Only then do I realize that I’m standing. Both my hands are on his desk, and I’m attempting to loom over him to help make my point. I sit down—hard.

Porn. He means porn.

Heat suffuses my cheeks, but I’ve lost all of my indignancy. Is he flirting with me? Or mocking me?

He leans forward. His hands steeple. “This is simple. You do the work.”

I stare at him. Is this another one of his crude jokes? “Excuse me?”

He glances down. “Here, you draw a line between this bee and this flower. And here on this worksheet, you add up these numbers and put the answer in the caterpillar’s asshole. They’ve got a real garden theme going on here, don’t they?”

“I can’t do the work for her.”

“I see your point,” he says, turning the page. “This coloring page is going to really stretch you. Color all the ladybugs that have a number less than ten. I mean, which way do you go? Realism? A nice red with black dots? Or do you go with other colors?”

“I can’t do the work because it’s hers.”

“Do you think the teacher’s going to figure it out? Maybe you should get one of the caterpillar ass numbers wrong just to be safe.”

I glare at him. “It’s not ethical.”

“Life’s not ethical, sweetheart. Or haven’t you figured that out yet?”

I hate that I know what he means. Going to sleep hungry so the children could be fed, giving money to the bullies so I could walk away relatively unharmed. Other people my age are going to college with a nice fund maybe supplemented with a few loans. Their parents are driving them to the dorm rooms, trunks full of new sheets and dishes from Ikea. I don’t want to become bitter about it, but it hurts. God, sometimes it just hurts to keep going.

“It will teach her the wrong thing,” I whisper. “She knows she has this work piled up. If it suddenly goes away, if she finds out that I did it, she’ll learn the wrong thing.”

“And the butterflies and caterpillars are teaching her the right thing?”

“It’s better than lying.”

“I built a billion-dollar company before I turned thirty. Do you think I did that by coloring in the lines? By filling out little worksheets? The world doesn’t give a fuck about first grade.”

“Then what about next year? She’ll be behind.”

“Because she won’t know about writing inside caterpillars? She already knows how to read and count and add numbers. She doesn’t need the fucking cuteness.”

“I’m not the one who set the curriculum. The school did. The school you picked.”