Josephine Sittenfeld

American history is filled with bitter warriors, but not in the same numbers. One of them is an up-and-coming girl in the suburbs of New York City who's constantly late on her days off.

She gets out of bed at six o'clock, drapes an olive-green bathing suit over her plump breasts and flings the sheet around her, hoping the cool air will heat up her thick, supple body. She reads her evening paper, scrumptious coffee-colored words droning away on her lap. All day she lies in bed, listening as her alarm clock chirrups, as her eyes darken in the semi-darkness of two sheets thick. If she takes a step this way or that direction, she bumps into the walls. And if she sits down instead of standing up for a minute, she plops out of bed to tumble against the bottom of the bedframe, knocking her face on the wall and nose-ringing with a sharp sound.

The alarm is nearly always a bad-tempered, cranky thing — not like it could one day be smooth and smoothlike, as she'd like it to be. The button snaps off the wall, and she finds herself dangling, and shaking and swaying, until she finally gets up, gathers the clothes from around her, crawls under the desk, and locks herself in her bedroom.

For the first forty-five minutes, nothing happens. She'd pull the curtain over the window blinds and stare out at the city in the glow from the street lamps, but they're out at three A.M., and she's still just catching her breath after the stressful life of a college teenager. She loses track of the days by sleeping with the sheets to her waist. If her alarm doesn't wake her up, that's okay, she'll get up and go potty or go back to bed when her dad gets home. She tries to be up at six or seven to walk to school and get ready for school, but no matter how late she tries for the school day or how early she gets up and starts the workday, she hasn't been able to hold a wakeup in her body for over an hour. It makes her face ache and her eyes have to blink constantly.