“Damn,” Marianne said. “Running a credit check would have been a lot easier.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know, I’m sorry. Let me think.” Marianne had a serpentine walking pattern—she’d walk away from you, then suddenly, her hip would be bumping against yours. Eric put his arm around her, and she leaned into him.

“When we started out, you told me I’d get inspiration for my book. A whole ugly bear list to choose from—homophobes and anti-environmentalists and pro-lifers and self-righteous bootstrappers. So when I read the applications, everyone was on my list. But there was so much of it, I started sorting it, and some of the pieces, they stood out. They weren’t good, maybe, not in the sense that you could publish them—”

“But they were interesting.”

“Yeah, they were.” Marianne broke away, walking diagonally into the shallow tide. “The personal stories of the writers, they were interesting too. I mean, Davonte Gold—he’s different than I expected. He’s a pain in the ass but, I don’t know, he’s also completely honest. I guess the list changed.”

“It wasn’t a shit list.”

“No. Tonight when I came down here, I was mad at you,” she said. “I felt like you were pushing me away from running the school, like you were dismissing me. Then one of the students—Janine Gray—she was here. The Terri Schiavo poet. Earlier today, I was rude to her. Okay, I was very rude—I didn’t know who she was, you know I’m bad with names.”

Marianne looked up at him, as if seeking his forgiveness, or maybe an admission that he’d done the same with someone else. He’d actually been gentle with his class, though twice already he’d had to intervene in an argument between Davonte and another student who seemed determined to provoke him. Eric could picture things escalating to fisticuffs before the session ended. “It happens,” he said. “She probably didn’t notice.”

Marianne crossed her arms and shook her head. “She noticed. But then she came down here and we talked about—poetry, I guess, and relationships, and her family. She has a job teaching home ec, and two daughters, and her husband doesn’t really get her poetry, even though it’s religious.”

“That doesn’t sound so strange.”

“That’s what I mean! She’s a totally normal person. Do you know she told me that she met an agent at the welcome party? Was there an agent here?”