That’s the other thing you think of. Or at least that you try not to.

A moment later, he said, I’m completely knackered. Shall we just go to bed?

It was nine thirty-five, which was at least five minutes past our bedtime. We’d been going to try to watch something.

Yeah, I said.

He set off the dishwasher while I plugged in the monitor to recharge.

There are times in my life, I said. It was a phrase that had recently entered our private lexicon, a shorthand of sorts.

I know, he said. It’s nine thirty-seven now. Come on.

I couldn’t sleep. It was too cruel, the nights this happened. Your exhausted body, flush with adrenalin, primed to jump at every cough and whimper, eventually refused to settle at all. I googled Monica Lewinsky again, and found the photo of the dress. It was on a cached eBay link, where someone was offering it, not the actual dress itself lol, for sale for a hundred dollars. Wouldn’t some other museum want it? someone had asked in the questions. Like I think the Smithsonian has the original?

I looked at the dress, at pictures of Monica now, at pictures 56of Monica then. You didn’t even need to type Lewinsky, the internet knew you wanted her. I found a fuzzy picture that someone had scanned in from a college yearbook.

I thought – of course, again – of myself back then. Of myself at twenty-four, twenty-two, nineteen.

We had done the Starr Report in my first week in college. It might, in fact, have been my first-ever lecture. The lecture theatre was packed to the rafters with not just freshers, but second- and even third-year students. The young lecturer was something of a celebrity on campus: I had picked that much up already, along with the slang for the dining hall and the porters’ lodge and the woman who, to my shame, made my bed and emptied my wastepaper basket every day. They were all words that I couldn’t bring myself yet to use, out of conviction they’d sound ridiculous coming in my accent, coming from my mouth.

The lecture was on prac. crit., ‘practical criticism’, the newest of the skills – or concepts – I had to master. How to close-read and analyse a text. I tried not to think of our teacher at GCSE, fresh out of teacher training and earnest, pressing us to explain why Wilfred Owen had selected a particular word. My friends and I sniggering, passing notes.

Because it rhymes? I’d said when she finally called on me, just sarcastically enough that my friends would definitely know it and she might not.

It’s utter shite, all of it, the girl beside me had whispered. Sure he’s there in the trenches, being shelled to fuck. He 57wants to get his poem on the page, he doesn’t care what word he uses and why.