Work for Hire

by Margo Karasek

  And I wanted it to stay that way.

  My fingers hovered over the keyboard as I searched for the right response.

  I could write the truth, that the date was a complete disaster, but then Markus would know I had lied about not dating and would get hurt, mad or—worse—start asking me out again, and everyone else in the section—and soon the whole law school—would know about my pathetic love life.

  I could say the date went great—hey, what was one more lie—but then what would I do when no second date materialized? Not to mention Markus. Sure, he’d get the message I wasn’t interested, but he would also stop speaking to me entirely.

  Or I could take the lawyer’s approach.

  Nothing happened. I wrote and smiled in thanks for the legal training. After all, nothing did happen during the date, not even a hot kiss.

  I met with a coworker, then went to the movies. Strictly speaking, true again. Julian was sort of my coworker. We worked for the same people. And I did go to the movies. After. To avoid Lauren and the questions I wasn’t in the mood to answer. No one had to know I went there alone.

  The movie ran long, so I got back late. A one-time deal. Again, all true. I wouldn’t be going anywhere with Julian any time soon.

  End of story. And end of discussion. To punctuate the fact, I got off the Internet before Markus, Lauren or anyone else had time to write something new. Crisis averted, I returned my attention to the lecture and the professor, who stood at the podium in front of the lecture hall, as tanned as ever, a George Hamilton in full gesticulating glory.

  “The Supreme Court’s expansive reading of the commerce clause, ladies and gentlemen, has made it the most important of Congress’s regulatory powers,” Professor Johnson waved his right arm like a South American general greeting his adoring army. “Congress today may regulate even small, individual activities which by themselves have no discernible effect on commerce as long as all such activities, in the aggregate, can have an effect on commerce.”

  Huh? Discernible effect on the aggregate? Shit. I reopened my class notes. In all that instant messaging I must’ve missed a few steps.

  “But let’s take it to the beginning,” Professor Johnson said, stepping down from the podium and leaning against the lectern. “To 1824 and Gibbons v. Ogden, the foundation for our understanding of the commerce clause today.”

  Gibbons. I scrolled through my case briefs, stopped on the fact summary and scanned the sad tale of Mr. O’s monopoly within the grand state of New York, and Mr. G’s competing monopoly. Obviously, two monopolies in operation in the same place were impossible—hence, the law suit.

  “With Gibbons,” Professor Johnson tapped his finger on the lectern, for added emphasis. “The United States Supreme Court first held that if a state law conflicts with a congressional act regulating commerce, the congressional act is controlling. That’s why Ogden had to lose. This, ladies and gentlemen, was a monumental decision.”

  Congressional act controlling. Monumental decision. I pounded away on my keyboard, barely keeping up with the flood of Professor Johnson’s words of constitutional wisdom.

  “Now let’s consider how the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1890 impacted this holding.”

  Professor Johnson moved back on the podium and took his place in front of the lectern.

  I sat back in my seat and reread the notes. Interstate Commerce Act? A monumental decision? Poor Mr. O lost out on his monopoly and probably lots of money, but a monumental decision? What was so monumental about two white rich guys fighting over more dough? It wasn’t like losing out on a few dollars matched the importance of, say, the Dred Scott holding or New York Times v. Sullivan. Not to mention Brown v. Board of Education.

  I glanced up from the screen and eyed Professor Johnson. He was playing with his gold cuff link, his lips moving, producing a constant flow of legal jargon discussing commerce, when there was the whole civil rights movement yet to be analyzed, along with all the First Amendment cases. What was next, the tax clause?

  I tuned out Professor Johnson’s droning and looked around the lecture hall. The girl seated in front of me was playing chess with her computer. Lauren was surfing the web. Even Markus had a game of solitaire going on his screen. Clearly, I wasn’t the only student left uninspired by Professor Johnson’s choice of subject.

  So I minimized my class notes and got back on line, to check e-mail. And I had three new messages!

  I clicked on the first one.

  Hey Tekla, sorry about last night. I’ll call you when I’m back in the city.

