It wasn’t a story, just a newsletter in my email. It wasn’t just about your school, but about a lot of different campuses. They’re expanding pretty quickly. Can’t find it now.

About Mom: what’s the difference?

Though the omission worried Eric, Marianne decided not to warn the other workshop leaders before GWGW’s visit, just three days into the residency. She remembered the stern warnings about visitors from her school’s administrators in Brownsville, and the flurry of bad feelings and recriminations kicked down the line from principal to teacher to student, especially those students—the biters and scratchers and Tourette’s swearers—who were corralled in the assistant principal’s office. There was so little you could control, after all—nothing she could say would keep Manfred from drinking or Lorraine from passing out poems by Amiri Baraka or Tom from forgetting his students’ names. To warn them would only make it more likely that they would exhibit their troublesome behaviors, she reasoned. And besides, hadn’t Eric agreed that the tour was up to her to coordinate?

He acquiesced, grateful that Marianne was willing to lead the tour. He didn’t comment on her last-minute preparations—straightening the office, removing one or two nymphs from the sculpture garden, ironing her clothes, and gathering her hair in a neat, low chignon. Probably he didn’t notice.

The visitors arrived in a black SUV, like Secret Service agents or the FBI, and emerged wearing identical pale blue polo shirts, the GWGW logo emblazoned on their chests. There were three of them, two identical tall men and a woman, attractive but hard-faced and a little frightening, like a politician, or a politician’s wife. They introduced themselves and offered firm handshakes and a tote bag full of tchotchkes.

“Thank you,” said Marianne, peering inside the bag. There were notepads and bumper stickers, water bottles and pens. She escorted them to her newly straightened office, which felt somewhat too small for the four of them. Marianne offered chairs, but no one wanted to sit.

“We have shirts for you in the car, too,” said the woman brightly. Her name, Regina, was spelled out in cursive above the logo on her polo shirt, which she’d tucked in to a trim pencil skirt. Despite the casual quality of her shirt, she wore nylons and heels. “Different sizes and colors. White and pale blue.”

“Oh good,” Marianne said, pulling a pale blue and white Rubik’s-style cube out of the bag. It was printed, on one face, with GWGW’s logo, but along the side it also read “School of Law.”

“That’s from one of our partners,” said Regina. “We’re partnered with a law school.”

“And a nursing school,” said Matt, the taller of the two tall men. “And a library science school, a digital arts school, an academy for hairstylists and aestheticians, and a school for social work.” He ticked them off across his fingers cheerfully.