“I went to school because it was the best way to avoid ever having a real job, or so I thought,” said Eric. “And so did you. You could finish ‘The Ugly Bear List’—think about the inspiration you’d have.”

Marianne felt a little electrical jolt at hearing her book-in-progress named, this book hardly anyone knew about but Eric. It had been in progress for a couple of years now, since the earliest days of the Tea Party, but wasn’t close to done. The title came from a private saying, passed down from her grandmother to her mother—you wouldn’t want to be on her ugly bear list—and referenced all the people and movements and decisions that made Marianne’s blood pressure rise. Climate change deniers, racists and gun nuts and abortion foes. The NRA as a whole. Big Tobacco. Republican legislators back home who sold out the coast, stingy school board members who wouldn’t take government money for a free school breakfast program, members of her own extended family who still loved that spunky former governor from Alaska. A shit list, a first-against-the-wall list, an accounting of all the people who’d one day have to pay, but also an examination of the incomprehensibility of those people’s minds and the fear it created, the bears gnawing away inside your mind. The way its existence changed you, made you vigilant and suspicious.

She’d barely worked on it since starting her new job, a teaching gig at P.S. 150 in Brownsville, where she tutored kids in writing and sometimes taught poetry. Last school year she’d taught three days a week, and summer school wasn’t full time, either—but the long commute and the intensity of routinely performing her own incompetence had left her little energy or motivation to write, which had come to feel like a private admission of defeat.

“You’re still working on it, right? Wouldn’t this be the perfect place to finish?”

Marianne lifted the sticky hair off her neck and knotted it loosely into a bun. Three of her students lived in homeless shelters all year, and her baby sister was a registered Republican.

“Yeah,” she said, “still working. How old is your aunt? Does she have all her … faculties?”

“Great-aunt,” Eric said. “Somewhere north of eighty. But sharp as a tack! Really, you should see—”

“Would she be looking over our shoulders all the time?”

“No, she’s got a full life, over at the retirement home,” he said. “She said in her letter that she trusts my good judgment about teaching and writing. She’s getting older. She wants a legacy. We send her some of the students’ work, invite her to a few readings …”

“What if the students aren’t any good?” Marianne said. “What if they’re terrible—unteachable?”

“Of course they won’t all be good! Were all your classmates at NYU good?”