  I stared at the two sentences then reread them again.

  Julian. The jerk. He probably e-mailed me from his trusty iPhone on the way to the airport. I wasn’t even worth a personal call.

  Delete.

  Yeah, call me later, buddy. See if I pick up. Have fun in Milan with Monique.

  The next message promised me bigger breasts in a week if I just used Bust-A-Size cream enhancer. I wished.

  The third message had me pausing.

  problem!!!!! the subject line screamed.

  I looked for the sender’s address.

  Master.X@yahoo.com didn’t look familiar.

  I opened the text.

  yo tekla.

  Xander. I could almost hear him speak the greeting.

  tried calling. ur phone off. big problem. dad made me show eng essay. wasnt happy. tell me to tell u u better have good essay in 1 hour or else. think hes serious. so heres essay. rewrite & everything ok. i think. bye.

  One hour! I checked the time Xander sent the message. Forty-five minutes ago. I had fifteen minutes left!

  Fifteen minutes to do what? I sat bolt upright in my seat. Professor Johnson was still at the lectern, blabbing about Congress and commerce. I reached for my bag and fished for the phone. But I couldn’t just get up and leave the lecture. Professor Johnson would crucify me. And whom would I call anyway, and about what? Xander wouldn’t be any help and I was not about to argue with Mr. Lamont. No, the phone was out. I dropped it back in the bag and returned to Xander’s message.

  I could ignore the e-mail—pretend I hadn’t seen it—and call Mr. Lamont’s bluff. What would he do, fire me? After all, Xander’s essay wasn’t due for another two days. He already had the first paragraph I wrote. I could coach him on the rest until he learned something, anything, about writing, and Mr. Lamont was happy with the final product.

  Yeah, that’s what I would do. I relaxed back in my seat. Everything would work out fine. No need to panic. It wasn’t easy to find a replacement tutor in the middle of the school year, Mr. Lamont had said.

  Then again, I thought as I fidgeted in my seat, we were talking about Mr. Lamont. He didn’t joke.

  I could lose my job over a measly English paper.

  I nibbled my lip. Trying to actually teach Xander how to write and thereby appease my conscience wasn’t worth the risk of a lost job.

  I balled my hand into a fist; there was no alternative. And really, it was only one paper. I would absolutely make certain Xander wrote all the others, threats or no threats.

  I’ll have something for you in thirty minutes.

  I replied to Xander, downloaded his attached essay—my one good paragraph and a lot of his gibberish—and got to work, hoping Mr. Lamont wouldn’t fire me when the paper came in a few minutes late, because not even Stephen King could write an entire essay in under fifteen minutes.

  Okay, maybe Stephen King.

  Twenty-five minutes later, I was still writing—barely cognizant of Professor Johnson’s continued litany of cases or Markus’s tapping on my knee—about creativity, about Xander’s mother and her copied photographs. If Monique ever read the essay, undoubtedly she’d have a few choice words to say. But, then, I could honestly answer that though the composition was mine, the choice of topic completely belonged to Xander.

  Consequently, few ideas today are really original, I typed and hesitated. “Consequently”: Would a fourteen
-year-old ever use the word? Probably not. I aimed for the delete key but stopped myself short. Hell, no teacher could seriously believe Xander wrote any part of this essay. Might as well leave it in. True creativity is hard to find, even in the artistic fields, my fingers danced over the keyboard. Markus’s tapping intensified. I swatted his hand away from my knee. Just as my mother’s pictures duplicate the paintings of the past …

  “Miss Reznar!” Professor Johnson boomed.

  I jumped in my seat and jerked my eyes up from the screen, towards the podium where Professor Johnson should have been.

  Except he wasn’t.

  I swiveled my head from left to right, trying to locate him.

  “Behind you,” Markus whispered.

  I turned. Yup. There was Professor Johnson, almost directly behind my seat, just a few students off. How, when, had he gotten there? And, more importantly, why? It couldn’t be because of me. He couldn’t possibly have it in for me that much. True, I hadn’t been paying attention, but I wasn’t disrupting the class either. It had to be a coincidence that he now hovered over my back—an unlucky coincidence.

