Summary

Dorothy struggles with a series of library printers in her attempt to get a document to print. Those struggles lead her, at one point, to think about going out and buying “a can of motor oil so she could come back and burn the library down” (211). At another point, once she has finally printed her material and survived a sharp conversation with a bossy librarian, she thinks about “how naïve she had once been to believe there was anything glamorous about the life of the mind” (212).

Dorothy visits the washroom, and after an uncomfortable encounter with a couple of students, uses the toilet and finds a spot of blood on her underwear. As she tries to figure out where it came from, she realizes that on some level, she is settling into life as “a bleeder” (213). She also considers how the...