“Thursday,” the woman said, loading her provisions onto the conveyor belt. “Just a tropical storm. This place’ll be packed tomorrow, better get what you need now. Faye’s the name.”

“Oh,” Marianne said. “Nice to meet you, Faye.”

“The storm, honey. The storm is Faye.”

Marianne thanked the woman, then turned her cart around to shop for something more substantial and nonperishable. Living most of her adult life in Brooklyn had not prepared her for this kind of shopping; she never bought more than what she could carry.

She wound up selecting the exact same provisions as Faye, and was pleasantly surprised by the low total in the checkout line. It took Marianne a while to find her car—she had not learned to mark the spot where she’d parked—and, wandering the lot with her cart, she surveyed the atmosphere. The ratty palm fronds lining the edge of the parking lot were completely still. Marianne hauled the flats of water into the trunk, nestled the bread on top.

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.