Some say it’s God’s judgment, a deep radio voice intoned as she turned the key. Then laughter. Nah, said another voice. You sound like one of those climate crazies. It’s just fall in Florida, same as always. Marianne turned up the radio, wondering if she’d hear news about the storm, but the hosts moved on to other concerns.

Back home, she made herself a fat peanut-butter-and-white-bread sandwich and ate it on the beach next to a stack of manuscripts. A slim stack, compared to the noes, but rich with promise: not of publication and esteem, perhaps, but of a kind of legitimacy, steady work, and—yes—tuition. Nine thousand dollars a year for two years.

Marianne had been using hardship deferments (surprisingly easy to obtain) to avoid her own debts and had managed to pay very little principal on loans that had somehow continued to grow. She’d lately imagined that she would never pay them off. She’d just defer and defer, one hardship after another; wasn’t that how life went?

But now she saw another possibility. Doing rough math on the back of an application, Marianne figured that two and a half students paying full fare was all it took to make forty-five thousand dollars. It was simple addition: take this long-winded missionary memoirist, add this evangelical poet, throw in half a writer of an ill-conceived Christian bodice ripper starring a hot Jewish carpenter stud, and she’d be back to where she started. They planned to admit thirty students in the first class; in a single year, not counting application fees, that was more than a quarter-million dollars. For once in her life Marianne could imagine coming out ahead.

Just follow any major religion on the planet Earth, a white-bearded man toting a red flag explained on the Occupy livestream. Greed is not a virtue.

But this was not greed; it was perfectly fair. Eighteen thousand dollars was a bargain compared to her tuition, and didn’t they have the same chances that she had? Better, maybe—the most popular books in America, after all, were Mormon vampire romances and pious, Pollyanna-ish collections of poetry by cancer-stricken children.

The sky had taken on a slight greenish haze, and far out, Marianne could see whitecaps on the choppy water. The creamy peanut butter and soft bread was the perfect food to eat while reading, Marianne thought. Easy, cheap, elemental. She smelled the salt of the sea, inhaled it deeply. She would sit here and watch the storm come in.

Across the gulf, Janine Gray unlocked the file cabinet where she stored ten years of lessons—on nutrition, setting up a bank account, planning a budget—and checked the folder where she’d collected her photocopied submission materials. She reviewed the order of poems, the personal statement, even her own address, neatly hand-lettered on the information page, which she’d also photocopied. Janine did not often apply for things—not credit cards (she did not believe in them), not mortgage applications (her husband had filled out the paperwork), and certainly not creative writing programs. How long would she have to wait before she heard something back? She had no idea. It was an extraordinarily personal and uncharacteristic thing she’d done, writing the statement and sending in the poems. If they—whoever they were—did not like her poems, would they write to her anyway? Would they respond to the something Janine had tried to say with the poems?