At the creative writing department’s end-of-year party, Ethan’s secretary fed him kale with her fingers. Ethan wasn’t supposed to call Abigail his secretary. Trouble was, Abigail often referred to herself as his secretary in wry subversion of the school’s progressive values, and her jokes had eclipsed her actual job title in Ethan’s memory. The party was crowded. Grad students were crammed into the kitchen, hoping their advisors heard them talking about sex. In the adjacent living room, academic spouses grew weary of discussing summer plans, as if everyone had summers off. Soon the house would overheat. Guests would spill into the yard but for now stayed close to the collapsible buffet table on which they’d placed their offerings. ‘I brought the kale salad,” said Abigail, who was not attractive but to whom Ethan was attracted. He’d formed a habit of fixating on her least appealing features, her crusty eyelashes and fleshy earlobes, daring his lust to subside, which it did not.

“I’m not a fan of that vegetable,” he admitted.

“Oh, I massaged it. Have you ever had it massaged?” She looked deep into his eyes with an intensity that might have indicated sexual devotion but was not uncommon in the type of person by whom Ethan found himself daily surrounded.

“I’m not sure. I mean, I don’t know how it’s usually prepared.”

She stuck an arm between two adjuncts and grabbed a fistful of her own salad. She was drunk. He was excited.

Abigail shoved the greens through Ethan’s closed lips. Oh, they were terrible. Coarse and curled and bitter, gritty with some kind of debris. “Are there nuts in this?” he asked.

“Quinoa.”

“Ah,” he said, chewing indefinitely. “That is different.”

Pleased, she drank her drink. Ethan stood ass-to-ass with party host and department chair Joyce Lockhart, who was engaged in a separate conversation. “We adopted him when he was seven,” Joyce was saying. “He was called Humphrey on his papers, which, no. Then we discovered he hates females his own age but loves puppies, so we named him Humbert!” Temperate laughter. Someone’s sandalwood perfume. “Lola” by the Kinks.