  “You seem very preoccupied, Miss Reznar.” Professor Johnson rested his hip on the table behind me. Students moved their computers and books out of his way. “May I ask what you are so busy writing, since I haven’t uttered a single word in the past two minutes?”

  He hadn’t?

  “Well, Miss Reznar? Please, don’t keep us waiting.”

  “Err,” I squeaked, then coughed to clear my throat, desperately trying to think of a remotely plausible answer. “I’m filling in a few gaps in my notes. I want to make sure I have everything down, and I didn’t get a chance before, when you were talking, because you were speaking so fast. But, with the break, I saw an opportunity to fill in the gaps.” No way he would buy that load of manure.

  “Really?” Professor Johnson’s lips thinned. White marks appeared around his mouth like cracks in broken glass. “Then please read to us some of those gap fillers.”

  This should have been easy. I should repeat a sentence—any sentence—from his wordy recital of the past few minutes and he would back off. Not even Professor Johnson would stoop so low as to personally read from my notes, or non-notes, as the case may be. Yeah, I should just string a few plausible words together. But I recalled none. I didn’t even have my case briefs on screen to make something up.

  I had no cover for my lapse, so I read what was actually on my computer and with each successive word came a hardening of Professor Johnson’s face.

  “What, Miss Reznar,” he said when I finished, “does creativity have to do with commerce?”

  I hung my head low.

  “Nothing.”

  Professor Johnson nodded, got off the table and walked back to the podium, not once looking in my direction again.

  I ceased to exist as he resumed the lecture.

  Strike two.

  CHAPTER 10

  “WHAT EXACTLY, Miss Reznar, do you think you are doing?”

  I stood in front of Mr. Lamont’s desk and stared at his annoyed face. His tortoiseshell glasses perched on the tip of his nose. He glowered at me like a put-upon headmaster who had to deal with yet another disruptive student, except nothing about Mr. Lamont’s office—not the surely priceless artwork or the one-of-a kind antiques—reminded me of school. Certainly not the sort of schools I went to.

  So what exactly was I doing here, standing like a petulant child called to task for her misbehavior?

  I shifted my weight from foot to foot and glanced down at the pink bowtie below Mr. Lamont’s chin and the matching socks on his feet.

  I really wanted to snicker, but I didn’t, because I unfortunately knew the answer to my own question.

  Xander’s essay. Or, more specifically, my reluctance to write it for him.

  When Lisa called insisting I see Mr. Lamont immediately, I knew what I was going to be in for: a scolding.

  “Well?” Mr. Lamont demanded and lounged back in his chair.

  The leather of the massive executive chair engulfed his small frame. Napoleon must have looked the same on his throne.

  I rubbed my palms against my leg, shifted from foot to foot again, and ogled the club chairs next to me. Boy, wouldn’t it be nice to just slide into one and give Mr. Lamont a piece of my mind: That it was rude of him to keep me standing while he sat, because for all his wealth and power he was no emperor, and as for Xander … Well, I was trying to actually teach him how to write and I didn’t exactly feel comfortable doing the work for him. And shouldn’t he—Mr. Lamont—be grateful—because writing was an essential life skill?

  But the words hovered at the tip of my tongue, unsaid, and I remained standing.

  “I’m tutoring your children?” I offered instead, sounding weak and pathetic.

  Mr. Lamont snapped up straight in his seat and leaned over the desk.

  “That’s right!” He banged his fist on the mahogany surface for emphasis. “You should be tutoring my children. That means helping them with their homework—none of this experimental teaching crap. I am not paying you to waste time, and Xander does not need another writing instructor. That’s what I pay his school tuition for. So please do your job, and leave others to do theirs. And now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  He sat back in the chair, fixed his glasses firmly on his nose and picked up a stack of papers.

  Clearly, as far as he was concerned, I was no longer in the room.

