She wakes up in the middle of the night to find Nathan sitting in a papasan chair in the corner, smoking a joint and staring at her so intensely it feels like a violation.

Ursula looks down. She’s lying on Nathan’s comforter, fully clothed, thank God. He was on top of her before, yes? Or did she dream that? “What did you do to me?” she asks.

He exhales a plume of smoke. “Don’t you remember? You seemed pretty into it.”

“I wasn’t conscious,” Ursula says, and the nascent lawyer in her surfaces. “Did you rape me?”

Nathan laughs. “No, Ursula.”

“You did something. I remember”—she’s not sure how to describe it—“you were on top of me.”

“That was what you wanted.”

Ursula swings her feet to the floor. She feels like she’s operating a piece of heavy machinery trying to get herself upright. Her head is splitting. “You’re disgusting.”

“You asked me for it.”

“I was too drunk to know what I was doing, Nathan,” Ursula says. “What did you guys put in that punch?”

“Oh, sure,” Nathan says. “Blame the punch.” He sets the roach in an ashtray. “If you report me, no one will believe you. They’ll think it’s because Gillis made me president when you thought it should have been you.”

“It should have been me,” Ursula says. “But that has nothing to do with what happened tonight. I’m going to call a taxi to take me home, and in the morning, I’m calling the police.”

“You’re bluffing,” Nathan says. But he looks worried.

It turns out, Ursula was bluffing. She doesn’t go to the dean or her parents, nor does she tell a single one of her friends what happened, mostly because she doesn’t know what happened. She knows only that she drank too much and that Nathan took advantage of her drunken state to satisfy his own desires. He shouldn’t have touched her. And yet she knows that she’s the one who will be blamed.

The bravery of the two women who came out against Stone Cavendish is remarkable.

Ursula imagined how she would have felt if Nathan Bowers were about to be confirmed to the Supreme Court and he flat-out denied having Ursula in his room and grinding himself on top of her when she was too drunk to give consent.

Not on my watch, Ursula thought. And she voted no.

The morning after Cavendish is confirmed, Bayer Burkhart calls. Ursula nearly lets it go to voicemail. She doesn’t need to hear what she already knows: Because she voted no instead of yes, he’s putting his support behind a different candidate in 2020.

Ignoring his call, however, is cowardly. What was the point of voting her heart, her conscience, if she’s too timid to defend it? “Hello, Bayer.”

“Ursula.” Bayer is eating something—a bagel, probably, slathered with cream cheese, piled with lox. He has quite the impressive appetite. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but you did good.”

“What?”

“Listen, I got the outcome I wanted. Cavendish is on the bench. And you, my friend, are a national hero.”

“I am?”

“You’ve got a seventy-two percent approval rate among women from both parties,” Bayer says. “You were the only senator on the committee willing to stand by your principles and not vote for a guy who was lying.” Bayer swallows. “You were impressive. Calm but commanding. I would have been mad as hell at you if he’d lost the vote, but he didn’t. If I were you, I’d wait no more than a week before you announce.”

“Announce?”

“That you’re running for president,” Bayer says. “My money is on you. You’re going to win.”

Summer #27: 2019

What are we talking about in 2019? The death of Bernard Slade, playwright; Nancy Pelosi; college admission cheating scandal; Miley and Liam; tamago sando; Lizzo; check your Uber; Jeffrey Epstein; Logan, Kendall, Roman, Shiv, Tom, Gerri, and Greg; Old Town Road; Rob Gronkowski; al-Baghdadi; Notre-Dame; John Legend and Chrissy Teigen; Where the Crawdads Sing; El Paso; Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper.

On the fifteenth of April, Link gets acceptance letters from the University of Alabama, the University of Georgia, Auburn, Ole Miss, and the University of South Carolina, and Mallory can’t help herself: she bursts into tears.

She’s so proud of him.

She’s gutted by the thought of him leaving. And yet she knows it’s natural. If he weren’t leaving, he’d be staying, and neither of them wants that.

Link decides on the University of South Carolina. Frazier is excited because U of SC is home to the Darla Moore School of Business, but Link tells Mallory that he has no interest in business. He wants to follow in his uncle’s footsteps—major in political science and shape domestic policy that will make life better, easier, more prosperous for American citizens. This all sounds very lofty to Mallory, but then Link admits that he also wants a school with big football, big school spirit, fraternities, pretty girls, and warm weather. Any school in the Southeastern Conference fits the bill. The University of South Carolina is his favorite, and it also happens to be the closest to home. From Boston, Mallory can fly to Charlotte, then it’s straight down Route 77 to Columbia.

Once Link makes this decision, things move quickly. All of a sudden, Mallory finds herself sitting in the bleachers of his last home baseball game. How is that possible? When Mallory closes her eyes, she’s back in Cooperstown. She’s at the Delta fields, watching him wallop a Wiffle ball off a tee. It’s his first birthday and Senior is tossing Link the squishy ball that he hits with the oversize plastic bat on his first try.

Natural talent here, Mal! Senior cries out.

Link takes Elsa Judd to the prom—Link and Nicole broke up six days into Nicole’s year in Italy—and then he asks Lauren Prestifillipo to the senior ball. He’s casual friends with both girls—friends or friends-with-whatever—because he knows he’s leaving for college and he learned his lesson with Nicole: he doesn’t want to leave with any romantic entanglements.

The last week of class arrives for the seniors, and then the triumvirate of senior ball, baccalaureate, and graduation.

Parents are invited to come to the senior ball after the seniors-only dinner. Mallory goes to R. J. Miller to get her hair blown out and then puts on a new dress, just as she always does the night of the senior ball. Tonight—she has to repeat this to herself several times—she isn’t going just as a teacher; she’s going as a parent. The mother of a senior.

During the reading of the senior-class prophecy, Mallory’s vision starts to get blotchy. At first she thinks it’s just her tears, but she can’t seem to blink or wipe away the amorphous pink blob in the upper left corner of her field of vision.

The senior-class prophecy involves a fictional tale about Gibbs Pond—Oh, boy, good old Gibbs, Mallory thinks—being bought by an evil developer who wants to drain the pond and build a Nantucket-themed amusement park. All the members of the senior class twenty-five years in the future are called on to contribute their particular talents or personality quirks in order to save the pond—but in the end, it’s billionaire Lincoln Dooley who is the hero.