And then nothing more. Diane wondered who the boy was Josh was interested in. She didn’t know if he had ever been on a date with anyone. He had never been willing to talk about dating with her.

Diane wondered how to bring this up to Josh, and then she wondered if this was even the kind of thing you bring up with a teenager.

“So you’re interested in dating?” she could ask, but expecting what? A yes? Then what?

“What’s his name?” she followed up in her daydreamed conversation.

“I don’t know. Someone else knows,” she projected him saying as he looked down his thin beak at his hands, which had twice as many fingers as her own.

“You wanted to ask what the boy’s name was. Why didn’t you pass the paper back to your friend?” she imagined herself asking.

“Why are you reading my notes?” she pictured him shouting. His eyes pink, his long teeth bared. He was crying, his wings flapping.

She imagined this conversation a few times at her desk, and it never ended any better.

She stuffed the note in her pocket and lied to Catharine that she was having a migraine (Catharine had said: “I can see that.” Diane didn’t understand how someone could even see a migraine.) and left work early—sometime between the hours of eleven and four.

She was anxious and driving fast, listening to the radio turned up to a loud but sensible volume. Cecil Palmer was talking to that scientist, who was explaining how clouds are made of moisture and aren’t cover for alien crafts or appendages of a great sky being. It seemed ridiculous, like most things on the radio these days. He was bending facts to create an absurd argument just to get listeners stirred up.

She was disappointed, because Cecil and the scientist were dating, and interviewing your partner for a news program seemed to be a conflict of interest. And, more important, the scientist was talking nonsense.

“. . . tiny, tiny droplets that are invisible individually, but as a whole form a puffy white cloud,” the scientist said.

That was when she heard sirens, which at first she thought were muncipal censorship to spare regular citizens from having to hear this kind of talk on community airtime, but then she realized were actually on the road behind her.

She was doing almost fifty in a thirty zone. Okay, she thought, so this I deserve.

As she pulled her car over, she looked at the clock on her dashboard and realized there was no way she was going to get to the theater in time to see Troy. A feeling that had risen to the top of her chest slipped back down into her belly. She couldn’t tell what that feeling was or if it was good or bad.