“Eh,” the exterminator shrugs. “It’s the city, you’re always going to find something, roaches, fleas—plus you’ve got a dog, so that ups your chances.” He pulls the flashlight from his belt and ducks back into the cabinet. “Looks okay in here.” His voice is muffled. “But what I’m going to do”—and here his hand reaches again toward his belt and pulls from it a spray bottle with a thin straw attached—“is I’m gonna put a little of this gel we use along the seams.” Isabelle can hear the hiss of the bottle as he applies the gel. His shirt is starting to come untucked in the back, and Isabelle can see hairs curling over his pant waist, dark and wiry. She looks from the exterminator to her mother, who is standing with a hand on her hip and her head tilted to the side as if, Isabelle thinks, she were really interested in what is going on, as if she really cared. “Just,” he says, pulling his head out of the cabinet again, “as a preventive measure.”

Her mother nods. “Whatever you say,” she says.

He puts the pots and bowls back into the cabinet and moves to the wall perpendicular to inspect the cabinets on either side of the stove. Isabelle swallows; if he keeps moving counterclockwise as he is, then her cabinet is next. She slides her back down the cabinet so that she is squatting against it, her heart racing and her breaths coming quick. If she had only known the exterminator was coming, she thinks, if only, if only. She might have tried to collect the ants, maybe, tried to lure them away with crumbs into the safety of a jar. She might have tried to construct a fake back wall for the cabinet so that the ants’ wall was covered. But what can she do now? She could try to distract the exterminator, she thinks, that might work. She could show him a spot in the living room or bathroom and swear that she’s seen roaches there. Or she could ask if he could work in another room just while she finishes up her homework—but her heart falls, because she cannot do these things—but she can, she thinks; she can speak up, but she won’t speak up. What is she afraid of? Hadn’t words only minutes ago been on the tip of her tongue when she’d reached out for the phone? She is a selfish girl, she thinks, selfish and awful and cruel, and now, because of her, the ants will be killed. She feels her jaw begin to tremble; she sets it tight, seething inside, swollen with helplessness.