I’d set aside two hours to be there. I turned on the computer. What else was I supposed to do? It’s not like she’d left me the ability to do my stupid job. I looked at some sites that I like and just felt really frustrated. Then I flipped through her bookmarks a little. Why not?

Polly thinks it’s wrong that I looked at what was on Gretchen’s computer sometimes, but I didn’t even do it on purpose. It talked to me and that’s literal. The first time it happened I freaked out. But then I got used to it, and it was like having a conversation. I’d press buttons and it would say stuff. It was funny.

One time when Gretchen had been using the computer, and I waited my turn out in the hall, I’d heard her. I wasn’t really paying attention, but I noticed it spell out “brussels1958.” I thought that was funny. I realized it was her password. It recited a series of numbers too. It was the password to her bank account. It’s just funny to pay attention to stuff like that. One time I watched a friend of mine dial her locker combination and freaked her out for weeks after by putting stuff in there. Nothing mean, just funny, like stupid toys from the dollar store. It just makes sense to pay attention in life.

So, when I was alone in Gretchen’s house, with absolutely nothing to do-which wasn’t my fault-I logged in. I just wanted to see how much she had. The checking account was normal; the investment account was enormous. Big to me anyway. Not like what had been kicking around Silicon Valley when I was a teenager, but still, it was a lot.

The thing is, I needed money for things, stupid things. Shampoo and food, stuff that I would have charged if I hadn’t hit my limit. It’s not like I could make it to Christmas. I was supposed to get a check today, and even then it would take time to clear. Now I’d have to wait even longer.

Since they had so much, it didn’t seem any big deal to take a little from the cash in the top drawer. Just three twenties. Queen Elizabeth looked at me all judgmental until I crinkled her into my pocket.

Polly’s mother was arrested on Day Seven. I was back at Gretchen’s house one last time, trying to not have a fight with her. “What do you mean you told Nick to ‘dispose’ of them? What does that even mean?” I’d come one last time to try to finish with the photos, and they were gone. Just gone. She’d gotten rid of them.

“I’m suspending the project. You may return the house key. I’ll get you your check. Harry!”

He was in the kitchen. His hands were covered with flour.

“What did Nick do with them?” I demanded. “You can’t just-”

That’s when the doorbell rang. Polly was hysterical, which isn’t really surprising. We knew by then how she’d reacted to Nick touching her. Who knew how she’d cope with anything else?

Everyone forgot about my check. Only Polly mattered.

They forgot about my key too.

“It’s one thing to use a girl because you’re just so in the moment overwhelmed by her. It’s something else to make her finish someone else’s job. After that, he was gone. And good, you know? Why would I want him to come back?” I told Dr. Keene everything, not about money but about Nick, to shock him.

He winced, then looked over my shoulder, as if the “Building Stones of Britain” were really, really interesting. We were in the basement gathering area under the Sedgwick Museum. My art stuff was spread out over utilitarian tables. The walls were covered with rock samples, every one a slightly different color. They were apparently a lot more interesting than me.

I’d volunteered to make models for a special exhibit at the Sedgwick: “Creatures of the Burgess Shale.” Apparently the Cambrian period, which was way before dinosaurs, had far weirder creatures than most people know. The students who’d studied these fossils in the seventies had given them hilarious names, like hallucigenia. I love the seventies. I would have looked awesome with Farrah Fawcett hair. I have this friend who’s fat who spends all her weekends at Renaissance Faires because the dresses look good on her. I think if I could be an original Charlie’s Angel on weekends, I’d do it.

It felt good to be making art again, not just talking about it. I was making these outsized abstractions of these creatures that were wacky in the first place. No one knows what color any of these things were, so I was free to really go for it. They needed to be paper pop-outs so kids could make their own spiky hallucigenia, or marrella, which is like a shrimp wearing elaborate headgear, or wiwaxia, which looks like Mercury’s winged helmet. With glue and pom-poms and feathers too. Anything to make the kids like science.

I’ve thought about majoring in science. Not stopping making art, but coming at it from knowing more about life. Because experience is the foundation for art, right? So I’m tempted, and then I think, What’s the point of this school thing at all? Why not be like Gauguin and have an adventure?

That’s the kind of thing I said to Dr. Keene, just to see if I could set him off. It was Day Ten, the rains had stopped, and the police were dredging the Cam. He’d come to take a look at my models, probably just to have something else to think about, and we ended up talking. But he didn’t rise up in defense of formal education and good grades. He just nodded absently. So I told him everything about Nick and me.

He did that thing of freezing his face to not show any reaction. A person only does that if their real reaction is something they’d be embarrassed by, right? He’s known Nick for longer than I have, so maybe it’s happened before. Maybe he knows Nick is a dog. Isn’t that the point of his religion? Knowing we’re messed up, and just accepting that as inevitable? So he acted weary about it, but not surprised. What he said, though, was “I don’t think you should be telling me this.”

“Why?” I said. I said it sharply, because that kind of prissiness about life is just what I’m trying to get away from. “Why not tell you about this? You mean it’s okay for Nick to be this way, just not okay to talk about it? Or it would have been okay, except Nick is gone and his victimhood trumps mine?” We were all imagining Nick bloated and gray from drowning.

“Or do you mean…” I was attacking him at this point, hurling words. “Do you mean that I shouldn’t tell you this because you’re a man and I’m a woman and we shouldn’t talk about S-E-X? Even about other people? Because I didn’t think a biologist would be all squeamish about that; isn’t that what you study all day long?” Which is absolutely true: the drive for sex, and the likelihood of sex and the success of sex, is the whole process of natural selection.

“So, like, isn’t this exactly the point? My traits won’t be carried on to the next generation because it’s not like someone’s going to fuck me. So, like, my belligerence and insecurity are going to die out. And that’s good, right? And good manners and restraint are going to be passed on by people like Polly, and people like you.” I knew he was getting married. To a doctor, a medical doctor.

You have to specify “medical doctor” here because Cambridge is stuffed with the other kind. Yelling “Is there a doctor in the house?” would get you Ph.D. computer scientists and engineers and geomorphologists and historians. It wouldn’t get you anyone practical. It wouldn’t get you anyone who knows how to apply a fucking Band-Aid.

I cried but I didn’t stop working, because I had said I would make the models. I do what I say I’ll do.

“I think it’s a wonder,” he said, sighing, “that any of us get past age twenty at all.”

I stabbed little spiny bits all over hallucigenia. I’d painted them purple.

“Why?” I challenged him. “What happened to you at twenty?” If he was going to be all I-know-what-you’re-going-through, I wanted to make him spell it out.

“That’s the year my brother decided he hates me.”