“It came to the school,” he says. “Addressed to you. Your mother asked me to give it to you.”

The postcard isn’t really a postcard. It is a photograph of a bar at sunset. In neon letters, the sign on the roof says OVER EASY. On either side of the sign there’s a neon silhouette of a naked woman, in red lines against a purple sky. The bar is a plain, flat-roofed one-story building made out of cinderblock painted green. No windows. A single palm tree sticks up over the roof. I look at it for a long time before I turn it over. On the back, in Grimshaw’s handwriting, is a single line. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. She’s written her address along the bottom. That’s it.

Mr. C. has launched the day’s lecture. We’re leaving the nineteenth century now, with its labor wars and socialist unrest in the middle of the country. He talks about Marx, Engels, and the crude theory they concocted called communism, and how it came over from Europe with ships of immigrants, along with smallpox and Norway rats, while I try to figure out what the line on her postcard means.

How can she have “nothing left,” when nothing is what she left Colchis with—her parents’ old suitcase from their honeymoon and a set of flannel sheets are pretty close to nothing. Everything else she left with was Mike’s—Mike’s car, Mike’s money, Mike’s plans, connections, and schemes. She did have her dreams, but if she’s turned them over to him for management, no doubt she’s lost those, too. But maybe they were gone before she left Colchis.

Mr. C. keeps sending me easy pitches, wanting me to engage, claiming how wrong Marx got everything, including his own phone number. I stare out the same window at the same pine tree I’ve been staring at for almost two years. It’s mid-April now, the world is still brown, but you can feel the green coming. Grimshaw is out there with nothing left to lose, while I’m still in here, breathing the stale air of childhood. Suddenly, I feel so restless it’s all I can do not to leave, just stand up and go, just like she did, and not come back.

So what has she lost, then? The only thing she had that she didn’t take with her was me. Maybe she thinks she’s lost me.

Mr. C. stops talking.