This little girl, who has no right to remind you of yourself, stands whining by the terrarium with grubby fingers smearing the glass. Grubby, you think, not to mean dirty or soiled but instead as a term of relative comparison to denote resemblance to a grub. You have not yet chosen the week’s vocabulary words for the homework assignment. Last week’s—relay, coward, sensitive, predator—remain in increasingly permanent dry-erase marker on the board. Patrice, with her fat, pale fingers layered in playground dirt, is here with a two-fold announcement: the snail has escaped; you are falling far, far behind.

“So get a new one,” the principal told you when you visited her office during recess. “Or don’t. We are not in the habit of supplying classroom snails. Mr. Kennedy’s terrarium is his own responsibility.”

And when you called Mr. Kennedy in his hospital room, he only sighed and shook his head as machines beeped in the background. “Jeez. Not again. Tell them he went on vacation or something. I’ll bring a new one when I come back. Better yet, buy a new one tonight and I’ll reimburse you.” He sounded old—the kind of age that has seen snails come and go.

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