Testing Kate (3 page)

“Oh. I can’t drink,” Dana said. “I’m underage.”

“You could still come,” Jen said.

Dana shook her head. “No, that’s okay. I don’t have time for parties. I heard that the only way you can make Law Review is if you study pretty much all of the time.”

Was that true? I wondered. I wanted to make Law Review too. Everyone did. At the end of the school year, the illustrious legal journal extended invitations to only ten One-Ls—those with the highest grade point averages in the class. They also had a writing contest in the fall, but that was an even longer shot; they only took five write-ons a year. Being on Law Review meant a whole hell of a lot of extra work for your second and third years at law school, but it was where the top law firms in the country went to recruit and was pretty much the only route to a prestigious judicial clerk-ship. I knew that the competition for Law Review seats was intense; I just hadn’t expected it to start this early.

“You can’t study all the time. You’ll get burned out,” Jen said.

Dana stood and grabbed her bag. “I’m used to it,” she said. “See you all on Sunday.”

“I should go too,” I said. “I still have to unpack and catch up with the reading assignments.”

“Are you taking the streetcar home?” Nick asked. When I nodded, he said, “I’ll come with you. Help you carry your books.”

“You don’t have to,” I protested, but he picked the bags up as he stood.

“Just consider me your own private pack mule,” Nick said, and he grinned. “See you guys later.”

“Bye,” I said, waving at Lexi, Jen, and Dana. And then I turned and walked with Nick across the lush green Tulane campus.

“Did you hear a guy in our building tap dancing last night?” Nick asked.

“Yes! You heard that too?”

“I was sleeping right under the dance floor,” Nick said. “Or, I should say, I wasn’t sleeping. I went up and knocked on his back door.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t. He didn’t even answer the door. He just turned off all of his lights and got really quiet.”

“What a freak.”

“No kidding. And I think he has about a dozen cats in there too.”

“Great,” I said gloomily. “A sadistic Criminal Law professor and a next-door neighbor who’s a tap-dancing cat freak. It should make for an interesting year.”

Chapter Three

I
t was early in the semester, but there was already a distinct competition brewing between my classmates over who was studying the most. It wasn’t enough to simply read the class assignment; we highlighted important passages in our casebooks, outlined the key holdings, and supplemented the class reading with Nutshells, which were like Cliffs Notes for law school. There were law students lined up at the doors every morning when the library opened at eight a.m., and the staffers always had to shoo us out at closing time, at which point we’d stagger out, bleary-eyed and hyped up on coffee. As we scattered into the night, weighed down by knapsacks full of textbooks, my classmates bragged incessantly about how many hours they’d just put in.

And even though I knew it was mostly bullshit and bravado and just part of the bizarre law-school culture, I couldn’t help but feel the flutterings of panic. What if people really were studying as much as they claimed? Was it even possible? When did they eat?

The one saving grace was that my fellow One-Ls had finally—
finally
—stopped pointing and whispering when they saw me. The story of my humiliation in Hoffman’s class was losing its legs as people turned their attention to their studies.

One night, about a week after classes began, I was in the main reading room at the library, trying to plow through a Civil Procedure case. It was a large room, with approximately thirty long tables and a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows on one side that looked out over the Tulane campus, now dark and studded with lights gleaming out from dorm-room windows and lampposts. Every sound echoed off the high ceiling and wood-paneled walls. A few days earlier, I’d witnessed a tightly wound One-L woman, whom I vaguely recognized from class, shriek at a guy humming softly along to the music on his iPod. Talking was strictly forbidden in the reading room, theoretically punishable by death.

I’d been up late the night before, studying, and the night before that, and I was exhausted. It was like the weariness was clinging to me, pulling me down. The words on the page I was trying to read began to blur, and my head felt unbearably heavy. Maybe if I just rest my eyes for a minute, I thought. Just one minute…

The next thing I knew, someone was jostling my shoulder.

“Five more minutes,” I mumbled, swatting at the hand.

The peaceful darkness of sleep was too seductive to resist, and I could feel myself slipping back under when the hand on my shoulder gave me another violent shake, causing my forehead to bump uncomfortably against the table.

My eyes snapped open, and I became aware of several things at once: the bright, buzzing lights. The inky smell of new books. Whispers. Muffled laughter.

Shit, I thought, sitting up suddenly. I looked around wildly. Jen was standing there—she’d been the one shaking my shoulder—grinning down at me. And she wasn’t the only one…. As I glanced around, I realized that nearly every person in the reading room was staring at me. Some were laughing; others looked annoyed. I blinked in confusion.

And then a thought occurred to me, one that caused my face to flame with embarrassment.

“Please tell me I wasn’t snoring,” I whispered to Jen.

She reached out and peeled a square yellow Post-it note off my cheek, a gesture that increased the hilarity among my rapt audience.

“I could tell you that. But I’d be lying,” Jen said.

I closed my eyes for a minute, wondering if anyone had actually ever died from humiliation. I’d snored for years, since I was a kid. My parents, my friends, everyone who ever heard me, teased me mercilessly about it.

“If you ever decide to get married, Katie-belle, you’d better pick a sound sleeper,” my dad had advised me more than once.

I used to hold out hope that my snoring was cute, endearing even, until my college roommate decided to disabuse me of this notion by taping me one night. It was awful—I sounded like a dying rhinoceros.

I opened my eyes and looked at Jen pleadingly. “Please just kill me now,” I said.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” she advised.

We walked over to P.J.’s, which was still doing a brisk business despite the late hour. We ran into Lexi, also on a study break, and after we’d ordered iced lattes all around, the three of us returned to the law-school courtyard to sit and drink our coffee.

“How late are you staying tonight?” Lexi asked.

“I have at least another three hours of work tonight, and it’s already…” I checked my watch. “Shit, it’s already nine o’clock. I had no idea I’d been here for so long.”

“That’s because the law school is like a black hole. You go in and lose all sense of time,” Jen said. “In a bad way.”

It was a warm, sticky night out, and the air felt damp against my skin. Lexi and Jen lit cigarettes, and the rich perfume of the tobacco filled the air, mixing in with the smells of freshly cut grass and grease from the nearby dorm dining hall.

“So, Kate, what’s up with you guys?” Lexi asked.

“Who?” I asked.

“Who do you think? You and Nick,” she said, and smiled knowingly.

“Nick? Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “We’re just friends.”

Law school resembled high school in more ways than one. I didn’t know if it was the enormous pressure we were under or a result of the microcosm we spent our days in, but everyone seemed to regress. Gossip, especially speculation over who was sleeping with whom, had become a popular topic of conversation. I guess it was more interesting than chatting about the Uniform Commercial Code.

“Oh, come on. You guys are always together. There must be something going on,” Lexi said.

It was true; Nick and I had been spending a lot of time together. It was sort of inevitable. We lived in the same house and had all of our classes together, so we usually carpooled into school or else rode the streetcar together. The night before, Nick had helped me put together the computer desk I’d bought in a flat cardboard box from an office supply store, and the night before that we’d shared a cheap Papa John’s pizza, dipping the slices into the greasy garlic dipping sauce.

“Really, we’re just friends,” I said again. “Anyway, I broke up with my boyfriend just before school started. I’m not ready to get involved with anyone right now.”

“Why? What happened?” Lexi asked. She tucked one long slim leg under the other and looked at me with interest.

“What do you mean?”

“Why did you break up?”

It was a good question. And the truth was, I really wasn’t entirely sure what had gone wrong between Graham and me.

We had gone out for Chinese on our first date, and by the time we were cracking open our fortune cookies, we both thought that this was It, that the person sitting across the table was The One. We immediately started dating exclusively—dinners out, Sunday-morning pancakes, long walks across the picturesque Cornell campus on crisp autumn afternoons. A year later we were moving into the seventy-year-old Victorian house that had seemed so charming when the Realtor first showed it to us. The lace curtains at the windows, the huge bay window in the living room, the elaborate crown molding.

Graham was the most intensely focused person I’d ever met. He was an academic by profession but a student by nature; he loved to learn about things. His interests changed—in the time we were together, he took up snowboarding, Russian literature, modern architecture, chess, and woodworking. He’d study his topic voraciously and learn everything there was to be learned about it. And then, after a time, his interest would burn out and he’d move on to something new.

In the beginning, it was this passion, this intensity, that attracted me to him. I loved watching his face glow with interest while he read, loved how his excitement would light him up. My previous boyfriend hadn’t been passionate about much of anything, outside of his softball league. But then I started to tire of feeling lonely even when Graham was sitting next to me, his attention absorbed in a book or paper. It didn’t help that our sex life had grown stale, to the point that much of the time it felt like we were more roommates than lovers. And, after a while, one thought kept flitting through my mind: There has to be something more out there. Not some
one,
although, yes, that would be nice too. But some
thing
else—a different career, a different path, a different life.

But that was probably too much detail to go into on a study break.

“Nothing too dramatic. We’d grown apart, and most days it felt like we were more platonic roommates than romantically involved. And then I decided to go to law school down here, and he got a job offer for a tenured position at Arizona State—he’s a professor of astronomy. It just seemed like a good time to split up,” I said.

