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handing a sheaf to a student on her right to pass around, giving Flannery a moment to look at her.
    She had the same serenely clear skin, the same slick red-dark hair, straight to her chin. And she wore the same outfit. Black leather jacket, in a cut trim and feminine rather than motorcycle-like, silver-zippered in a few strategic places; close-fitting blue jeans, studiously faded; pointed, pretty, argumentative boots. Not high-heeled or spiky, and not black either—a deep animal brown—but certainly the kind that were made for walking. They brought a Nancy Sinatra shiver to Flannery’s hunched shoulders.
    She stopped in the doorway, before she’d been seen. “I can’t . . . I forgot . . .” she stuttered to Cheryl.
    “What? Come on. This is the right room. I recognize the lady.”
    That’s no lady, Flannery wanted to say, but she kept quiet as Cheryl dragged her over to a corner chair. At least the closer seats were filled, so they could sit farther away, near the window. If worse came to worst, Flannery could always jump out of it. The act might have a certain poetry. Might reveal, all too late, her sensitivity to Criticism.
    It had to happen. Once seated, Flannery tried to busy herself with her educational equipment, but all she really needed was a notebook and a pen. She placed these in front of her. Someone handed her another printed sheet of paper, which listed due dates for papers, Anne’s office hours, the exam schedule. It had to happen. There was nowhere else to turn. Flannery finally looked up.
    And there she was, her tormentor, watching Flannery cannily with her glorious green eyes.

“A ll right, kids,” the instructor began, getting the irony in at the very beginning. “Welcome to the wide world of criticism. There are a lot of you, which is delightful, but it means extra work for me. Your job is to be able to distinguish, by the end of the semester, Derrida from de Man, Henry Louis Gates from Harold Bloom; mine is to be able to distinguish one of you from another. Sadly, that means roll call. Pretend you’re in the army. Amy Adamson? David Bernstein? . . .” And on she went, stopping after each name for a moment with each face, to lock it in her memory.
    Inevitably she reached “Flannery Jansen,” a name that caused her to look around the room with a disbelieving half-smile. Flannery had no choice but to raise her pen in reluctant self-identification.
    “You’re Flannery ?” she repeated, bringing the rose of embarrassment once more to Flannery’s pale face. “Well, that gives you a kind of head start, doesn’t it, in the literature department?”
    She carried on, mercifully, so that Flannery could keep her head down and devote the rest of the hour to not listening to anything else the woman had to say. The instructor went over the material of the first week’s lecture, adorning and explaining and encouraging questions. In spite of Flannery’s stubborn ears she couldn’t help noticing that the words were uttered with an easy wit and grace. She also couldn’t help noticing—it was her fingers that noticed it—a taunting intimacy between their two names. Without thinking about it, while not listening, Flannery decorated the instructor’s name on the printout with some extra letters, so that ANNE became FL-ANNE-RY . Having seen with horror what she’d done, she then had to scribble over the entire name, rather violently. Finally, ANNE ARDEN was wiped out altogether, lost to a block of blue ink.
    Class was ending. Thank God. People were standing. The ordeal was almost over. Flannery leaned over to Cheryl.
    “I’m going to have to switch into a different section.”
    “You are? Why?”
    “I just—can’t do this one. I remembered I have something else that conflicts.” She was not about to explain her reasons to distracted, Doug-stunned Cheryl.
    “Oh well,” said Cheryl, and left in a down-jacketed huff, puffed up in offense. “ Whatever. ”
    Flannery planned to make it up to