There was probably a time in my life when I had not yet heard of the Rapture—the miraculous evacuation of Christians to heaven before God unleashes hell on earth—but I cannot remember such ignorance. “If the Lord tarries,” was tagged onto nearly every conversation my fundamentalist parents had about plans more than a week or so in the future. Every which way they looked they discovered signs the end was nigh. From the Gulf War to the “Kids First” Illinois license plates popular during my elementary school years, proof that the world was too corrupt to last much longer was seen everywhere. The most damning evidence that the Jesus’s return was imminent, though, was the utter lack of interest our small-town neighbors had in attending our church and listening to Papa preach at them about the sin of abandoning church in the weeks, maybe years, preceding the end of times.

It’s lunchtime on Thursday. The university commons room is abuzz. Students mill about, others dart their way to class. Blazer-wearing faculty walk to classes or offices. Administration rush around in an attempt to keep the whole operation from crashing. I weave through them with determination. I have a meeting with a vending machine.

Footnotes are stupid. They’re superfluous.

n 2003, I accidentally dated an alcoholic. He came as an accessory on my Prius. I got to know handsome Johnny O. (not his whole name) while I awaited the delivery he promised in four days. And during the four weeks I was dropping in on the dealership to check on my anticipated Prius, he began courting me in a car man kind of way, demonstrating how his smart key could open my vehicle without even touching it, showing me how to change the oil, change a tire, hot wire a car, skills I’d never use, but I liked the way he was teaching me. He would worry, he said, if I were abandoned along a roadside somewhere: fearful, cheerless, Johnny O.-less. This man rolled the odometer back on my feminism thirty years. Single and celibate, I suddenly got hormonal, helpless and girly.

We’re driving on whatever the hell the name of the main road is that goes through Paris and I have to piss. There’s six of us in a car—me, my girlfriend, her friend Katty, Katty’s husband’s mother who has a name that I forget as soon as she says it, a dog named Ramses (I’m serious), and Katty’s husband’s father who will not let me piss. I think it’s a gas issue. He’s worried that if we exit, we might end up driving around for a bit looking for a place for me to relieve myself, so he’s telling me to hold it in. Except he’s doing this in French and no one speaks English in the entire car other than me and my girlfriend.