I looked at her and I looked at the check. The gesture was unmistakable. She was refusing the money. I thought I knew why. That is: because she was so pale and because she was so silent, I thought I knew why she was refusing the money. I flushed. My god: I was sure I hadn’t meant anything like that. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. Well: maybe a little. I’d meant the money honestly enough. No small print in the contract, no obscene clauses. No strings that led from my indorsement to a small tour of the nearest mattress. $200! I’d lost that much in an afternoon at the track. I’d spent that much on far sillier things than a semester’s tuition. She needn’t have had those belated qualms. She could have ignored it. Smiled. Been quietly grateful or not grateful at all. Paid the tuition. Viewed it as a charitable donation. Treated me like a private foundation who aided slum blossoms having difficulties with their higher education. Forgotten it. Gone on. Now she’d brought the check back and the simple signing of it had a suddenly villainous air.

She stood there as though she had a bitter task to perform and had determined she was going to perform it. At both our expenses. Yesterday, she’d looked unhappy: today, she looked as though she’d committed a crime.

“What’s that mean?”

I gestured at the check there on the desk.

“I’m returning it.”

“Aren’t you going to pay your school bill?”

“No.”

“They’ll drop you.”

“My tuition’s paid.”

Like that. I was stopped cold. Her mother didn’t have a tumor; her tuition was paid. It was like the insomnia. A nagging question about something in the dark that I couldn’t phrase.

“But you told me that it wasn’t paid. You said you needed the money to pay it.”

I sounded stupid even to myself.

“I lied.”

“About the tuition? And about your mother?”

“Yes.”

A pale admission. An artichoke of lies. But why? She’d returned the check. That was incomprehensible; there was the check, returned.

“You don’t need the money?”

“Not for school.”

“Take your coat off.”

Because she hadn’t. She and the boy: nobody took their coats off when they came to visit me.

“I’m leaving.”

“Isn’t it a short visit?”

“I only came to return the check.”

“Why?”

“I told you.”

“You told me you didn’t need it for school. You didn’t say you didn’t need it.”

She didn’t answer.

“Why did you bring the check back?”

“It’s yours.”

“I gave it to you.”

“I’m a bitch. I take things. Then I bring them back.”

“Something’s wrong. It doesn’t make sense. What’s the matter with you, Aurora?”

“I’m this year’s queen.”

“Queen of what?”

“The Bowl. What else?”

“What Bowl?”

“Why, the Fuckup Bowl,” she said. “That’s what I’m queen of.” And she sat down and she started to cry.

Oh, she cried as she intended to cry and let me take her fur coat off as she intended me to take it off and allowed her shoes to be removed as she intended to allow her shoes to be removed and let herself be persuaded into a drink as she intended to be persuaded. I bustled about. I am, as Michael would say, a great bustler-about.