Dan shot Rick a look. Rick caught it and grinned with a nod, then turned to Rob, who was halfway out of his chair, ready to high five. Rob elbowed Stick, who grudged out a smile. His crew knew—I’ve got this.

“Montenegro.”

“That’s not fair!” Teddy Boudreaux swiped the pen, journal, and papers off his desk. “He got the question from the book we just read.”

It was a total jackass meltdown. Oglesby turned to address this latest hissy fit. But before his teacher could say anything, Dan grabbed the moment back.

“General Anthony Wayne, Falstaff pretended to die at the Battle of Shrewsbury, and Arthur. Arthur ‘Boo’ Radley.”

Oglesby leaned back on his teaching stick, closed his eyes, and nodded. Rick pumped his fist. The period bell tolled. Jay Blaylock woke up as a red-faced Teddy Boudreaux stormed past him to the jeers of an entire class.

And Oglesby picked up a brown rubber rat off the desk and handed it to Dan.

Just after Pat’s trip to the hospital, in a surge of productive despair, Anne Malone scheduled her own physical checkup. She was healthy as a mare, but the doctor, an icy-handed Baylor grad named Carlson, recommended an annual breast X-ray. He called it a mammogram, which made Anne picture some sort of lactating rodent turned helpless on its side by its mewling litter. Nonetheless, she agreed, and Dr. Carlson’s office made her a separate appointment at a hospital for this.

What the good doctor didn’t tell her was this procedure literally put her tit in a wringer while a technician lowered an eerie soulless lens that looked like HAL in 2001. It hurt like hell, but the nurse complimented Anne for precaution and prevention. “Early detection” was the optimistic way to say it, but what Anne really thought was: With Pat falling apart you would be truly cursed and miserable if you came down with cancer. You deserve to be sick. Which wasn’t so much Munchausen syndrome as how miserable Irish people think.

Anne considered her woes as she put her bra back on. And as she got ready to leave, another thought occurred to her: You’re in Presbyterian Hospital. So is Margaret Raleigh.

The trial had ended seven weeks ago that Friday. Anne had held out for three votes of eleven to one, but then five thirty pushed to six thirty, and the bailiff came back in and announced that the sequester hotel was a Days Inn in Grand Prairie. Everyone was pissed at her stubbornness, and Anne realized she didn’t have a chance in hell of changing anyone’s mind, so she asked that dickhead dentist who was their foreman for one more vote so they could all go home.