. He’s in love with this girl and he wants to persuade her mother to let them go to the same college.”

            Nick said nothing. Carolyn sensed that he was listening, really listening. Maybe he should have been the therapist; he was better at paying attention than she was.

            “He’s desperate,” she said.

            “You see your role as helping him find the words to convince her?”

            “Mainly, I see my role as helping people figure out what they want. You’re supposed to be positive and affirming, oh, and genuine, which sometimes pulls me in two different directions. Like today, B told me that he read this woman, Holly’s, I mean, this woman H’s, diary, which shocked me. It’s really not OK.”

            “Obviously. Did you tell him that?”

            “We’re not supposed to be judgmental. It just makes the client defensive, then he clams up and you can’t help him. But in this case, B got defensive and talked more. He told me what he read in the diary—and it was a little disturbing.”

            “What did the diary say?”

            “Well, to be honest, I tried not to listen because you know, violation of privacy and all that… but it was interesting.”

            He massaged her neck and shoulders. “Ah, Sweetheart. I wish you could leave your work at the front door.”

            “So, I could concentrate on you?”

            “So you weren’t so stressed. But I guess you care about your clients because you’re a profoundly compassionate person—which is why I love you. So, no. I wouldn’t have you any other way.”

            Nick wanted to move on to the next part of the evening, she could tell. If she talked the case through, just for a few more minutes, and figured out her next moves, she’d be able to concentrate on Nick as fully as he deserved. “Apparently the woman wrote in her diary that she just hates her colleague—who sounds like a complete jackass—she described him as looking like Jay Leno and talking like Jordan Peterson.”

            “Nice,” Nick murmured. “You think the kid wants to use this information to change her mind?”

            “Whoa!” she said, “God. You think he’s planning on blackmailing her?”

            “Maybe. You know how love makes people do crazy stuff.”

            “Oh boy. That could get ugly. I’ll have to figure out how to head that one off.”

            “What does he have on her?” Nick asked.

            And Carolyn told him what Bryson had told her.

***

            Carolyn was asleep upstairs. Nick knew her sister would drop the kids off at school. He turned on Bach’s cello suites, made himself coffee and avocado toast, and read the news—Trump meeting Kim Jong Un, another woman accusing Brett Kavanaugh—as well as texts from news sources around town, looking for leads to follow: a fight on Railroad Ave. last night; a spill on the bay that could endanger Great Blue Heron rookery, a protest at an SSU faculty member’s house in the wealthy Bayview neighborhood—close to campus and overlooking the San Juan Islands. University politics wasn’t Nick’s beat. His editor would assign this story to the new kid, fresh out of college herself, who would fit in and be able to get interviews from the protesters, if the protest came to anything. Nothing that particularly interested him this morning.

            He should use the time to visit his father at the Green Acres retirement home. He drove forty miles southeast to Sedro Woolley through evergreens and farmland, his mind moving haphazardly as clouds in a windy sky. That fuss at the university; Carolyn had said something about a professor who’d given the address of a colleague to a student who wanted to mount a protest. Interesting. Probably a coincidence. Coincidences did happen. Statistically inevitable; just rare.

            Nick shelved thoughts of Carolyn and the protest to focus on the visit. His father, a clever, competent doctor before he retired, had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Lately he’d been affectionate, aggressive, vulnerable, seemingly at random. What to expect today?

            Nick parked and entered the building, his nose twitching at the smells: synthetic florals, a sort of potpourri, antiseptic, boiled Brussels sprouts, urine. He greeted the man who worked the desk, and Freya Lundstrom, the young nurse’s aide who cared for his dad, bathed him, reminded him to take his meds, bandaged his legs when he scratched the thin skin. Freya was a heavy-set woman in her early twenties with a broad face and big, brown eyes. Like a cow, Nick thought, a sturdy, calm, steadying sort of cow. He shook his head briskly. There was no way to use cow to describe a woman without insult. He smiled at Freya, grateful for her attention to his dad, conscious that she was doing work that, in another time or place, would fall to him. “Is he OK today? Any more flashbacks to ‘Nam?”

            “Dr. Davis is in a gud mood today. He had eggs and bacon for breakfast, and we watched the morning news together. He was talking about you. He’ll be happy to see you.” Nick wondered what Freya thought about her job and her clients. Her face showed no pity or contempt. He liked to believe that her mind was as generous as her face.

