When she was in fifth grade, Jennifer set the world record for Most Pogo Stick Jumps in One Minute. At age twelve, she swam the state’s best time for the 100-meter butterfly (Girls, 11–12 years old), a record that still stands today. She graduated high school a year early, was class valedictorian, and got accepted into every college she applied to, a fact that she told everyone she met.

Now Jennifer is forty, divorced, and single. She’s a well-paid project manager for a large technology firm, which means she sits at a computer all day reading and writing emails and running virtual meetings. When her typical teenage daughter comes home from school, she goes to her room and tap-taps the rest of the day away on her cell phone. She’s that age, people tell Jennifer.

Jennifer’s swimming medal and her complimentary copy of The Guinness Book of World Records are in a shoebox on her closet shelf. She occasionally meets her friend Nancy from high school for drinks, and when they reminisce about their youth, Jennifer marvels at that young girl who accomplished all those things. She was fearless. But of course, Jennifer thinks, she didn’t yet have that little voice telling her It’ll never work, it’ll never work.

Whenever Jennifer has a glass of wine or two (or three), she thinks about things she might do: she might just hike the Appalachian Trail, or backpack across Europe like some of her friends did in college, or she might go on a camelback desert safari. There’s nothing stopping me, she’ll say to her wine.

But something stops her. Later, sober, she thinks: I’ll have to find someone to water the plants and watch the dog. Someone to move my car for street cleaning. Then there’s all the planning and preparation. I’ll need to get shots. It’s so much easier to stay home. If I give up on the whole idea, I can just relax again.

So the days continue, their pattern unchanged. Then one day, Jennifer is sitting at her computer, type-typing away, when she sees a man stroll down their street and jog over to her neighbor Destiny’s Subaru. He fiddles with the door until it opens, then jumps into the driver’s seat. At first, Jennifer doesn’t believe what she’s seeing, but then the man ducks his head down and looks as if he’s fiddling with the ignition, or whatever you fiddle with these days to start a car that’s not yours.

Jennifer feels an energy flow through her, and she leaps from her chair, runs through her house, pulls open her front door, and races across the street. The man’s head pops up from below the dash, he’s got the car started, and he starts to drive off, but Jennifer heads him off, stands in his way so he can’t pull out of the parking space. “Stop!” she shouts, blocking the Subaru just like the man in Tiananmen Square standing in front of that column of tanks.

The thief inches the Subaru forward, threatening to run Jennifer over, or trying to scare her into jumping aside. Jennifer doesn’t budge. The man taps her in the shin with the car’s bumper, but Jennifer ignores it. He pushes her back a few inches with Destiny’s car, but Jennifer is undeterred. She leans on the hood, splays her legs for balance, moves with the car. The man mashes down the horn, pushes her back a little more so that her shoes skid along the asphalt. But Jennifer holds on.

There, in the street, getting shoved slowly backward by a 2-ton car, Jennifer is thinking of all her accomplishments. They have to mean something, she thinks, I must be somehow special. Someone like me does not give in. That’s my secret, it’s how I did all I did. Jennifer feels a blossom of pride and pounds the car’s hood with her fists.

Hearing the hubbub, Destiny comes out the door of her building and sees her car accelerating away, down the street, and her neighbor Jennifer lying in the street, bleeding. She runs over to her.

“He was stealing your car,” Jennifer says, stunned. “I tried to stop him.”

Destiny hears sirens. Someone has already called 911. She kneels beside Jennifer.

“Oh, honey,” Destiny says. “You didn’t need to do that. I got insurance.”

Jennifer’s eyes go wild, like a scared animal’s. Destiny can see something failing in her. She takes hold of Jennifer’s arm and begins softly stroking it.

Jennifer stares off at nothing. “Good girl,” she says.