Work for Hire

by Margo Karasek

  I shrugged. Kind of.

  “The drinking, you know,” I said as I took another sip of coffee, replaced the cup on its saucer and traced a finger along its rim, “was nothing more than a desperate cry for attention. It can’t be easy growing up with a mother who’s always absent and an uninterested father.”

  Julian continued his staring.

  “Give me a break,” he finally laughed, though the sound carried no humor. “Gemma and almost every other kid in America. The world.” He leaned across the table towards me, his face mere inches away from my own. I could read the lines of fatigue on his handsome features. “Tell me, did your parents work when you were little?”

  I paused. I knew where he was heading with the question, but didn’t know how to answer without proving his point and undermining my own.

  “Yes, but that was different.” And it was. My parents weren’t always present, but they cared. They were interested in what I was and was not doing. Unlike Gemma’s.

  “How?” Julian sat back in his chair and took a hearty sip of coffee. “They probably had to work so you could have a roof over your head, so you could eat. And that doesn’t leave a lot of room for quality time with the children. Take my parents, for example,” he offered, rubbing his eyes before he rested one hand, palm up, on the table. “My father worked nights and slept days. I hardly ever saw him. Forget about having father-son conversations. And my mother? She worked two jobs, and in between raised three children. There wasn’t a lot of time there for individual bonding. They did all this just so they could support us. So tell me, where’s the difference. Oh, wait.” His hand on the table curled into a fist. “I have one. Unlike me, and probably you, the Gemmas of this world are filthy rich. So while their parents are gone, they have housekeepers, nannies and tutors to take care of them. Could you say the same about yourself? Because I remember plenty of days, and nights, when the TV was my nanny.”

  I sat looking at Julian, uncertain what to say. He seemed so angry, so frustrated, all traces of the charming, cover-boy-perfect Mr. GQ completely dissipated.

  After a moment of silence, Julian exhaled a deep breath. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m tired. I’ve spent the last God knows how many hours running around trying to get us all back to New York just so we can fly out again tomorrow, and all because of Gemma.” He closed his eyes and pinched their corners. “But, honestly, aside from that, I’m mad, and jealous, because these kids, they have opportunities you and I will never have. They fly on private planes, dine with royalty and party with celebrities. They flunk school, but still get the best jobs when they feel like working. Meanwhile, I’ve worked my way through college, graduated with the best grades—and all I can hope for is a position as an assistant. I do Monique’s dirty work while she gets the credit. And all the while, I have to kiss her ass just so I can have the opportunity, the exposure, to network so I can eke out a decent future for myself. Gemma will never face that problem. She has it made, so forgive me if I save my pity for those kids who grow up in abusive homes, or have no homes at all. They’d probably trade places with Gemma in a heartbeat.”

  I nodded and drank more coffee, the taste now stale on my tongue.

  Julian was right, of course. But I wasn’t entirely wrong either.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE LAW LIBRARY was mostly in the basement of the school’s main lecture hall.

  Oh sure, the visitor’s desk, the guest reading rooms, and the body-sized portraits of major donors occupied the sunny ground level, with its floor-to-ceiling arched windows. But everything else—the stacks of legal reference texts, the computer lab and the rows and rows of student study desks—was in the pits.

  No natural light ever reached this part of the library. Students toiled away under giant florescent light boxes, which obliterated any indication of day or night. Of course, that didn’t bother the few bodies napping on the beat-up sofas positioned throughout, their snores reverberating in the church-like silence.

  “Shhhh,” I hissed at one such body snoozing two feet away from me. His snores buzzed in my ear like a mosquito that just couldn’t be swatted away.

  Not that he was disturbing much. I had been staring at a blank computer screen for the past fifteen minutes, itching to slam a fist through it and destroy the cursor that seemed to jeer, “you can’t write squat,” with every blink.

  It was right. I couldn’t write squat, at least not about Constitutional Law.

