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titles in the last ten years. The coach was Wesley’s ex-girlfriend, ex as of one month previous. Ellen Silverman was the source of the spite that had moved Wesley to buy a Kindle from Amazon, Inc., the company that sold them. WellcEllen and the Henderson kid in Wesley’s Introduction to Modern American Fiction class.
    .
     
    Don Allman also claimed the Moore faculty was mediocre. Not terrible, like the football team—that, at least, would have been interesting—but definitely mediocre.
    “What about us?” Wesley asked. They were in the office they shared. If a student came in for a conference, the instructor who had not been sought would leave. For most of the fall and spring semesters this was not an issue, as students never came in for conferences until just before finals. Even then, only the veteran grade-grubbers, the ones who’d been doing it since elementary school, turned up. Don Allman said he sometimes fantasized about a juicy coed wearing a tee-shirt that said I WILL SCREW YOU FOR AN A, but this never happened.
    “What about us? What about us ? Look at us, bro.”
    “I’m going to write a novel,” Wesley replied, although even saying it depressed him. Almost everything depressed him since Ellen had walked out. When he wasn’t depressed, he felt spiteful.
    “Yes! And President Obama is going to tab me as the new Poet Laureate!” Don Allman exclaimed. Then he pointed at something on Wesley’s cluttered desk. The Kindle was currently sitting on American Dreams , the textbook Wesley used in his Intro to American Lit class. “How’s that working out for you?”
    “Fine,” Wesley said.
    “Will it ever replace the book?”
    “Never,” Wesley said. But he had already begun to wonder.
    “I thought they only came in white,” Don Allman said.
    Wesley looked at Don as haughtily as he himself had been looked at in the department meeting where his Kindle had made its public debut. “Nothing only comes in white,” he said. “This is America.”
    Don Allman considered this, then said: “I heard you and Ellen broke up.”
    Wesley sighed.
    .
     
    Ellen had been his other friend, and one with benefits, until four weeks ago. She wasn’t in the English Department, of course, but the thought of going to bed with anyone in the English Department, even Suzanne Montanari, who was vaguely presentable, made him shudder. Ellen was five-two (eyes of blue!), slim, with a mop of short, curly black hair that made her look distinctly elfin. She had a dynamite figure and kissed like a dervish. (Wesley had never kissed a dervish, but he could imagine.) Nor did her energy flag when they were in bed.
    Once, winded, he lay back and said, “I’ll never equal you as a lover.”
    “If you keep talking snooty like that, you won’t be my lover for long. You’re okay, Wes.”
    But he guessed he wasn’t. He guessed he was just sort ofcmediocre.
    It wasn’t his less-than-athletic sexual ability that ended their relationship, however. It wasn’t the fact that Ellen was a vegan with tofu hotdogs in her fridge. It wasn’t the fact that she would sometimes lie in bed after lovemaking, talking about pick-and-rolls, give-and-gos, and the inability of Shawna Deeson to learn something Ellen called “the old garden gate.” In fact, these monologues sometimes put Wesley into his deepest, sweetest, and most refreshing sleeps. He thought it was the monotony of her voice, so different from the shrieks (often profane) of encouragement she let out while they were making love, shrieks that were similar to the ones she uttered during games, running up and down the sidelines like a hare (or a squirrel going up a tree), exhorting her girls to “Pass the ball!” and “Go to the hole!” and “Drive the paint!” Sometimes in bed she was reduced to yelling “Harder, harder, harder!” As, in the closing minutes of a game, she was often able to exhort no more than “Bucket-bucket- bucket !”
    They were in some ways perfectly matched, at least for the short term; she was fiery iron, straight from the forge, and he—in his apartment filled with books—was the water in which she cooled herself.
    The books were the problem. That, and the fact that he had called her an illiterate bitch. He had never called a woman such a thing in his life before, but she had surprised an anger out of him that he had never suspected. He might be a mediocre instructor, as Don Allman had suggested, and the novel he had in him might remain in him