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I chewed my toast, considering this, and between glances at Brigid looked all around the room with equal attentiveness, just so it wouldn’t seem like I was particularly fixated on her face (so sharp-boned and precise, but with a pleasant suggestion of former plumpness everywhere smudging it faintly…

“What uncle?” Vaneetha asked. “Which watch? Were you just now fired?”

“Um, yes. I was just now fired. From Pfizer. Wow. Pfired! So I’m pfucked!” But the p was silent so no one laughed but me. I looked at Vaneetha. “Don’t worry about my uncle. He doesn’t exist. So he’s fine.”

Wednesday passed in this way, then half of Thursday. Thursday at lunch I walked down to Times Square where there was a Belgian frites shop whose product I admired. Then I walked back to Pfizer wondering if flying off to meet some hardly-known person in a foreign country was really the ideal decisio…

“Come on, Alice,” dad growled. “Show some spine. A diffident revolutionary is no good. I’m a commodities trader. If you don’t kill me, who will you?”

I knew she was right. It wasn’t very unusual for me to lie awake at night feeling like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world. But knowing the clichés are clichés doesn’t help you to escape them. You still have to go on experiencing your experience as if no one else has …