Eventually he notices that someone is watching him. Across from him on a bench there is a girl, maybe college-aged, maybe younger, it’s hard to tell as she’s thin and wearing baggy clothing, and as her hair is natty and wild, and she is barefoot, and has hemp bracelets on her wrists and ankles, in dirty cargo shorts and a fading T-shirt, with a dog next to her, and one of her hands is stroking its forehead while her other holds up some used stock mystery novel, the kind with a glossy embossed cover. Around her is splayed the kit of the beggar—the wicker mat, upon which sits a cardboard sign and a plastic container with some change and a few dollar bills in it. Her smudged thumb turns the page, but she’s occasionally glancing at him, and now he at her: does she remind him of someone? Then he places it—Alice Waterson, a fellow neuroscience grad student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Three years into the program Alice had dropped out for reasons unknown, although everyone speculated. Madison was a small enough town that people from the program still saw her downtown occasionally, now with hippie tassels in her hair, zooming around on a skateboard with dirty bare feet. Everyone avoided her, and the girls in the program always gossiped about her, exclaiming about how embarrassing it was to see her downtown, how they always had to hide to avoid saying hi. But to Kierk it had seemed like maybe she had found some kind of inner peace. A few months after Alice left, Kierk had run into her one evening at the public terrace overlooking Lake Mendota. Over the sound of the live band she had talked about her renewed Christian faith, been energetic and engaged, happy to be outside, if a little thin and grubby. He didn’t see her again, and neither did anyone else, until a year later the next summer, when Kierk was driving back from getting groceries, his windows rolled down as he cruised the back roads. He spotted Alice again, walking over a hill toward a bus stop, wearing a shabby backpack. Kierk pulled over and approached her. She didn’t have her skateboard anymore, and though she lit up at seeing Kierk she struggled through their conversation, her gaunt face slow to respond to his comments, and she smelled bad even in the sunny breeze. She tried to summon up a brave face, dismiss everything, crack a few jokes, but after chatting with her for a bit Kierk told her to wait right there. He went back down to his car on the side of the road and lugged back up five or six full bags of groceries. The bus had come as he trudged up the hill. The driver idled with the door open. Kierk and Alice, who had once been paired together on a project about the evolution of the neocortex in a graduate-level course, stared down at the bags of groceries. Embarrassed, finally she took them, apologizing to the driver as she lugged them onto the bus, waving to Kierk as he walked away down the hill. For a while Kierk followed the bus, as it was headed the same general direction as him, but then its blinker went on and it took a turn and he never saw her again.