Russell�s in Javanalia, of all places, and it�s only eight-thirty in the morning but he couldn�t sleep due to all the construction right smack outside his apartment window�an unforeseen peril of living downtown�and it�s still dreadfully hot and he has no air conditioning, and so of course sleep was a fool�s errand, so he came down and crossed the street to this ridiculous place he loathes so much but it�s air-conditioned and he can sit and read without being bothered directly, at least. And he�s hating the fact that he�s a good fourteen months out of college and yet he�s still here in coffee shop purgatory, amidst the early-morning-too-cool-for-you-but-actually-frumpy-and-genuinely-unpleasant-and-overrated-approaching -middle-age-First-Wave-Ferminism-feminist-TA-poetry-reading-attending-overpriced-cooperative-grocer-shopping -organic-coffee-drinking-local-business-supporting-Annie-Proulx-reading-staying-sober-on-the-weekend types. It�s well past the middle of August but the weather is hotter than it�s been all summer. He could have moved away. He doesn�t have to be here anymore. Instead he took a small apartment downtown and is going to keep working at the Patina and hating this place. He�s buttered his own grave, and so on.

Across the room, a girl with impossibly straight brown hair is sitting and reading something Russell can�t quite make out: a novel, something predictable, probably. She�s been into the Patina a few times, not really enough to be considered a regular. But he�s seen her at the bar during happy hour a few times, her book bag resting against her stool but still somehow conspicuous. He doesn�t want to admit to himself that he finds her attractive, because then his routine would kick in and he�d go through the predictable and inevitable motions he actually doesn�t have the energy for. But that�s when it hits him, in his early-morning cottony brain: he knows her, from a class, from a frightfully boring class his senior year, some Western something-or-other, philosophy or religion or philosophy of religion. She had shorter hair then and wore glasses all of the time, but it�s definitely her. Margaret something. Maybe Madison. He shudders at the thought of a woman named Madison. He can�t deal with this right now, this early in the morning. So he throws his newspaper on the table and leaves.

He goes outside and thinks for a split second, his hair still not fully recovered from his pillow, that it might be getting colder out. Something in the air, elusive: it�s late summer�definitely, distinctively not early summer, not even July-summer, but late summer. It�s the time in summer where the nights will, he hopes, get a little cooler, people get a little sadder, the window fans come out instead of the air conditioning, and Russell inevitably, for all his bluster, hearkens back to childhood days with the looming fear of the imminent back-to-school trauma, first-semester registration, driving back from out east, celebrating his birthday in a sad hotel room in Ohio somewhere, the DNC conventions, the rain. Mostly the rain. The emptiness of a college town in August right before everyone reconvenes. He really doesn�t want to be around for all this; he really, really doesn�t.

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