Writing.

Only one complete thought from that morning rests intact in my memory: Dorothy had left her cereal bowl in the sink. The other thoughts have started to peel away, leaving dead skin caught on my bottom lip. Instead I recall the sink itself, say, Dorothy’s bowl at the front edge, tipped against the drain at close to thirty degrees, the milk pooled at the low point of the tilt and gone the same gray as the countertop grout. Around the rim there was a ring of Frosted Flakes swept to one side by the spoon and abandoned there. Three more bowls sat behind Dorothy’s, a pan with egg whites blackened into a crust. Mr. Langford’s mug, the one I had mailed him the year he made full professor, some cheesy but self-aware aerospace engineering pun printed on the

side, was stained with the half inch of coffee he had left untouched. Mrs. Langford had asked me, in a string of texts sent from an airport gate two weeks earlier, whether I could stay with Lloyd and the kids while she was on a work trip on the other coast. “Nine days,” she’d written, “ten if they add the second leg, and I’ll owe you forever.” I had just graduated high school. Doing nothing had always been my least successful extracurricular, one I’d been handed an entire summer to practice. It was also the first one I ever quit; I texted back yes before I’d finished reading her message. My suitcase sat unzipped in the guest room upstairs, in what used to be Mrs. Langford’s study. Taped to the front door was a

sheet of pertinent information she had sent the night before she left, their pediatrician’s phone number, no TV for Wesley past eight plus when I should give him his inhaler, that sort of thing. Dorothy has a dentist appointment Thursday, she’d written. Dorothy, I said, when she came through the kitchen an hour later, you left your bowl in the sink.

She looked up from her phone, pressing her lips into a fat pitying smile. “It’s Teddy,” she said, drawing the word out like I might not catch it the first time. “Nobody’s called me Dorothy since I was a kid.” I said take it up with her mother, who signed her texts like she was serving a subpoena, and Teddy didn’t laugh, just said her mom still introduced her as Dorothy to anyone new, mortifying every time. I asked what was wrong with Dorothy. “It’s an old lady name. If they named a boy Theodore he’d just go by Theo or something. No one even names little boys Theodore anymore, so why should I be stuck with some

grandma’s name?” Except it turned out she wasn’t, not really. She was named after her great-great-grandfather, Theodore, and Mrs. Langford had been indifferent to Theodora, so she’d landed on Dorothy instead, which she called “the same name reversed.” Teddy didn’t seem to know this made her own nickname more accurate than her real name, or maybe she did and didn’t care. To that I said nothing. I must have thought of Roosevelt with his pince-nez and big stick, figuring eighth grade social studies hadn’t quite gotten to him yet. A stranger who walked into that kitchen and witnessed my sponging down a stubborn

stain on a Le Creuset dutch oven would have assumed I was just a babysitter and wouldn’t have been wrong, since I did the meal prep and the homework help the same as any layman hired to do it. But nobody had hired me. I was a friend. Alongside preschool family portraits, fifteen-year-old me and newly balding Mr. Langford were taped to the freezer, the colors sun-bleached over the three years since the international aeronautics conference held in Seattle where I had presented a paper on aluminum buckling.

The whole conference comes back to me now as that single photograph, taken in a hotel ballroom, where a man twice my age read my abstract in the program guide. Before he’d found my name, or the age listed in smaller type beside it, he’d spotted an error with the boundary conditions. He told me so the next morning, while we squirmed in line for the continental breakfast, with the same matter-of-factness he would have used on actual colleagues, and I liked Mr. Langford for treating me like one. He mentioned neither my being subadult nor being AAPI nor being a woman in a male-dominated field. We had been writing to each other ever since, on and off, whenever one of us (usually me) had something worth arguing about.

Before I went back upstairs I went for that last bowl again, Teddy’s, and turned it over to rinse the underside. An ant was crawling across it. I wiped it off with a paper towel. I rinsed the bowl a second time and headed up to unpack. Wesley’s swim lessons, an hour every morning, got moved up half an hour by a sloppy email nobody had thought to forward to me, and we found out by showing up in time to watch someone else’s class finish. We arrived home just as Teddy was leaving to meet friends whose names I never learned. “I’m going to a birthday party on Saturday, by the way,” she mentioned, one foot out the

door before I could ask whose or when or where, or whether it had even been added to the shared family calendar. Are you seriously going out like that, I spoke by reflex, eyeing her shorts whose inseam spanned the length of my thumb. Then I could hear my mother repeating those words in her broken English, and it made my stomach turn. When I decided to call after Teddy and take back my premature snark, she scoffed and said, “It’s not that deep,” not even bothering to turn around.