  I had come to the library in a vain effort to catch up on my Law Review assignment: cite check every quote and every paraphrase—virtually every word—of a seventy-five-page article by a rising professor, to be published in the next issue. So I had pulled out books and journals and settled at a desk to do the fact-checking, a privilege I’d earned by out-competing four hundred other law students vying for the coveted spot of a Law Review staff editor. And as reward for this academic accomplishment, I got to search for needles in the reference book haystack, all for free. No paycheck waited at the end of what surely would be a thirty-hour job, minimum.

  These law schools had quite a thing going.

  Instead of hiring paid editors to man the school’s most prominent scholarly journal, they had students fighting over the opportunity to do the labor—free of charge. Brilliant! Only a legal genius could come up with such a scam. And I was a complacent victim who’d been eager at the opportunity. After all, this was the Law Review we were talking about; the very name would give my otherwise meager legal resume hefty weight. It could mean glorious future jobs. Or so I’d been told—no, promised. So I tried, really, really tried, to cite check every word and fact.

  But when doing so proved just too tedious, I’d decided to get a head start on the Constitutional Law competition brief instead. We had two weeks to finish it.

  “Two weeks, ladies and gentlemen,” Professor Johnson had announced during class. “And not a day more.”

  He had walked around the podium and stopped in front of the lectern. I could’ve sworn he was looking straight at me when he made the warning, as if he anticipated my brief being late. So I’d elbowed Markus: See, I’m not paranoid. He is singling me out. But Markus had shrugged, clearly unimpressed with my keen perception.

  “I want them on my desk, in my office by nine a.m. at the latest. Not 9:05, not 9:01,” Professor Johnson had commanded. Again, his eyes had seemed to rest on me. “Nine sharp. And be warned,” he’d threatened, pitching his voice low like a judge about to pronounce a death sentence, “I’ve been known to fail students in the past when they did not meet this deadline.”

  The class of a hundred had gone absolutely still, the hum of laptops the only sound in the room. Professor Johnson had leaned on the lectern and smiled, apparently satisfied with the effect his words had on the audience.

  “Now,” he’d said, straightening up, twirling a gold cuff link for the hundredth time and pulling at his sleeve, “for the topic. A Work for Hire scenario is being hung outside this room by my assistant as we speak. So is a list of all of you; half of you are to be pro, and half con. Please find your name on the appropriate list and have the brief in my hands in two weeks or less. Good day.”

  Work for Hire? What the hell was Work for Hire?

  Everyone in the class had grabbed their textbooks and flipped through the pages in a mad dash for the answer. I couldn’t recall studying the doctrine. It obviously had something to do with copyrights, but …

  “Page 263,” someone had called out from the back of the room, and pages had flipped even faster. I had skimmed the text: “A ‘work made for hire’ is a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment.”

  I’d glanced up from the page. What fact scenario could Professor Johnson possibly have come up with to complicate this simple concept?

  The answer would be hanging on the wall beyond the classroom. Almost as one, my classmates and I all had shot our books closed; in a swarm we’d flown for the door, with me smack in the middle.

  “Miss Rezn
ar, a moment please.”

  I had stopped midstride. Bodies had brushed past and bumped into me as I turned towards Professor Johnson, still standing by the lectern. Somehow, his request hadn’t really surprised me: after all, these after class tête-à-têtes were becoming very regular.

  I had approached Professor Johnson like an acrophobic approaches a hundred foot drop.

  “Miss Reznar, it has come to my attention that you are falling behind in your Law Review responsibilities.”

  I’d gawked. What? How? Law Review was a wholly run student entity. We edited faculty work, usually from outside the immediate NYU Law School, but—for the sake of academic integrity—the professors had no say in the process. So what could Professor Johnson possibly have to do with the Review and my assigned article?

  “Please remember what an honor it is to be selected to the editorial staff and how much others rely on you meeting your obligations. Imagine how the author of your article will feel when it doesn’t get published because you fail to do your part in time.”

