Waiting is hard. When she was a child, she used that time to clean; she liked to go through things and organize, to find a little bit of order. Each doll had its own place on the shelf; each stuffed animal was assigned the right spot on her bed. Once, when she was in sixth grade, she saved her money to buy Hefty trash bags—the giant heavy plastic ones like they have at hardware stores, for removing debris from construction sites; her brother drove her to buy them and said, “Good luck with that,” but he didn’t really think she could change anything. He said their mother and grandmother would still sit there in their bathrobes, surrounded by stacks of paper, and their dad would still pile up burned-out appliances—toasters, electric razors, hair dryers, blown lamps, radios—out on the back porch, where Shelley thought there should be a hammock with a quilt on it and little pillows. She thought if she surprised them and started cleaning that everyone would pitch in, like all the little birds and mice in Cinderella.

“Sorry to tell you, kid,” her brother said, the pupils of his eyes like pinpricks, “but we live in shit, and the only way out is what I’m fixing to do.” She didn’t think much of it until late that night when he hadn’t returned home and, while their mother slept, she filled those bags with all the trash and all the shit, all the detritus—a word that makes her think of the word viscera more than it should.

Surely, the judge will forgive her; surely, the judge won’t judge. She is hoping that the story she wrote comes true. She wrote: