He would love that she was dating Leonard, she knew that. Len was so completely her father’s type that she was embarrassed to even mention him. Most of the men and women she’d dated were sweet-natured ruffians, artists and drug dealers and waiters, and her parents had treated them with varying levels of forbearance. But this fucking guy—more than gainfully employed, nice-enough-looking, drug-free except for Adderall all the time and weed on the weekends—fit their idea of the person she should be dating. She was almost mature enough, she thought, to not torpedo the relationship for that reason alone. But she also wasn’t going to reveal her relative contentment and give her father the satisfaction of feeling right. He wasn’t right; she’d gotten lucky. Another of his favorite phrases to repeat during her childhood: “I’d rather be lucky than good.”

“I’m actually pretty happy right now,” she said.

“You look tired,” her father said.

Leonard, on one elbow in bed: “Do you think there’s going to be a revolution?”

Cassie, on her back: “No.”

She felt it a little more every day, the ebbing away of her rage at the president and his cabal of monsters. She hated them now with a colder certainty; she could vividly picture strangling various cabinet members without her pulse quickening. The desperation of the previous year had, she realized, been tinged with something like joy, the catharsis of one’s worst fears being realized. This current feeling, though easier to live with daily, was more like despair. Of course they’d all gotten used to it, even if they claimed they hadn’t. Things for her were mostly the same as they had been before. Better, in many cases, no thanks to the shitheads running the country. One of her plays had been named a finalist in a prestigious competition. Another was going to have a staged reading in an experimental space in a couple of months. Her substance intake was limited to the occasional hits from Leonard’s vape pen during long, liquid nights of streaming video. Sure, she was worried all the time that the world would soon be at war and that she’d be dragged screaming and vomiting through the streets by the police at the next protest she attended. But the anxiety was tolerable. She could, to her relief and regret, live with it. There was danger in projecting her own emotional vacillations on the country at large, but, unfortunately for her sense of herself as a unique and independent human, her varying acceptance of the unending political crisis seemed to map quite neatly onto that of her compatriots, or at least—and crucially—those of her age and social position. Re: Leonard’s question, if there was going to be a revolution, it would likely come from roughly their quarter. And the signs at the protests were still mostly jokes.