  I’d sputtered, searching for words that would bail me out of this conversation. “I’m just a little behind … ” Lie. I hadn’t even started. The Lamonts had made that impossible. Mostly. There was also my laziness. “Err, I was planning on going to the library straight after class to finish.”

  Well, I could at least make that part reality. So as soon as I’d slipped out of Professor Johnson’s sight, I’d headed for the library and its legal stacks.

  But I just couldn’t make it happen. No amount of good intentions or fear of Professor Johnson could make the cite checking palatable. Nor did they help with the brief.

  So I stared at the blank computer screen some more. The snorer had since abandoned his post on the sofa, yet my writing was going no better. I had to argue against the expansion of the Work for Hire doctrine, but couldn’t formulate a single sentence, not even to summarize the facts, even though they had been provided by Professor Johnson. They were straightforward, really: An imaginary teacher in an imaginary elementary school wrote an imaginary children’s book to help her students learn to read, and that imaginary book eventually became an imaginary bestseller that made imaginary millions. The teacher claimed the money was hers, but the school disagreed because she wrote the book on its dime. Who’s right? I had to defend her.

  “How’s it going?”

  Markus tapped me on the shoulder. I hadn’t seen him in the library earlier, though I assumed, like everyone else in the class, he had holed himself up to create a legal masterpiece. He had to argue for the school.

  “It’s not,” I sighed, sitting back in my chair. “Neither the Law Review article nor my brief. And what’s up with this Work for Hire crap? Like there aren’t a hundred other more interesting Constitutional topics that Johnson could have picked.”

  “You still haven’t done the Law Review assignment?” Markus gasped.

  If he were a girl, I’d call it a shriek.

  “Shhh,” a woman occupying the next desk spat out at us.

  “Nope,” I responded, lowering my voice. Markus hadn’t been picked for Law Review—a fact that still shocked—but he got his International Law Journal assignments completed ahead of time. He was that journal’s star editor, the first-rank man in a second-rank periodical. “And it seems like I’m not getting it done today because … ” I said, glancing at my watch, “ … shit! I’m late for work.”

  “TEKLA, THANK GOD you’re here!”

  Lisa yanked open the Lamont front door, grabbed my arm and pulled me inside.

  I gaped. I never imagined Lisa would be thankful to see me. Ever.

  “Help me,” she said, and kept pulling on my arm.

  The gasps coming from the dining room clued me in that maybe, indeed, she was right; my help might be necessary. So I let her shove me into the room without protest.

  “Oh my God!” I shrugged off Lisa’s grip and sprang towards the dining table.

  Gemma lay sprawled on the floor, next to the table, an upturned chair still underneath her, Xander on top of her. His knees were on her chest, and his hands were around her neck like two gold bands of a choker.

  Gemma was wheezing; her left hand flailed in the air, the other clawed at Xander’s face. Her own face was turning a telling shade of purple, the veins in her temple popping in warning.

  “Xander!” I grabbed Xander’s shoulders and tried to jerk him off her. “Get off!”

  He wouldn’t budge, just kept pressing harder.

  “Xander!” I screamed and kept yanking. “You’ll kill her.”

  Had the boy gone completely insane?

  Lisa materialized by my side, reached for Xander’s hands and tried to pry his fingers open.

  “Xander, stop!” she cried. “She can’t breathe.”

  I abandoned my station by Xander’s back and joined Lisa’s efforts. We worked on his fingers one by one until all ten opened.

  Xander slid off Gemma’s limp body and said nothing. Gemma simply gasped for air like a fish out of water. Lisa and I stared at the two, panting. The room was otherwise silent. Unfortunately, the lull didn’t last. Gemma took three more breaths and pounced on Xander.

  “You fucking asshole,” she shrieked and aimed a fist at his face. It connected with his chin. “I hate you!” A second blow landed squarely in his eye.

  I winced. That had to hurt. Bad.

  Xander seemed momentarily paralyzed by the attack. Sadly, this immobility too didn’t last. He curled his hands into fists and popped two punches—one after the other, bam, bam—into Gemma’s stomach. She squealed and rolled into a ball, clutching her abdomen, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Xander,” I exclaimed, startled. The violence of this latter assault somehow seemed more vicious than his first. “Xander!”

