“I might.” He looks at her warily, enough to make her think that perhaps he does know how to speak Spanish. That this is just another one of the things he has kept hidden from her.

Among a herd of wildebeests in the migration diorama, she can see where the animals’ joints are coming loose. The stitching shows. The noses are cracked, the horns precariously tilting. There are nine of them in the glass enclosure with her. Painted on the wall, in various sizes and degrees of perspective, there are perhaps five hundred more.

A group of teenage boys stops to peer in the window. They are thirteen at most—with thin arms and legs that are growing too fast to be strong. One of the boys points at her and they all turn, and Mary smiles, weakly. Their eyes travel over her body. A boy with sandy hair begins to tug at his belt. The other boys glance left and right, and then Sandy drops his pants and moons her.

The flash is brief, but in the moment when he connects his cheeks to the glass, she can see the unhealthy skin—the red bumps spreading across his lower back. Afterward the group scatters quickly. She can hear the echoes of their whoops down the hall.

She reports the boys to Dr. Fisher. He is standing on a stool, trying to reach a book on the upper shelf, when she walks into his office. He jumps down, and Mary can see that it makes him unhappy to be disturbed.

“How could they expose themselves without a teacher noticing?”

“I didn’t see any teachers.”

“Perhaps you imagined it.”

Mary imagines her hands around Dr. Fisher’s neck, but then she lets it go. She needs the job. Her father’s medical expenses have drained their savings. As she walks through the hall, she slaps the black bear on the behind. She crawls into the migration diorama, picks up a brush, and paints a tiny caricature of Dr. Fisher in the corner, getting kicked by one of the wildebeests.

When she’s finished, she turns to the suggestion of specks in the upper section of the painting, the animals farthest away. Everett gave even these dots a certain amount of personal character. One mark will slant to the left, as if it is tossing its head; another will raise its leg in a decidedly reluctant gesture. He used, for the most part, a myriad of grays, touched here and there with a darkening shadow of black. Mary sucks on the end of her brush before dipping it into the paint. She follows his outlines exactly. As she progresses, she feels a gathering of dust in the back of her throat.