I left out the part where Graham had agreed to come to New Orleans with me—he’d been offered an instructor position at Loyola, a lateral move from his current job at Ithaca College. And for the first time in a long while, I’d felt excited about our relationship again. Maybe this was what we needed—a new city, a fresh start. But then the offer from Arizona State came through. I understood why Graham wanted to take the job—it meant more money, more prestige, job security. But he hadn’t even discussed it with me. He’d just taken the job and assumed I’d change my plans.

“You can go to law school in Arizona,” he’d said.

“No, I can’t. It’s too late now to apply for the fall semester,” I argued.

“So, you wait a year and go next fall instead. Big deal.”

“I don’t want to do that.”

Graham spent another three months trying to talk me into going to Arizona with him—he even started to make noise about “maybe” getting engaged—and when I refused, he withdrew into a tight-lipped silence. The day he moved out, his suitcase packed and the plane ticket to Arizona jammed in his pocket, I wondered if I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life.

“Still. That’s no reason to swear off men altogether,” Jen now said. “I think that will be my goal of the year—finding Kate a new and better man.”

“Shouldn’t your goal have something to do with, I don’t know, law school? Like getting good grades, or making Law Review?” I asked.

Jen made a face. “Spoilsport.”

“What about finding me a new and better man?” Lexi asked. “Although I do have my eye on someone.”

“Addison?” Jen asked. She’d obviously made the same assumption I had.

Lexi laughed, and as she did so, a plume of smoke shot out from her mouth. “Oh, my God, are you serious? Addison? No way!”

“Well, you two are always together,” Jen said.

Lexi waved her hand, dismissing the idea. “We just bonded over cigarettes at orientation and ended up in the same section. But, no, I’m definitely not interested in him. I’m not even sure if he’s straight,” Lexi said.

“Why, did he tell you that he’s gay?” Jen asked.

“No, but he’s way too sketchy about his past. I can tell he’s trying to hide something,” Lexi said.

“You think he’s in the closet?” I asked. “That’s kind of weird, don’t you think? He’s a thirty-year-old single guy—why not just be up-front about who he is?”

“I don’t know for sure. It’s just a feeling I got,” Lexi said, shrugging. “I mean, we’ve been hanging out a lot, and he’s never hit on me. Not once.”

“Nick hasn’t hit on me, and I’m pretty sure he’s not gay,” I said.

“Addison just seems…asexual to me,” Lexi said vaguely. “Anyway, even if he is straight, he’s totally not my type.”

“Who is?” Jen asked.

Lexi leaned in. “Do you know Jacob Reid?” she asked quietly.

“The name sounds familiar,” I said, trying to remember where I’d heard it. I still hadn’t put names to faces.

“Jacob Reid…Wait—do you mean
Professor
Reid?” Jen asked, her eyes suddenly round.

Lexi nodded and smiled coolly.

“He’s a professor
here
? At the law school? Is that even allowed?” I asked. Romantic relationships between faculty and students had been strictly prohibited at Cornell—in fact, it was pretty much a surefire way for a professor to ruin his or her career.

Lexi shrugged. “He’s not
my
professor, so I don’t see what the problem is. It’s not like he’d have a conflict of interest.”

“He is really good-looking,” Jen said.

“Isn’t he? And he’s got an incredible body. I saw him at the gym working out, and I have to tell you, he looks amazing in jogging shorts,” Lexi said. “While I was talking to him, he lifted up the hem of his T-shirt to wipe his hands, and his abs were rock hard. I think he caught me staring.”

“I don’t know who he is,” I said.

“Yes, you do, I pointed him out to you yesterday,” Lexi said. “When we were in the lounge checking our mail folders.”

“Oh, that guy? I thought he was a student,” I exclaimed.

“He’s just here for a year as a visiting professor, but he said that if it goes well, he might be offered a tenured position. He teaches Income Tax and Commercial Paper,” Lexi said.

“Did he seem interested in you?” Jen asked.

Lexi looked at her with an expression that bordered on smugness.
What do you think?
her face seemed to say. But then Lexi’s face softened into a smile, and she said, “I think so. He did tell me that he was going to be at the Bombay Club on Saturday night. He said he hoped to see me there.”

A group of guys exited the law school. We watched as they congregated by the back door, joking with one another and laughing.

“I think they’re in our section,” Jen said.

“They are. I recognize the tall blond guy,” Lexi said.

“He’s cute,” Jen said. “His friend too. Is either of them your type, Kate?”

“Please don’t try to fix me up with anyone. I’m begging you,” I said, shaking my head.

“What? I was just making casual conversation,” Jen said, although her grin gave her away.

“Hey, you’re the girl that Hoffman creamed in class last week,” one of the guys said as he approached us. I didn’t recognize him; he was short and broad-shouldered and had the thick, shiny dark hair of a Prell girl.

“That’s me,” I said, smiling tightly. My notoriety did not thrill me.