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sleepy leers that incinerated her spirit. She slammed out the front door and wobbled down the path to her car.
    She drove until she found a nearby McDonald’s. She got her coffee there and drank it in the parking lot, pacing up and down the Datsun’s length. She cursed Hagen and his manhood first, but it simply wouldn’t serve.
Stupid!
she told herself finally.
How can you be so smart and be so stupid?
A truck driver, roaring past on the boulevard, shouted an obscene remark at her—something about putting his head under her short skirt. It made Michelle feel filthy and horrible and she climbed back in behind the wheel of the car.
    And there, at last, she did begin to cry. Her face just crumpled like a child’s and, like a child, she despaired. Shewept and moaned aloud, her throat contracting until she felt she would choke on her own tears. She held her head and bowed it, and shook it back and forth, her black hair whipping her face. Despair, despair. Alone, so terribly alone. No boyfriend since high school. No friends since college. No real friends there; she was too above them. Her social life was all errors in judgment. Her career—on which she relied for self-respect—was in a pit. She knew everything about everything and nothing about anything and she could not get a handle on how she was supposed to live her life. So, in her wisdom, she believed.
    “My life is shit,” she spat out angrily, hurting herself, crying. “My life is such shit.”
    By about 7:05 A.M ., she had cried herself out and felt better. Sniffling, she threw the empty coffee cup into the backseat: into the landfill of empty coffee cups back there, and fast food containers and yellowing newspapers and notebooks and press releases. With a shuddering sigh, she pushed the little red car into drive. She had come to a decision, she told herself. She knew what she was going to do. The car screeched out onto the road, weaving wildly.
    Someone probably should have stopped her then. God knows, the cops have a hard job of it on the road; they can’t be everywhere. Still in all, someone probably should have pulled her over the night before, driving out there, drunk as she was. And she wasn’t much better this morning. Her head felt feverish and thick. Her sinuses were jammed up. Her stomach felt like an upside-down volcano. Her vision was gamy and blurred, what with all the booze and dope and all that crying. Even she knew she was thinking with rusted cogs; thinking slowly, reacting slowly. But hell, she’d driven home like this before. She’d done it plenty of times. She’d never had an accident yet. She figured it was going to be all right this time too.
    It was all right—at first, on the broad boulevard leadingback to the city’s edge. The Monday morning traffic was fast, but it was still pretty sparse. Michelle attached her gaze to the red taillights of the car in front of her, let them draw her along like the stare of a vampire, sped after them in a nodding trance. She was thinking about her decision. She was nodding to herself, her lips pressed together tight. She was going to stay at the paper, she thought. It was what she was born for; she knew it, and she wouldn’t let any of them make her quit. She was smarter than they were—Alan, Bob, me—she was smarter than all of them and she was going to be better than all of them put together. They didn’t have to like her, she announced to herself, they just had to put her into print.…
    She grimaced as her bowels roiled. She needed to go to the bathroom badly, but she didn’t want to stop. She wanted to get home and shower her own idiocy off her and start again and make it right and make Alan Mann eat her pieces word by word. She was going to go on talking to Everett, she thought. Everett was going to teach her. He was the best of them, bastard that he was, and she was going to make him teach her everything he knew. Then he could make his stupid jokes. Then he could watch her dust. She