I’d started keeping a grocery list in my head by then. I found things before anyone realized they were missing: Teddy’s retainer, for instance, was supposed to live in her bathroom, a ramekin in the second drawer down, but somehow kept turning up everywhere else. I put it back each time. Wesley wouldn’t eat rice unless it touched nothing else on the plate. Trash day was Tuesday and recycling day was Tuesday too but a different bin, a distinction Lloyd had failed to make in however many years of living in that house and this planet. When I found another three ants prowling along the pantry, I handled them the same way, neutralized by the time anyone else came downstairs.

“You don’t have to do that,” Lloyd said once, watching me scrub the yellowing bathroom tiles with an old toothbrush. He didn’t notice the trail of ants smothered by the dish soap and vinegar. “Please, that’s enough. You’re not our maid.” I know, I said, and kept going. And I did know. Nobody was making me. I scrubbed until the tiles shined white. Lloyd stood in the doorway for a while, and then he went back to his study. That evening I made dinner while Lloyd worked at the kitchen island with his laptop and Wesley narrated an epic battle between toy soldiers to himself and Teddy fiddled with her phone

with one earbud in, punctuating the fight every now and then with an ill-fitting “wow,” and for maybe ninety seconds the whole scene felt good, a tableau that could one day become familiar and tepid, the four of us occupying exactly the same number of square feet. Then an ant crossed the cutting board and I killed it without looking down, and I saw how much of that footage was empty, the negative space between us taking on a recognizable silhouette. Here is a thought that was then only an uncharted petri dish: I had spent eighteen years trying to escape the homemade

panopticon that raised me, an attempt by my parents to show me a taste of the motherland. Like every other second-generation Korean American, I hadn’t needed the industrial complex of Santa Claus to ease me into living in a surveillance state, yet here I was, pro bono, building an identical one inside somebody else’s marriage. And worst of all, it didn’t stop feeling good. The pharmacy called to say they were out of Wesley’s usual Ventolin and wanted to know if the generic was fine. I knocked on Lloyd’s study door and asked him. “Suzanne usually handles all that,” he muttered, eyes glued to his screen, “can you just tell them yes?” I just thought there was something about the nozzle on the generic getting clogged faster,

I said. Mrs. Langford told me she flagged it for the pediatrician. “They’re basically the same thing. It’ll be fine.” I’m no expert, obviously, just, um, are you sure? “Relax, I know my own son.” I couldn’t reach Mrs. Langford. Reluctant but stranded, I told the pharmacy to go ahead. For the remainder of the afternoon, I hunched next to Wesley on his bedroom floor as he raced his toy cars across the uncooperative carpet. I watched for the flare of his nostrils, listened for the pause between breaths that stretched just long enough for me to imagine an ambulance weaving

through traffic. But Wesley wanted so little from me. He wanted me to retrieve his red Porsche when it rolled out of reach. He nudged at me to hold the plastic ramp steady and venerate as he sent a blue Mustang into the wall over and over again, delighted each time by the crash. I thought about Mrs. Langford’s phone ringing somewhere without her. I thought about how, if anything happened to Wesley, I would have to explain that I was looking for a Hot Wheels under his bed.

By the sixth day I could no longer clean my way out of the ants. I tried dish soap first, diluted in a spray bottle, then rubbing alcohol, then both in varying ratios, killing whatever I found with whatever was closest, a paper towel, my thumb, the flat of a butter knife. And I would feel, for a few minutes, like I had finally put an end to it. But new trails kept infiltrating in places I hadn’t checked. As soon as I finished each morning, the counter was spotless, but the colony had simply snaked into the shadows. I went to bed smelling mothballs. Saturday came and Teddy saw me on my hands and knees with a spray bottle and a roll of paper towels, a trail of the ants marching from the wall to a popsicle stick someone dropped on the

floor. A shadow waned across the ground and I looked up to find her already there, arms crossed, like she’d been observing me a while. Ants, I started before she could ask, it’s just ants. I’ve had it handled since Tuesday. Once again, silence. Please don’t tell your dad. I mean, it’s not a big deal. Just, he’s got enough going on with your mom gone, and I don’t want him thinking I can’t keep house on my own. She eyed the clutter, then me. “Okay,” she said. I finished the ants off while she scrutinized me, not helping, not leaving either, and when

I stood up my knees had two red rings pressed into them from the floor. “You know you can’t just keep killing them, right? There’s a whole nest somewhere. That’s how they work." When I finally stamped out the last of the trail, armed with a noncommittal reply, Teddy was gone, off toward the hallway mirror to try on outfits for the party that afternoon, none of which I was asked to weigh in on. By noon she had settled on the shorts from before, plus a shirt

creasing tight in her underarms, all polyester a size too small. I told her I’d pick her up at six thirty, final offer. Teddy considered this with her phone still in her hand, thumb paused over whatever she’d been scrolling. “Eight,” she said, “and if you make it six thirty I guess I’ll just have to tell my dad about the thing, thanks for the ride though.” Text me when you leave, I sighed. “It’s at Nicole’s.” Then, remembering I don’t know anything about her, “It’s on Ellis Street, the blue house.”

