She doesn’t know what to do with herself now, with the hours remaining. She checks her phone. 11.11. Tomorrow, at this time exactly, the other pills, all four of them at once. It would still be possible, if she hurried, to make the midday seminar. But she hasn’t been to lectures all week, hasn’t done the seminar prep. She likes the module, likes the tutor, wants to do well. Last term her supervisor said her idea had PhD potential and she replayed the words in her head for weeks. So she goes up to her room now and sits at her desk and flips through the handout and reading lists. Gender, Family, Faith: Norms and Controversies. Paradise Lost in Context. Civil Wars of Ideas: Politics vs. Religion. You can’t get away from religion, in the seventeenth century. She reaches for the Norton anthology, opens it at random. A ballad. She skims the first couple of stanzas:

Farewell, rewards and fairies,

Good housewives now may say,

For now sluts in the dairies

Do fare as well as they.

Lament, lament, old abbeys

The fairies lost command;

They did but change priests’ babies,

But some have changed your land.

And all your children stolen from thence

Who live as changelings ever since

13She stops, heart pounding. Sluts. Illegitimate children. Changelings, and fairies to blame them upon. Nothing feels neutral any more, she thinks. It never will again.

And then: Wise up, she tells herself, and then she says it aloud. Wise up. Wise yer bap: that’s what they used to say in school. Wise yer bap. She forces herself to tap her laptop awake and type out a few lines of the ballad. It’s going to be fine. It’s all going to be fine.