Ms. Hempel is a seventh grade English teacher in New York City. After the fifth grade English teacher, Ms. Duffy, returns, pregnant and glowing after a year of travel in Yemen following an extraordinarily bad year, Ms. Hempel reflects on her unhappiness with her own life. Ms. Hempel thinks about how her life is different from, say, Ms. Cruz, the librarian who dates musicians and explores exciting bars. Ms. Hempel feels she leads no double life outside of the school. Ms. Hempel recalls a night when Mr. Polidori and Ms. Duffy, who is a captivating dancer, danced together at a bar the younger teachers would frequent. She imagines the brief affair the two had, which ended before Ms. Duffy left, began then. Mr. Polidori flirts with everyone, but Ms. Hempel desires his attention. Ms. Hempel hears from Ms. Cruz and another teacher, Mrs. Willoughby, that Ms. Duffy is moving upstate to live in a yurt with the father of the child, a kite artist named Roman who she met after she became ill in Yemen and had to return home to visit her mother after only two months. The conversation touches on how, according to the other teachers, Ms. Duffy was "miserable" before leaving for Yemen. Ms. Hempel thinks about how she often considers deliberately falling and injuring herself to get out of going to work and wonders if Ms. Duffy ever thought similarly. She doubts it. She thinks about how affairs seem to be commonplace among the teachers—Ms. Cruz has told her all the —and how she has never been a part of that world. Ms. Hempel runs into Ms. Duffy in the hall. Ms. Duffy is distressed about how the new fifth grade teacher hung his students' assignments on the bulletin board and failed to correct mistakes in their grammar. Moreover, he took down the poems she had stolen off of busses to hang on the classroom walls. Ms. Hempel has a breakthrough where she realizes her choice way to escape her job wouldn't be to injure herself but to get pregnant. Ms. Duffy says, she should get pregnant, forgetting that Ms. Hempel broke up with her fiance, Amit, who left her for another woman, and feels bad when she remembers. Ms. Hempel recalls a brief and unexpected sexual encounter between herself and Mr. Polidori in the bar bathroom, after his fling with Ms. Duffy was over. Partway through, though, something shifted and he wrapped her in a friendly bear hug. She wishes she could feel that way again—like somebody had made a decision.