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malevolence was directing itself at me. Did I fit any of those categories? What did this mean? And what do you do to undo something that couldn’t have happened in the first place?
    Four
    Ididn’t go downstairs but instead ate my hard-boiled egg and apple at my desk, working on a revised exam, obsessed not only with making up new questions for the seniors but on asking them of myself. Who could have stolen the exam and how could they have done it, and who was my semiliterate confidante who ratted?
    I came up with no answers, but I did come up with new questions and I went to the office to see about duplicating them.
    Harriet had her faults, but inefficiency wasn’t one of them, nor was an unwillingness to help the staff. “I’m in a bit of a rush,” I said. “I had to change the exam at the last minute. Could I have the copies for next period?”
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    A HOLE IN JUAN
    Past experience made my stomach quiver after asking a question like that.
    “Of course!” she said. “These things happen.” She stood up and headed toward the copier.
    During the reign of Helga the Office Witch, nothing was ever duplicated in less than three days, and only after begging and pleading one’s case for urgency, and then it was accomplished with a scowl and a clear message that asking her to push the button on the copy machine—which faculty could not use—
    was a nearly insupportable outrage.
    Harriet’s amiability seemed nothing less than miraculous. I watched her place the sheet and press the required number and set the machine humming—and it was obvious how a student could get a copy. “Do you do all the duplicating yourself?” I asked. A student aide could simply print out an extra when he manned the machine.
    “Exams? Definitely,” she said. “Too tempting to the students otherwise, don’t you think?”
    That was wise, and a comfort, but I was sad to lose my easy solution.
    “I love your wedding band,” she said as the pages piled up. I looked down at my finger. The ring was still an unadorned gold band. I, too, loved it, but couldn’t imagine what was remarkable about it.
    “We’ve been looking, too,” she said, and now I knew that what had appealed to her had little to do with rings. She felt we had a bond, were soul sisters, both paired with what she referred to as “scholars” who also moonlighted in order to stay afloat. Her scholar, however, was often derailed from his part-time day jobs due to the rigors of taxidermy and the irrational behavior of his various employers.
    We had so much in common. Both of us were helping with our guys’ tuitions. “They don’t give scholarships for taxidermy,”
    she said, shaking her head at the madness of financial aid distribu-GILLIAN ROBERTS
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    tion. “And the specimens are so expensive. His wolf-rug specimen cost over six hundred dollars!”
    I often couldn’t bear hearing what was being killed so as to be stuffed and made to look as if it were still alive. There was a hideous contradiction in the lifelike dead things concept, but it seemed to have escaped Harriet and Erroll.
    “It would be less expensive if he could bring his own specimens, but road kill isn’t any good, and where would Erroll find a wolf or mountain lion on his own?”
    I pictured lion-vendor stands ringing the school of taxidermy. Run! Mountain lions, run! I mentally telegraphed, wherever they’d managed to still be alive. Luckily, Harriet couldn’t hear my thoughts, only the small noises I made in an attempt to signify amazement and wonder. I thought of them as my Harriet sounds because they satisfied her need for approval without my ever saying I approved.
    The test pages had long since popped out of the printer, but it seemed rude to grab them and run.
    “I can’t wait till he graduates,” Harriet said. “You can’t imagine how well they do—not that he’s in it for the money. He’s in it for the art. It’s nice that it also affords a comfortable living.”
    Except, of course,