Derek wasn’t delusional enough to think it likely that Violet had any interest in him beyond their already loosely bound friendship, but he was happy to be the recipient of her excess feelings, thoughts, whatever. She was two years older than him and had only predated him at their publication by a matter of months. But somehow this small gulf placed her on a radically distinct plane of experience in his eyes, as alien to his as when he’d been an eighth-grader watching through the chain-link fence bordering the sports fields as the members of the high school soccer team smoked cigarettes and impugned each others’ manhood. He knew that this didn’t have to be the case—he felt on equal footing with, if severely annoyed by the condescension of, most of the members of the reading group—but he still couldn’t help but think of Violet as morally and intellectually superior. And he felt the latter to be true despite what seemed her studied (or unstudied?) indifference to the standard intellectual markers and pretensions of the time. She claimed to be unironically engrossed by the celebrity Internet, and she paid to see romantic comedies and horror sequels that could only be sociologically interesting, if at all. She chewed gum at all hours, sometimes while smoking cigarettes. And yet she was friends with people. The pop music critic for the Times. The Booker-winning young Scottish novelist who taught at NYU. She acted as though she’d gotten her fancy job by accident, as though one could just sort of pick up the phone and find oneself editing … whoever the next day. And maybe, he thought, if one was smart and cool enough (and, all right, went to Yale), one could.

“Okay, least valuable player,” Violet was saying across the table to the three or four people who were listening.

“Everyone was so valuable,” Kyla said, to Derek’s left. She was very thin and very drunk and Derek wondered if it was too early to suggest she skip the next round of the already innumerable vodka shots they’d downed from the handles on ice in the center of the table. “You can’t attach value to people,” she continued when no one responded. “Tolstoy? Gandhi? Hello?”

“I was going to nominate Ben, because he only came once and spilled wine all over his book,” Violet said. “But maybe that’s ‘not nice’ and we should ‘respect all members of the group no matter how tertiary and useless.’”

“Can I at least be the least valuable regular attendee, then?” Leslie said. “Do I get a prize? I didn’t learn nothing, I swear!”

“Only a man can be least valuable,” Violet said. “We see right through that mustache, missy. In addition, I hereforth nominate Derek for rookie of the year.”

“Aren’t we all rookies?” Kyla said. “Isn’t this the first and, God willing, only year of this?”