THE FUSE

I once ran into a student at a gas station, buying a lottery ticket. When I asked why, he offered a perfectly constructed explanation: He had an exam the next morning, and it was, he said, statistically impossible to have two pieces of bad luck in one day. Either he would pass the exam, or he would win the lottery. The odds of both failing were simply too low. (The clinical scenes that follow draw on experiences across multiple patients; identifying details and circumstances have been combined and altered.)