            Edward Davis sat facing the window, his skull gleaming under his sparse white hair. Nick took in the narrow single room with its bare walls, bed, armchair, tiny TV, and bedside table with a vase of desiccated daisies and the photo of himself, with his deceased mother, and older brother, Wayne. “Hey, Dad.”

            His father turned “Ah, Nick.” The baggy, crumpled version of Nick’s own face broke into a smile. “Or is it Wayne?”

            “Nick,” Nick said, trying to hide his disappointment.

            “Ha! Gotcha.”

            Nick wasn’t sure if this confusion was genuine. It didn’t matter. The truth was that his father remembered distant details with godlike clarity and forgot who the president was or where he’d left his toothbrush. This was all normal, they said. Bits of brain stuff fell away, a natural process like meat falling off dead bones. Of course, Edward Davis wasn’t dead yet. Another bad simile.

            “Let’s go for a walk, shall we? I hate it in here.”

            Nick took his dad’s balsa wood arm and helped him to a standing position.

            The old man pulled his head away. “God, Nick, can’t you brush your teeth. You smell like you’ve been drinking fish sauce that’s past its due date.”

            “Lost your filters, have you?” Nick muttered. “No more need to worry about hurting people’s feelings. You can’t help it. Must be nice. Such a reprieve.”

            “What?” his father snapped, and Nick remembered that his hearing went in and out too.

            Nick’s own filters were still intact. He could help it. “Oh. I just got a little hurt with the personal remark. But I guess it’s useful to know my breath stinks. How about I chew a piece of spearmint gum? Would you like one?”

            His father snorted. “Get stuck in my false teeth. Aging—not a walk in the park, Wayne. Enjoy your youth while you have it.”

            Wayne was their dad’s favorite, who never came to visit. Nick was tempted to correct his dad because these visits were a chore and he should get the credit, but if he did correct him, his father would be upset. Why not let him believe that Wayne visited him? “Let’s walk, Dad. There’s a little community garden about a block away. It’s mostly shady all the way. We can talk as we go.”

            After they had checked Ed out and Nick had signed a waiver, when they were outside on the sidewalk, his dad asked about his work—at the drycleaners.

            “Wayne’s the one who owns the cleaning business, Dad. I’m the journalist. I studied journalism at the University of Washington. I work for a paper in Agate and sometimes get stuff published in The Atlantic.”

            “I know that. I was just kidding. Tell me a story you’re working on.”

            “Here’s one I’m thinking about. One of the English professors at SSU said some things that upset his students. Now they’re protesting. Hundreds of kids are camping outside his house, playing Heavy Metal music, and using loudspeakers to demand that he resign or be fired. Nobody can get any sleep.” Nick was embroidering, something he would never do in an actual article.

            “I heard something about that on the television,” his dad said. “Just before you arrived.”

            “Oh yeah?” Could that be true? Events on the ground must have escalated since he’d read the text about the protest this morning.

            “You’re involved in that?” His father’s eyes narrowed. “It sounded as if someone else was on the scene. Apparently, the police have been called in. Things are getting tense.”

            “I’m working a different angle,” Nick said. “Apparently, one of the professor’s colleagues, a woman who hates him, gave the students his address and that’s how they were able to stage the protest.”

            “Another English professor? What was her name?”

            “Holly something. I forget the last name. I have it in my notes though.” Carolyn had let the name slip when she was talking last night. He filled in the details he recalled from their slightly inebriated pillow talk, until he realized, both that the incident was potentially newsworthy and that he could never write about it without compromising Carolyn.

            Before they reached the community garden, his father turned around. “We’d better get back. They have steak for lunch. If I don’t get in line early, the old crones will clean them out and I’ll be left with mashed potatoes and peas.”

            “It’s only eleven o’ clock, Dad. And it’s Tuesday. Isn’t Tuesday Taco Day?”

            “Tacos give me gas.”

            Nick felt bad about having massaged the truth. “How about we go to the Outback?”

            His dad beamed.

***

            Fox News, the old folks’ channel, advertising Ensure Max Protein and walk-in bathtubs, was blaring extra loud in the dining room. The other residents watched Fox. His son watched MSNBC. But Edward Davis recalled Walter Cronkite on CBS with nostalgia. He had been the voice of authority, just stating the facts. Facts shouldn’t come with additives, extra sweeteners and blue or red dye like blueberry or raspberry yoghurt. They should come at you straight, not adulterated or pre-digested.

