In college, before I switched gears and plunged headlong into the black hole of neuroscience and linguistic processing, I’d studied psychology. Behavioral, child, abnormal, and all of that. Now, staring into this pot of tomato mush and garlic, I’m thinking I did a crackerjack job on the behavioral part, conditioning Sonia with bribes of cookies and marshmallows to keep her words unspoken. Someone should take away my mothering license.

I keep reminding myself it isn’t my fault. I didn’t vote for Myers.

I didn’t vote at all, actually.

And here’s Jackie’s voice again, telling me what an acquiescent shit I am.

“You have to vote, Jean,” she said, throwing down the stack of campaign leaflets she’d been running around campus with while I was prepping for what I knew would be a monster of an oral exam. “You have to.”

“The only things I have to do are pay taxes and die,” I said, not holding back the sneer in my voice. That semester was the beginning of the end for Jackie and me. I’d started dating Patrick and preferred our nightly discussions about cognitive processes to Jackie’s rants about whatever new thing she had found to protest. Patrick was safe and quiet, and he let me bury myself in my work while he crammed for one medical school exam after another.

Naturally, Jackie hated him.

“He’s a pussy, Jean. A cerebral pussy.”

“He’s nice,” I said.

“I bet he quotes from Gray’s Anatomy while he’s eating you out.”

I put my notes to the side. “The book or the television show?”

This time, Jackie sneered.

“He doesn’t talk politics, Jacko.” It was my pet name for her, or had been. “That’s all I hear in this fucking city.”

“One day, hon, you’re going to change your mind.” She tossed a paperback onto our thrift shop sofa, which I’d spread out on. “Read this. Everyone’s talking about it. Everyone.”

I picked up the book. “It’s a novel. You know I don’t read novels.” It was true; with five hundred pages of journal articles a week, I had no time for fiction.

“Just read the back cover.”

I did. “This would never happen. Ever. Women wouldn’t put up with it.”

“Easy to say now,” Jackie said. She was in her usual outfit: low-rise jeans; a cropped T-shirt that didn’t cover her belly, which Jackie didn’t care to hide, even with its slight paunch; ugly-but-comfortable sandals; and three hoops in her right ear. Today, her cropped and spiked hair had a few green streaks in it. Tomorrow, it might be blue. Or black. Or cherry-cola red. You really never knew with Jackie.