The bird chirping started again. “Dammit, Adelaide Rosario Dawson,” she told herself as she pressed the “postpone” button on the wall clock again, seeking another eight minutes of rest. Ada’s ambition was to wake early to review her notes from the last tutor session before her morning shift at the scan-out desk at the Folger Library, off the Mall. She wallowed in her foolhardiness—she should have slept in rather than activating the snooze again and again.

As she rushed out the door with last night’s cold pizza squares dinner for breakfast, and down into the Metro Mag Lev, she tore off the thermals with her notes at foot of the stairs.

Ada was looking forward to her work trip to the UK Union in two weeks. She was taking a group of museum volunteers to the Shakespeare trail and she would gain her the next level of expertise. The highlight for her would be being on stage at the Globe, a perspective she had only watched through record performances.

Her paper notes darkened in the heat of her hands as she tried to review them in the shuddering light through the windows on the train. The wrinkles and smudges started to look like the manuscripts she would soon be checking out to visitors at the Folger. The Capitol South stop arrived.