            Ed wasn’t hungry, and the square slabs of cod and overcooked broccoli didn’t look appealing, but he liked a little company now and then and maybe there’d be dessert: chocolate pudding or Jell-O. Freya would be off at eight. He liked Freya. They had good conversations. She asked him questions about anatomy and biology and seemed impressed with his wealth of knowledge. Sometimes she read him short stories out of a fat textbook. Her odd mispronunciations, “shin” for “chin”, “yolk” for “joke” made him laugh.

            The Fox anchor was going on about how brave Trump was to meet with Kim Jong Un and to stand up to the horde at the Southern Border and then moved on to a new story.

            “Hey, that’s Agate. Just up the street,” one of the old ladies called out and everyone turned their attention to the television. The protest at the professor’s house had swollen and blocked the streets. The police had responded. Protesters had thrown rocks. A teenager had just been shot in the chest.

            Ed felt a burst of energy and pushed himself to his feet. “We must get him to the hospital. Call the medevac chopper. First, we need to staunch the wound. Use sterilized gauze if you can. A bundled-up shirt if need be. They can deal with the infection later. The absolute priority is to stop him bleeding out.” He was in La Drang Valley in 1965, dusty sweat streaming down his face, flies circling his head through a haze of heat. Above him, the urgent churning of the chopper, beneath him, a fresh-faced boy crying out, his own fist pressed against the wound, going numb. Then a gentle, accented woman’s voice reached him through the chaos.

            “Tell me about your time as a medic in Vietnam,” Freya asked when they were back in his room. He talked and talked about the lives he’d fought to save. She listened closely, her face mirroring his feelings about the outcome of each case.

            When he asked her about the person shot in the chest, she scanned her phone for more news. CNN was reporting that the victim was a sixteen-year-old boy, a foreign exchange student from Morocco who was living with a neighbor of the professor. He wasn’t even involved in the protest. “He’s in intensive care.” She shook her head.

            Ed liked this girl. The feeling wasn’t quite like the feelings he’d had for his wife or for other girls of his youth, but it wasn’t entirely different. He wanted to delay her departure. “My son, the one who was here today…he knows something about this protest.”

            “Oh ja?” she asked without enthusiasm. She’d had a long shift. She’d be eager to get going. It was after eight, but he wanted just a few more minutes of her attentive presence.

            “He told me how it happened. A professor said some ugly things in class that got the students riled up. They wanted to protest at his home but couldn’t find his address. Then a student asked one of his English department colleagues, Holly somebody—who gave them the information.”

            “Wow! I wonder if she’ll get in trouble. Why would she do that?”

            “Well, Nick said she’d been hurt by some things the other professor had said and done in the past…” He talked on, glad that the exchange with his son had not evaporated like so many conversations these days. 

            She shook her head. “Hurt people hurt people. I just wish the police in this country weren’t so quick to shoot.”

            “The news story said that some of the protesters were throwing rocks.”

            “That’s what the police always say. That’s what Fox always echoes. Listen, Dr. Davis. I need to go now. I’m exhausted and I have to walk my dog before he goes wild and gets me kicked out of my digs.”

            “You have a dog? Do you have a picture?”

            Freya showed him pictures of her young German Shepherd, Wallander, and then patted his arm and left the room and the building and his life until Friday. Ed wondered whether he might request a hug and a kiss on the cheek next time he saw her.

***

            Freya cleaned up the mess Wallander had made in the kitchen, fed him some kibble, and took him for a walk on the boardwalk. It was dark except for a gibbous moon, but she felt safe with an almost grown German Shepherd by her side.

            She returned to the shabby house where she did not feel at home. Her roommates left dishes in the sink, forgot to take out the garbage, never cleaned the toilet, and complained when Wallander had an accident. One of them was playing rap music too loud; pot smoke seeped out from under another’s door. Freya shut her own door and turned on her small TV while she ate the cellophane-wrapped tuna sandwich she’d bought for her dinner. Apparently, the Moroccan kid had died. Turns out it was a homeowner, not the police, who’d fired the shot. Sad, very sad, very wrong.

            Freya turned off the TV. She had an English assignment due tomorrow. Creative writing was an elective and low on her list of priorities. She devoted most of her homework time to biology and chemistry, hoping to become a physician’s assistant. She had “a heart for helping people” everyone said, and she wanted to earn enough to have a place of her own. Nothing fancy, just quiet, private, and as clean as she left it. Freya’s family had been prosperous when they came to the US seven years earlier before her father died and her mother decided to return to Sweden. Freya had refused to join her even though it meant paying her own way through school. Sometimes she regretted her decision, but she was not the sort to wallow in remorse. She had things to do, so many things.

