In my fifteen years of fighting with Sadie Shaw, we only had six ceasefires.

The first five, we broke.

Ceasefire #1—Second year undergrad

Thirteen years ago

Our unit chair for Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Literature made two pedagogical decisions that Future Jonah, who would go on to teach classes of his own, would find utterly fascinating in their sadism:

1) Group work was the best possible way to assess individual students’ understanding of the libertine novel.

2) Pairing the two students who, over the year and a half they’d known each other, had spent every seminar passionately disagreeing with each other would lead to excellent results.

“Truce, Fisher,” nineteen-year-old Sadie said, long red hair spilling over her shoulders as she marched across the seminar room toward me. “The grade we get on this assessment is more important to me than the fact I can’t stand you.”

She held out her hand for me to shake.

I looked at it.

“Well?” she demanded.

“. . . Fine. Truce, Shaw,” I said. “Our grade is the most important thing.”

I shook her hand. Her skin was soft against mine, the way I had imagined it might be, but her grip was secure, assertive, assured.

Mine wasn’t.

I loved arguing with Sadie in seminars. Everything I could think of, she always had an answer to—sometimes a completely unexpected one—and it was entirely, utterly thrilling.

This was our fourth semester of undergraduate Lit Studies at Eastern Sydney University. Every semester, I made sure we were in the same seminars, because I liked arguing with her so much. Every week, I looked forward to the hours we spent together: to those productive, fruitful, generative debates; to the way our commitment to one-upping each other made us both better students; to the glint in her eyes as she turned her gaze on me across the room; to whatever it was she would say next.