“You’re coming to the march, right, Jean?” Jackie stood, braless and makeupless, at the door to my room, where I lay sprawled among half the library’s neurolinguistics collection.

“Can’t. Busy.”

“For fuck’s sake, Jean, this is more important than some stupid aphasia study. How about you focus on the people who are still around?”

I looked at her, letting my head drop to the right in a silent question.

“Okay. Okay.” She threw up her hands. “They’re still around. Sorry. I’m just saying that what’s going on with the Supreme Court thing is, well, it’s now.” Jackie always called political situations—elections, nominations, confirmations, speeches, whatever—“things.” That court thing. That speech thing. That election thing. It drove me insane. You’d think a sociolinguist would take the time to work on her vocabulary every once in a while.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’m going out there. You can thank me later when the Senate confirms Grace Murray’s seat on the bench. The only female now, in case you’re interested.” She started in again on “those misogynistic fuckwits on the hearing committee two years ago.”

“Thanks, Jackie.” I couldn’t hide the smile in my voice.

She wasn’t smiling, though.

“Right.” I pushed a notebook aside and shoved my pencil through my ponytail. “Would you quit giving me shit? I mean, this neurosci class is killing me. It’s Professor Wu this term and she’s not taking any prisoners. Joe dropped. Mark dropped. Hannah dropped. Those two chicks from New Delhi, the ones who always go around arm in arm and have their butt imprints on next-door library carrels, dropped. It’s not like we’re sitting around trading anecdotes about angry husbands and sad wives and sharing our vision for how teenage text-talk is the wave of the future every Tuesday.”

Jackie picked up one of the borrowed library books from my bed and opened it, glanced at the title at the top of the page. “‘Etiology of Stroke in Patients with Wernicke’s Aphasia.’ Riveting, Jean.” She dropped it onto the comforter, and it landed with a dull thud.

“It is.”

“Fine. You stay here in your little lab bubble while the rest of us go.” Jackie picked up the text, scribbled two lines inside the back cover, and let it fall again. “Just in case you can find a spare minute to call your senators, Bubble Girl.”

“I like my bubble,” I said. “And that’s a library book.”

Jackie didn’t seem to give a shit whether she’d just tagged the Rosetta stone with a can of spray paint. “Yeah. Sure you do, you and the rest of the white feminists. I hope someone never comes along and pops it.” With that, she was out the door, a mountain of colored signs in her arms.