            Most immediately, she needed to turn in the assignment by nine tomorrow morning, less than twelve hours from now. And she needed sleep. Perhaps she could ask for an extension—like other students did. She thought of her English professor, Professor Kowalski. Narrow-shouldered, short, with longish hair, he was not a handsome man, not even an especially kind man, but he had something, a sort of indifference to fashion—in clothing and in opinion—that Freya found refreshing. He would probably give her an extension but asking would be irresponsible.

            She brewed herself a pot of coffee and sat on the lumpy sofa with her feet on the box that functioned as a coffee table and her notebook on her knees. First drafts, Professor Kowalski had said, should be written in a rush without edits, just tapping into a stream of consciousness. Later you could go back and revise, but with that first draft, if you let your mind roam freely, sometimes you come up with patches of pure gold. He told them that, “The Lottery,” had been written in a single sitting and had required only minimal revisions.

            “This is especially important for you, Freya,” he’d told her in a one-on-one conference. “Your writing feels stilted, corseted. I sense you second-guessing every sentence. Just relax. Take a hit of pot or drink a glass of wine.”

            Freya had clutched her little gold cross and opened her eyes in alarm at this and he’d added. “I believe you have incredible potential—if you could just unlock it.”

            Freya had inscribed these words in her notebook after she left his office and returned to gaze at them often. No-one had ever said such a thing to her before. It occurred to her that he might be snowing her, but he didn’t seem the type. He was too genuine, too reverential when he talked about the stories he assigned for them to study, with a fervor Freya had not encountered since she’d heard her Lutheran pastor grandfather talk about Scripture.

            She’d read some of Professor Kowalski’s own work and she’d been impressed and a little bewildered. If she wanted to write good stories, she would need to train her taste to recognize good writing in others and in herself. But the story for tomorrow didn’t need to be great, just good enough for a passing grade. Professor Kowalski had said to write freely without self-censorship. How hard could that be? She sat back and, using a pencil, started writing whatever came into her head. She wrote about the shabby digs she shared with her annoying roommates, the long commute to her job at the retirement center, the man she helped there, Ed Davis, who, if she was completely honest, could be annoying at times, who didn’t respect boundaries, but who was lonely and afraid. About that shocking moment when he’d stood up at the dinner table, grabbed two of his tablemates’ napkins and wadded them together and started calling for a medevac helicopter.

            Freya paused. She felt an air current lifting her wings. She’d found a path for a story. She wrote on and on, forgetting her exhaustion, about everything Ed had told her, about the woman who had given the address of a colleague to a student. Freya had no idea who the people in his story were. For all she knew, this Holly woman could have been a figment of his imagination. It didn’t matter. This was fiction.

            When she finished writing, she dozed and woke to daylight leaking through the spindly blinds and the sound of a roommate making oatmeal. It was after eight. She took Wallander outside to pee and then ran up to her room to type the story into her computer with only minimal edits; then just before nine am, uploaded it, and hit submit.

***

            Gregor Kowalski, aged forty-nine, associate professor of English, waited ten days to read the pile of stories. Not exactly a pile because they were all virtual, available on Speedgrader to save trees, but he thought of them as a pile, a pile of shite as his old professor from Chicago would say. He poured himself a whisky and started reading, making corrections and comments and assigning grades—higher than he would have preferred  in order to minimize complaints and improve his teaching evaluations.

            Freya Lundstrom’s piece was better than most. She’d obviously taken to heart his advice about writing without edits. There were a lot of typos and some head-hopping, but her writing had a new vigor. He liked her descriptions of her obnoxious roommates and the old guy she helped at the retirement center. Good dramatic moment when he jumped up at the dinner table and started yelling for a medevac chopper in response to a news story about a teenager shot at a protest. Could she be writing about the protest at Jerry Monroe’s house? Gregor leaned closer to the screen and drained his glass in a single swallow. Freya described the subject of the protest as looking like Jay Leno and talking like Jordan Peterson. That captured Jerry Monroe exactly. Freya must have had a class with him. Jerry had always been a prick. Gregor recalled his smirk a few years ago as he dismissed Gregor’s best story, the one he’d published in Crazyhorse, as “just warmed-over Hemingway.”

