“Typical,” said Matt.

“Completely,” said Christopher, with more venom. “It makes me sick—”

But Regina had turned back to her screen. “We’re thinking GWGW can find the great ideas first. Or,” she said, lowering her voice conspiratorially, “grow the ideas, right here. We, at GWGW, can train your educators to work on the kind of exercises and programs that will help your students achieve this type of success. Or we can help you find new educators … you look sort of pale, Marianne. Do you need some water? Christopher, Matt, please get Marianne some water.”

“No, I’m okay,” Marianne said. She was trying to imagine holding such a workshop with Tom and Lorraine. “My head hurts a little, that’s all.”

“It’s the sun!” Regina said, as Christopher handed Marianne a bottle of water branded with the GWGW logo. “Also, this must be a lot to think about. Why don’t you let me email you with some of this information, and we’ll formulate a plan of attack?”

Marianne nodded, chugging GWGW water like a teenager in a drinking game.

• • •

Some of the students were hosting an after-dinner reading in the dining hall, offering snacks they’d frugally saved from the salad bar. Apple slices browned next to bowls of toppings and vegetables: fried ramen and clumped golden raisins and sliced carrots and broccoli florets. The meager snacks, the atmosphere of expectation and nerves reminded Marianne of her first NYU readings, but something was different here. Though she had always searched the crowd at school functions for her professors, the Ranch’s poets and memoirists and novelists did not appear to mind that half the school’s tiny faculty ducked out of their reading before it even began. Lorraine and Tom, sitting helplessly near the back, looked pleadingly at her as she dragged Eric by his shirtsleeve toward the door. Stay, she mouthed, like they were dogs.

“Maybe they’re onto us,” Marianne suggested, when no one asked her where they were going. “The students know we can’t really help them.”

She opened the office door with one of the keys she now wore all the time, on a lanyard around her neck, though weeks ago she’d discovered that it was openable just by turning and yanking the knob. It was important to keep up appearances, to preserve the idea that everything was as it should be. Doors closed and locked properly. Writers were learning something.

“I don’t know,” Eric said. “I thought my class had a pretty good discussion going today—not the part you saw, of course, that was sort of a mess. But after you left, I think we got Louis to understand something about the power of subtlety.”

“The power of subtlety,” Marianne repeated, peeling, from her computer screen, some of the sticky notes she’d left for herself, mostly phone messages she’d forgotten to deliver. “Well. I hope Manfred remembered to take his medicine. Also: I think we’re back to square one.”