And of course beside the paper towel is this week’s homework, from which she is distracted by everything else. She has finally finished looking up dictionary definitions of words that she already knows, but a definition never seems to encompass the real meaning of a word. She looks at her list. Desolate is not “joyless, disconsolate, and sorrowful,” she thinks. No, desolate is the desert through which they’d driven last spring, that barren, red, and dusted landscape that she would never think to label joyless. Desolate is desolate, just as joyless is joyless and sorrowful is sorrowful. Words do not suffice, it seems to Isabelle, to define other words.

She shoves her vocabulary aside and scans the rest of the pile of homework her mother has brought home for her. She will do math next, she thinks. Unlike words, numbers can define one another, she thinks; while desolate isn’t exactly joyless, disconsolate, and sorrowful, for instance, the number six, on the other hand, is inarguably one and two and three, but it is also one and five, and two and four, and two and two and two, and three and three—so many definitions for a single number! If there were ever a dictionary of numbers, Isabelle muses—but there could never be, she thinks. It would be an infinite project.

She rubs her eyes and pulls her math worksheet toward her. She frowns when she sees it; more probability. Probability, it seems to her, is not math. One might be able to predict the probability of something occurring, but whether or not the thing actually occurs is entirely out of math’s control. Probability, in the end, has nothing to do with actuality; it doesn’t matter if the probability of an occurrence is unlikely, only one out of a thousand; that one still exists in a very real way. She does not want to know what “might” happen, she wants to know what “will” happen; she has no use for a mathematics whose answer is “maybe.”

She shoves her worksheet aside; she does not have the patience for it now. She eyes the back door. Her mother has asked her to listen for a knock; the doorbell is broken and she is expecting something—what, Isabelle doesn’t know, probably her dry cleaning, or maybe the chocolates she always orders for Christmastime. Her mouth waters at the thought of those chocolates; she isn’t hungry, but some hot cocoa would be good, she thinks.