            Gregor read on. Could the Holly Chambers in the story be based on his other colleague, the self-righteous, virtue-signaling Holly Allaire? If not, the shared first name would be too much of a coincidence, surely. And Holly in the story hated Professor Rogers; Gregor recalled the burning animus that had flared between Holly and Jerry, most recently over the hiring of that young Virginia Woolf scholar that Jerry had been so taken with. Gregor could see Holly trying to ingratiate herself with the students and trying to injure Jerry in a single move. Two birds.

            This story undoubtedly involved people Gregor knew and didn’t love. But how had Freya known all this? She’d heard the story from the old guy at the retirement center, Ed Davis, and he’d heard it from his son, Nick. Gregor googled Nick Davis who turned out to be a local journalist. He must have covered the protest, talked to the students, heard about Holly’s indiscretion from one of them. God damn it, Holly! You doxxed Jerry and got a kid killed.

            If the bullet had hit Jerry instead of the boy, Gregor could almost have forgiven her. But an innocent child had died—and Gregor despised Holly, who had voted against his promotion, almost as much as he despised Jerry.

***

            The department office and common room buzzed with intrigue, different somehow from the sad whispering and headshakes that Holly had observed over the last couple of weeks about the protest directed at one of their colleagues and the terrible shooting death it had led to.

            This time people were glancing in Holly’s direction as she walked past. Or perhaps she was imagining this. She found a large, brown envelope in her mailbox, opened it, and read the handwritten post-it note attached. “A story by one of my students. Blew me away. Real talent. We need to get this kid into the major. Gregor.” She glanced at the other mailboxes, many of which contained brown envelopes with the same lettering and no stamps.

            Holly sniffed. A story good enough to draw such altruistic enthusiasm from Gregor would have to be something special. She read it while walking back to her office, hoping, in some part of her brain, that Gregor was wrong, that he had not uncovered a true genius amongst their undergraduates.

            The story was dreary stuff, about dishes in a sink, dog turds, profane rap music beating through thin walls. Nothing she hadn’t read before. She reached the bit about the retirement home and the guy with dementia and the sudden eruption at the dinner table over a TV news report about a student protest outside the home of an English professor at a state school in the PNW. The story had her full attention now. She closed her door and leaned on her desk while reading on and on. The story followed closely events she’d watched on television with growing dismay. And then the climax, the reason Gregor put the story in her mailbox—how English professor, Holly Chambers, had given the students the address of her colleague.

            A boy had died. Holly’s breath came in short, sharp puffs; she leaned more heavily on her desk, not sure if she could stay on her feet. That poor, poor boy. His name was Tariq, they said. Holly had seen his mother on television, talking in broken English about how America was supposed to be safer, and how she wanted people to remember her son. He’d been a skilled guitar player, and the fastest middle-distance runner on the track team, a sophomore at Roosevelt High in Agate. Lily’s school! The victim of the shooting could have been Lily!

            Holly felt a plunge of grief. She’d done this; she might as well have pulled the trigger.

            A loud noise—a bird hitting her window—startled her and she dropped the papers. She bent to pick up the white pages and the brown envelope, without stamps, just like the ones she’d seen in her colleagues’ mailboxes. Gregor was out to destroy her. Her dean would hear of it. There’d be disciplinary hearings, and maybe even a criminal investigation. How would she pay for Lily’s college tuition if she were fired?

            But no. This was catastrophizing. Any small action, when combined with dozens of other disconnected random events—could lead to disaster. You turned left rather than right, missed a flight, chose to enter the bank rather than the post office, and something terrible ended up happening. You couldn’t be blamed for these unforeseen outcomes. At least, you shouldn’t be blamed—particularly when others were more culpable.        

            Holly left her office and walked down the hall. Gregor’s door was shut. The bastard. He’d printed up twenty-five copies of that mediocre story and hand-addressed twenty-five envelopes, just to spite her!

            Jerry’s door was half-open and through it, Holly heard his voice and that of a young woman followed by peals of laughter. He had started this whole wretched business but had recovered quite well, thank you very much, from the tragedy. She considered confronting him, but he would have read the story too and was probably planning to file a grievance against her. Best not give him more ammunition.

            In the department office, Python stood at the copy machine, with his back to her, balancing his weight on one foot, scratching his ear. Playing the innocent when the leak must have been his doing! He must have shared the story of her misstep with a reporter. Had she really confided in him how Jerry had insulted her, how Jerry reminded her of Jay Leno? Apparently, she had. She’d trusted him; she’d wanted to help him; she’d tried to be an ally in the struggle for social justice. And this was how he’d repaid her.

            Well, she would make damn sure that he paid too.