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?

She wished for a cup of coffee and a cigarette, an early-afternoon-break routine she’d established when the girls were little, before she’d started teaching. But she didn’t smoke anymore, and hardly any of the other teachers at the high school did either. The ones who couldn’t quit had to walk all the way to the teachers’ parking lot to sit in their cars, and while Janine occasionally felt like joining them—say someone set a fire in the kitchen, or she suspected a student may have called her a bad name in his native language—she resisted. How would it look for the life skills teacher to demonstrate such a nasty addiction?