Josephine Swigart is listening to a green iPod in the cubicle across from the table where I’m grading her essay on Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen. She’s wearing a pink polo underneath a corduroy jacket and a skirt with a belt that looks like a garland of flowers. Her hair is long and curly, the speckled color of sandstone, and her face, partially obscured by the wall of the cubicle, reminds me of the girls I knew in college, the ones who wore sweatpants to class and never lit their own cigarettes or paid for their own drinks. It’s finals week, and, even though I shouldn’t, I can’t stop staring at her legs through a gap in the shelves that must, I imagine, be laden with books about love and wishful thinking.
