She swallows and opens the refrigerator door, scanning the shelves as she tries to remind herself of what she’d been looking for: orange juice, hummus, cold cuts, carrots, salsa, grapes, pizza left over from Sunday, Chinese left over from who knows when, a jug of milk. She pulls the milk from the fridge and pours just a small amount with cocoa into a mug, her stomach yearning now, and she has just put the mug into the microwave when she hears a knock at the back door.

Isabelle leaves her cocoa still cold in the microwave to hurry to the den for her mother. She knocks on the door only after she has already opened it so as to get her mother’s attention; her mother is on the phone, but she looks up at the sound of the knock and places her hand lightly over the mouthpiece.

“Back door?” she asks.

Isabelle nods.

“Jimmy,” she says into the phone. “Listen, I’ve got to run…. No…. I will, Jimmy…. Listen, I’ve got the exterminator at the door and he’s not going to wait around…. I don’t know if we have a bug problem, Jimmy…. No…. Good-bye.” She hangs up the phone. “My brother,” she says, getting up from her desk. “I swear to God.”

Isabelle stands still in the doorway as her mother approaches, her palms gone sweaty and her shoulders tight with worry. Her eyes are fixed on her mother’s desk chair, the cushion there unburdened now and rising. The exterminator, she thinks, remembering all the times in the past when the building exterminator has knocked on their back door and she has not given a thought to whatever creatures he was there to exterminate. But her ants! Exterminate, she thinks; such a violent, calculating word. Her mother brushes past her; Isabelle hurries after her toward the kitchen. Normally at a time like this, when there is a delivery or the superintendent has come to fix the toilet, Isabelle retreats to the safety of her room until whoever has come is gone; her mother looks over her shoulder with surprise at the sound of Isabelle’s footsteps on the kitchen floor, and she pauses before pulling the back door open.

“Should I wait?” her mother asks, thinking, Isabelle thinks, that Isabelle wants to gather her homework or pour a glass of orange juice to take away with her before the exterminator comes in.