  Too bad I couldn’t actually disappear just as fast as his attention had.

  “DUDE, WE HAVE ANOTHER English essay due next week. And there’s a history paper due this Friday.”

  Xander eyed me from underneath a mop of overgrown hair. He desperately needed a haircut. Actually—I scrunched my nose—he needed a shower more.

  The boy smelled worse than a crowded New York City subway in August. I moved my stool away a few feet.

  Xander chuckled, raised his arm and sniffed the armpit.

  “I know. I stink. The gym teacher made us run three miles.”

  That certainly explained why Xander was wearing a tee shirt and shorts, and why his uniform was spilling out of his schoolbag, wrinkled almost beyond repair.

  I pointed to the clothes. “Shouldn’t you take those out? And would it have been too much to ask for some deodorant?”

  Xander shrugged. “No time.” He pulled a tie out of the backpack and looped it around his neck. “You were coming and, like, there’s those two essays. Especially the history.”

  Yes, the essays.

  “But what happened to Gemma?” I didn’t want to deal with the essays, Mr. Lamont be damned. Gemma’s absence was far more interesting; I always met with her first. She got first dibs on my attention. The one time Xander tried to usurp the order, she threw a fit that ended only after a phone call from Monique in Paris and Xander’s sworn promise never to do it again.

  “She went to a spa with Maman,” Xander twirled the tie around his finger. “But she said to make sure you don’t leave without seeing her ‘cause there’s stuff she has to discuss with you.”

  “A spa on a school day?” And with Monique? I hadn’t realized Monique was back in New York. I almost groaned. It was never good when Monique was back in the city.

  “Yeah, Maman is trying to make up for blowing her off the last time. Gemma’s so stupid she still falls for it. But, whatever.” Xander rolled his seat closer to mine and rested his sock-clad feet right in front of me.

  “Dude!” I swatted his feet away. “They smell as bad as the rest of you. And when is Gemma planning to be back? I have my own schoolwork to complete after we’re done, you know.” And I did. I had hundreds of pages of law books to read for the following day.

  “She said she’d be back by the time we’re done.”

  Xander reached down for his schoolbag, pulled out a blazer, shirt, and slacks, and dumped them all over the floor. A stack of crumpled papers followed. Xander retrieved one sheet and tried to flatten it wi
th his hand.

  “Here,” he shoved the paper at me. “That’s the history assignment.”

  “Great,” I took the sheet and grinned, all saccharine cheerfulness. Oh no you don’t, my brain screamed. You’re not getting off that easily. Not even on Mr. Lamont’s orders. “What have you written so far?”

  Xander stared. I stared back.

  “Me?” he questioned, narrowing his eyes. “I thought you spoke with Dad.”

  “I sure did.” I grinned again. The little schmuck. Too bad for him Mr. Lamont wasn’t here. But I was, and he would play by my rules. “So, I repeat, what have you written so far?”

  Xander opened his mouth, shut it and opened it again.

  “Nothing … ”

  “Well then,” I chirped and handed the sheet back to him. “I guess you better get started, since the assignment’s due Friday.”

  Xander stared some more.

  “All right.” He reluctantly retrieved the sheet. “But what do you want me to tell Dad when he asks what we did today?”

  “Why, Xander,” I said as I moved my stool back in his direction, “tell him the truth—that we worked on your history paper—what else?”

  WHEN OUR HOUR WAS UP—an hour of Xander constantly whining he didn’t know how to write a grammatical sentence and me nagging him to just write it the way he would say it—Xander had managed to complete a grand total of three sentences: The American Revolutionary war began in 1775. It had many causes. Some of these causes were very complicated.

  “Time’s up for today,” I declared as I got up from the stool and walked towards the door. I couldn’t take more of this.

  Xander dropped his pen before I finished the sentence. Apparently, he too had reached his limit.

  “I gotta go.” Xander hopped off his seat and headed for the door even faster than I did. “I need to get away from this school crap.”

  “Wait!” I yelled after him. “What about Gemma?”