Suddenly, he didn't see a "literary archetype." He saw himself on a Sunday afternoon, ignoring his alarms, drifting in that comfortable, dangerous fog of "later."

"Maybe," Dima smiled, finally touching pen to paper. "But to me, he just looks like a guy who’s scared of Monday morning."

He picked up his pen, ready to transcribe the digital wisdom. But then, his eyes flickered back to the textbook. He opened to the section on . He read a paragraph about the slow, honey-thick days in Oblomovka, where the sun seemed to stand still and no one ever hurried.

It was Lena, the class overachiever, holding her own copy of the textbook. She looked at his empty pages and sighed. "You haven’t even started the 'Check Yourself' questions at the end of the chapter, have you?"