  I grabbed his arm when he raised the fists again and shook him. “Xander, can you hear me?” He looked right through me. “Xander!” I landed my own punch, on his arm. For attention. What was a little more violence anyway?

  Xander’s eyes finally focused on my face.

  “Xander, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.

  He stared at me some more. Then his face crumbled.

  “She started it,” he whined. “She poured soda all over my pizza. On purpose.”

  “Liar!” Gemma screeched from her corner. “You started it. You called me a drunken ho. You asshole!”

  I looked at the two of them like they were alien children, all green and otherworldly.

  “Enough,” Lisa interjected. She raised herself from the floor where Xander, Gemma and I were still sprawled, dusted off her slacks and straightened her shirt. Her stilettos were on, a marvel since my flats had long come off. “The two of you are hooligans! Barbarians! Animals! What will your father think about this?”

  “What happened?” I scrambled up, not really expecting Lisa to answer. She surprised me.

  “These two idiots,” she spat, pointing at Gemma and Xander, “insisted on having pizza for dinner. Then when the delivery came, they insisted on fighting over the same slice EVEN THOUGH THEY HAD THE WHOLE PIE.” Lisa shook. Literally shook. “Somewhere in there, Xander called Gemma you-know-what, and she decided to retaliate by pouring a whole bottle of Coke over the pie, thereby ruining dinner for us all. And Xander, in his brilliance, thought choking her was the best resolution. You saw the rest. Now, I’m going to call Stephen and let him know what wonderful children Monique has. And you,” she pointed a red-tipped finger at me, “can deal with them. Luckily that’s no longer my job. And by the way, you’re late.”

  She left the room in a huff. Yeah, I wanted to shout after her, if it’s no longer your job, what are you doing here, Miss Personal Assistant? Oh, and FYI, it isn’t my job either. I am a tutor. T-u-t-o-r. Here to help with homework, not discipline. And, excuse me, but five minutes isn’t really late.

  I turned to Gemma and Xander. Xander had made his way up from the floor and was trying to help Gemma up. She swiped a
t his efforts.

  “Get away from me,” she yelled. “I hate you. I hate all of you!” She vaulted off the floor. “And I’m not a drunk!” She stormed out of the room.

  “Nice.” I looked over at Xander. A shiner was already visible around his eye, as were a few scratch marks. “What possessed you? Strangling your sister. Punching her.”

  Xander pouted.

  “Well, she is a drunk,” he proclaimed, his voice heated. “Do you know how freaked out I was that night? I called all her friends looking for her. I thought she was dead!”

  I stared. So this was what the fight was really about. The parents hadn’t done the disciplining so he’d decided to do it for them.

  “Xander … ”

  But Lisa’s voice cut me off.

  “Xander, Gemma!” she shouted from the living room. “Get in here. Your father’s on the phone and wants to speak to both of you. Now. He’s on conference.”

  Xander grimaced, but did as ordered. So did Gemma. She sulked back into the room. I followed. What else was there to do? Certainly not tutoring.

  “What in the bloody hell are you two doing?!” Mr. Lamont’s voice boomed from the telephone. “Gemma, provoking your brother. And Xander, a gentleman never hits a woman, especially if she’s his sister. Now go to your rooms, both of you, and think about what you have done. Miss Reznar, are you there?”

  “Ah, yes,” I squeaked, startled. What did I do?

  “Make sure they stay there. And what’s this I hear about you being late?”

  WHEN MY CELL PHONE RANG, I was ten blocks away from the dorm. After the two hours with Xander and Gemma, I’d needed a stroll, for the fresh air, clear head and all. The day was warm, so I had decided to walk home. And I was tempted to ignore the call, but I checked the caller’s identity.

  Ms. Jacobs.

  How fortuitous. The one call I actually wanted to receive, from the one person who could intervene with the Lamonts on my behalf.