I called at eight fifteen and again at eight forty, peering at Lloyd working across the kitchen island not noticing that I was calling anyone. By nine I was in the car, driving with nothing to go on but the color blue, and I told Lloyd I was going to get some snacks. The house had every light on, bass loud enough to feel through the porch steps. Nobody stopped me as I rushed past the front door. Upstairs, past a couple pressed into the wall, I spotted Teddy on the edge of a couch, a boy with equally bloodshot eyes beside her, shaking her shoulders and swaying a little himself with each motion. I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her up off the couch, past the boy and the crushed red cups. She smelled like a mixture I couldn’t

isolate into its parts, and there was a wetness on the front of her shirt I decided not to ask about. “You’re basically babysitting me now too,” she said, once we were moving, her head against the window. I told her that was rich, considering.

“Considering what,” she said, and I said considering she was fourteen and drunk and/or, God forbid, high on God knows what in my passenger seat, and that she’s lucky her own father hadn’t seen her like this. Your dad needs to know about this, I said, once we were a few blocks away from our house. “If you tell him about this, I’ll tell him about the ants. All of it, and how you go in his room sometimes.” I said that wasn’t the same thing. She said she didn’t care. We were making some kind of equal trade, her secret for mine. I kept my mouth shut throughout the rest of the drive and then the night.

In the morning I told Lloyd his daughter had battled a stomachache the night before and how I’d sat up with her a while and got her something to eat, and he said thanks for taking care of it. Upstairs, Teddy’s door was still shut. And that was that. On the second-to-last night I stayed up later than I needed to, technically waiting on a load of laundry that had already finished, and Lloyd came down for water and stayed instead, leaning against the counter in a T-shirt with a hole starting at the collar, talking about nothing in particular, some dispute with a colleague over funding. For a while there didn’t seem to be a difference between us worth mentioning.

At some point he reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, the way you would to a child or to a lover. "You remind me so much of myself at your age," he said. "It’s kind of scary." The sentence closed whatever gap he’d opened a second earlier. Goodnight, I said, and went upstairs, and lay there a long time not doing anything you could call thinking.

Mrs. Langford’s flight got in early Thursday, she texted, don’t worry about picking me up, I’ll take a car. Which left me one night to finish what nine days hadn’t. After I’d scrubbed the rest of the house and still discovered more ants, it left me with only the master bedroom, which I had left untouched until now, at three in the morning with a flashlight and a tank of pool chlorine, careful to step around Lloyd asleep on his side of the bed. I sprayed at the baseboard and crushed the stragglers that hadn’t drowned under the heel of my hand. I don’t know how long I was there. Mrs. Langford stood in the doorway in her travel clothes, a rolling suitcase parked behind

her. Neither of us said anything. There was a moment when I thought she was preparing to kill me. I wasn’t afraid. She didn’t ask what I was doing or why, at that hour, in their room, and I didn’t offer a dignified allocution either. She stepped back from the doorway to let me leave, which I did, and I slumped into the guest room, where I lay on top of the covers until the sun had risen enough to justify getting up. By the time I came down there was breakfast already made and Wesley fed. Mrs. Langford lounged at the table still in the clothes she’d flown in, looking like a woman who had not, hours earlier, found her houseguest kneeling in her bedroom at three in the morning. She

effused a warm greeting and I stumbled through one in return. It was Lloyd who brought it up, at the counter, fixing up his own coffee for once. He must have noticed something, the vinegar smell maybe, or the baseboard streaked pale. I had already packed my bags. "The ants are back.” "Already?" Mrs. Langford sighed. “Is it our room again?” Lloyd grumbled about how it always found its way there first, every August, like clockwork, and Mrs. Langford mentioned they should call their usual exterminator. Teddy came through in the middle of it, poured her

cereal without sitting down and groaned, "Ugh, don’t tell me the ants are here.” No one looked at me while they spoke. Teddy had known. Of course Teddy had known. She’d told me herself. Lloyd hugged me goodbye on the porch, and I pulled away first. "We’ll see you at Thanksgiving.” Sure, I mumbled. Mrs. Langford embraced me too, briefer, and said, "Thank you, really," into my ear. On the counter by the back door, the bait traps were out, small plastic discs the exterminator must have set. I went to wipe an ant down out of habit. "Leave those," Mrs. Langford said, passing behind me with the last of the coffee mugs. “They’re supposed to carry it

back to the others.” I watched one ant, fat and happy with sweetened poison, make its slow trip back home. I watched it forever.