“You’re paying good money to be here,” said Manfred. “And no one else was saying much of anything, to tell the truth. What do you think of Ms. Kominski?”

“Oh, I don’t know yet,” said Janine. “I liked the poem she brought us. But she was a little … intense, maybe?”

Manfred laughed. “You should have seen her in her prime.”

“You know her?”

“I took my first workshop with her at a conference in Key West, back in the eighties. On the first day she kicked three people out because she didn’t like their poems. Insipid, she called them. On the second day she kicked a fourth person out for taking up space. This is mellow, post-treatment Lorraine. I’ve taken three other workshops with her.” He paused at the place the pathway forked, between the dormitories and the dining hall, and said, somewhat ruefully, “She doesn’t remember me.”

Janine wondered what he meant by post-treatment. “Maybe when we talk about your poem,” she suggested. “Perhaps the pen name confused her?”

“She may not learn any of our names, to be honest,” Manfred said. “But she’s a good teacher if you listen to the right things. She once crossed out every other line in a poem I wrote. I was mad, but when I typed the damn thing up again, it was a better poem. I published it.”

Janine tried to imagine how she would feel about that happening to one of her poems. At school, they’d recently implemented a policy of no-writing-on-student-work, after the assistant principals went together to some conference in Orlando. Everything—you didn’t finish this, please check your spelling, even grades (B or better for work that was basically complete and reasonably on time, C minus for what was unintelligible or barely begun)—was communicated through sticky notes, which inevitably fell off the page and littered the hallways, making a yellow path of gentle chiding. Disney World shit, the other life skills teacher called the pads of sticky notes delivered to their department, and continued writing—in black Sharpie, which bled through one student’s work and onto the next—on the weekly worksheets she collected.

Perhaps Lorraine’s tough love approach would be refreshing. Surely the knitting woman’s days were numbered. Manfred pointed himself in the direction of the dormitories. He reminded Janine of an alcoholic turtle.

“You’re not going to lunch?” Janine asked.

“Oh no,” he said, taking out a pack of cigarettes. “Chili mac. Do I need to say more?”

That was something too old-fashioned and caloric even for Janine’s life skills classes, but she had not brought anything from home. She felt a cigarette urge tugging at her, but Manfred didn’t even light his own cigarette, just fiddled with the pack.

“Maybe I’ll see you later,” said Janine. “Will you be at the beach for sunset?”