“She didn’t cross out any of my lines,” Maggie said. “But she did write ‘start over’ at the bottom. And circled it. Oh well.”

“I have two lines left,” Janine said quietly, still staring at her bludgeoned poem. Lorraine had critiqued her work before, had sent notes and emails exhorting her to be strong or radical, but this felt more personal, to have her writing marked through—obliterated, banished—with the stroke of a pen. She felt sick to her stomach, thinking of the connection she had assumed existed between herself and her teacher. “Two.”

“It’s better than ‘start over,’” Maggie said.

“I think I’d rather start over.”

Janine tried to write in her room, opening the curtains wide to let in light, but Beth’s things were strewn across every surface; even the air, humid from her late-morning shower and permeated with the smell of coconut shampoo, was full of her. She shouldn’t have brought her here, should have insisted that this was her time away, that it was something she needed. Even Rick said as much: You sure you want to take her? But Janine was helpless in the face of criticism from her daughters, the suggestion that she might not want what was best for them. Beth had known that and used it against her.

Where were these mean thoughts coming from? She did not want to think them, not about her own daughter. What was wrong with her?

Janine took her spiral notebook, with the two acceptable lines copied into it, outside, but that was no good either—everywhere she looked she saw a poet. Thinking about other people writing poems did not motivate Janine but instead made her feel nervous and self-conscious and competitive. She wondered how many good poems could be written on a single day, at a single school. Two? Three? Maybe none, she thought, looking at her classmates. She started walking toward the Kangaroo; Beth said this morning that she needed tampons, which was better than Beth not needing tampons, but still. Sometimes Janine thought she’d done too much for her girls; their expectations of her were too high.