She fumbles around on the nightstand, trying to find her phone, trying to shut it off. It feels like the alarm is inside her head, emanating from a place deep inside her skull. It’s so loud, it hurts.

“Stop, stop.”

Someone thumps against the wall from Mikaila’s room. It has to be Mikaila, since Steven is usually too polite to do something like that. Mikaila is the nervy one, the type to say something.

Rebecca grabs the phone, shuts the noise off. Sweet relief. She feels like her eardrums have been punctured, like blood must be cascading down the sides of her head.

“Stop being overly dramatic,” she says to herself.

She checks the phone. Seven thirty-one. Ugh.

The bed is a mess, papers spread all over the sheets and comforter. Last night, Rebecca started reading the manuscript that landed on her doorstep, the one with no name or return address. The one about the two women who are friends—and then the friendship is threatened because one woman might be cheating with the other woman’s husband. While it isn’t exactly her style—she prefers Jane Austen or maybe Dickens over contemporary novels—the pages flew by faster than she could turn them. It felt like the book was covered with glue and the pages stuck to her hands, leaving her unable to put it aside. She read and read until she fell asleep with the book covering her like a blanket. She slept like homeless people who covered themselves with newspapers in order to stay warm. She barely stirred during the night, didn’t even get up to pee.

But duty calls. In addition to her job at the library, she also tutors at the writing center one morning a week, and it’s this morning. She needs to dress and get to campus, and she dreads the thought of the January cold that is unseasonable for Kentucky and seems to be eternal.

No time for a shower, so she brushes her teeth and then pulls her hair back into a ponytail and splashes what passes for hot water in their apartment onto her face. When she emerges from the bathroom, Mikaila’s lithe body is leaning against the wall of the hallway, her mouth open in a tremendous feline yawn.

“Becca, you know I’m a light sleeper and a really sensitive person. If I don’t sleep enough, my anxiety really goes into overdrive. We have to do something about that alarm. You set it too loud.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll remember tonight.”

“Steven and I are so tired. We were watching a documentary about nine eleven last night. Did you know the government set charges inside the Pentagon? That’s why it exploded. It was totally an inside job.”

“Um . . . well . . .”

“The shit these professors don’t teach us.”