Ed said: Maybe we won’t have to move? But how could we possibly stay? Those that don’t know how to be pros get evicted. Said Queen Latifah. It’s not just a question of money, though his adjunct salary is not going to cut it. It’s that one way or another, one or the other of us is going to have to find a new job, a raise-a-family sort of job, a position, which means either becoming something new, launching into some entirely different profession, preferably one that pays well and requires no particular skills or enthusiasm, or else—at best—means lingering on as a less impressive version of the academic outlier I already am, but in a new town, a new life, a situation much less promising. A position with no future, at a school no one’s heard of, with a teaching load twice as large. A one-way dead-end move to a town with nothing for Ed to do and far fewer opportunities for Ali. No history museums or art galleries or science centers, just weedy soccer fields out past the public pool. Just a Cineplex with twelve screens showing the same three movies, a strip of fast-food drive-thrus and car dealerships, and a high school that looks like it was designed in the 1960s by a notorious architect of prisons. The town’s population will be almost entirely white, with a range of business-conservative, rural-conservative, and suburban-liberal values, but with zero interest in activism or public debate. A deeply homogenous town. A willfully insular town. Worst of all, there will be nothing to suggest to a curious promising young person like Ali that the world outside might be more interesting or varied or in any way different from the town itself. It will be exactly like where I grew up.