Testing Kate

by Whitney Gaskell

  “Married? Boyfriend? Any dark secrets?” Lexi continued.

  I shook my head. “Nope. None of the above,” I said, and tried not to feel guilty about the ease with which I was able to push Graham aside. It wasn’t like I was lying. He wasn’t my boyfriend any longer.

  “So, we’re all single. Except for Jen; she’s married,” Lexi said. Jen nodded at this, and for the first time I noticed the wide gold wedding band etched with interlocking circles on her finger.

  “And we all did something else before coming back to law school,” Lexi continued. “None of us came here straight from college.”

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “I went to NYU and then worked for Bloomingdale’s in their PR department,” Lexi said. She tucked a shiny tendril of blue-black hair behind her ear and smiled. Her teeth were very white and straight. It was as if every last detail on her person had been polished. I suddenly realized that Lexi wasn’t quite as pretty as I’d originally thought when all I’d seen were glossy hair, slanted eyes, and a slim figure. Her nose was a little too sharp and her lips were too thin.

  “Addison’s from L.A., and he’s been very mysterious about what he did there,” Jen said.

  Addison shrugged. “It’s not a mystery. It’s just not that exciting. I worked for a few of the studios, did some location scouting.”

  “Compared to being a paralegal, working in Hollywood is exciting,” Jen said dryly. “Anyway, my husband and I were high-school sweethearts—we grew up in Missouri—and we both came here, to Tulane, for undergrad. Then Sean went to med school, and now that he’s finishing up his residency, it’s my turn to go back to school.”

  “D.C.,” Nick said. “I worked on the Hill as a congressional staffer. Nothing too serious. Mostly I just brokered deals between the various power players. You know, shaping U.S. foreign policy, keeping my finger on the pulse of the country’s epicenter. Stuff like that.”

  “Is that what they call being the coffee gofer up there?” Jen quipped.

  “Hey, watch it. I have CIA contacts,” Nick joked.

  “So…we should form a study group,” Lexi said. “We’re all in the same section together, and we’re all about the same age. Older than the average One-L. If we stick together, we’ll be able to blow everyone else out of the water.”

  “I’m in,” Addison said.

  “Me too,” Nick said, and Jen nodded.

  They all looked at me. “Sure,” I said, feeling happy for pretty much the first moment since I’d arrived in New Orleans. It had been one misery after another—from getting lost in the maze of streets that made up the Garden District while I was driving around looking for a grocery store, to having to drag almost all of my furniture up the stairs on my own, aided only by a spacey-eyed guy who told me to call him Jimmy-D.

  “Like the sausage,” he’d said happily.

  Jimmy-D had approached me on the street while I was unlocking the back of the U-Haul and offered to help me move in for twenty bucks. It’d seemed like a good deal, right up until I discovered that he’d stolen my toaster and three pairs of pink satin Victoria’s Secret panties.

  “May I join your study group?” a voice asked.

  I turned and noticed for the first time that there was a girl sitting on the bench behind us. She looked even younger than the undergraduates milling around, but she was dressed like a junior executive in a tan pantsuit and expertly pressed blue oxford shirt. A gold-toned pin of the scales of justice was fastened to the lapel of her suit jacket. She had a mop of brown corkscrew curls framing a serious, pointed face.

  “Are you in our section?” Nick asked her.

  The girl nodded. “I’m sorry Hoffman called on you,” she said. “Although you really should have read the assignment.”

  “Ah…you’re right, I should have,” I said, waiting for her to smile. She didn’t. She just looked at me with solemn eyes and then nodded briskly, as though she was satisfied that I appreciated the gravity of my transgression.

  “I heard what you were talking about—forming a study group of older students. I came here straight from undergrad, but I’d really like to join your group. I think older students are more likely to take things seriously,” she said.

  “Sure, you can join us,” Nick said, smiling at her.

  His instincts were markedly nicer than those of the rest of us, all of whom were staring at this girl, who looked so young she ought to be out shopping for a prom dress or running for student-body treasurer.

  “What’s your name?” Lexi asked her.

  “Dana. Dana Mallick,” she said. And then she did smile, a beaming, confident grin. It was the smile of someone who had never failed at anything in her life, the smile of someone who had won student-council campaigns, led the debate club to victory, and delivered a valedictorian speech.

  I’d known girls like Dana at Cornell, both during my time as a student there and the subsequent years I spent working in the admissions office. They were earnest and peppy and threw themselves at their schoolwork and activities with tireless enthusiasm. They’d always sit in the front row at lectures, take elaborate notes that would later be filed in a color-coded binder, and would fling their arms up in the air whenever the teacher asked for a volunteer to answer a question or helm a project. When they sent out college applications, they always requested interviews.

  “Cornell is a good school. It’s my first choice after Harvard and Yale,” they’d say, with the innocent confidence of one who has never had to resort to the desperate ass-kissing that less confident candidates instinctively fall back on. Usually unsuccessfully.

  I joined the others in smiling back at Dana, and we introduced ourselves in turn. And then finally Jen blurted out what we were all wondering.

  “How old are you?”

  Dana had the grace to blush. “Nineteen,” she admitted, looking down at the toe of a perfectly polished black pump with a sensible two-inch heel.

  “Nineteen? And you’re in law school?” Addison exclaimed. “That means you’re, like, Girl Wonder.”

  “Are you a genius?” Lexi asked.

  Dana’s cheeks stained even darker, and she shrugged. “I was accelerated, so I graduated from high school and college early,” she said.

  I decided to rescue her from further interrogation. “When should we meet?” I asked. “And where? Is there room in the library for study groups?”

  Nick nodded. “There is, but when I was there on Saturday, it seemed like it could be sort of a scene. And the librarian had to chase away some undergrads who were hanging out in the reading room.”

  “I say we meet Sunday afternoons,” Jen said. “That way we’ll have all weekend to go over our notes from the week before we get together.”

  “There’s a coffee shop near my house, the Rue de la Course,” Addison said. “The Rue, for short. It’s in the lower Garden District, on Magazine Street, and it’s far enough away from campus that it might not be crowded.”

  “Sounds perfect. Sundays at the Rue,” Lexi said. She pulled a white box of Marlboro Light cigarettes out of her leather knapsack, packed them against the heel of her hand, and then pulled one out. She lit the cigarette with a light-pink Bic lighter and took a long, satisfied drag on it. The mannerism was fluid and self-possessed, reminding me of a Parisian woman, the kind whose elegance is so natural she can wear a scarf or hat without looking foolish.

  “Cool. I’m sure we’ll talk before then,” Addison said. He stood and shifted his knapsack onto a thin shoulder. “Okay, chickadees, I’m going to split.”

  “Plan on coming over to my place next Saturday,” Lexi said to him. She nodded at the rest of us. “All of you. There’s a Bar Review that night. We can hang out at my place and then all go together.”

  “What’s a Bar Review?” Dana asked, frowning. “Is it a requirement for class?”

  Lexi laughed and shook her head. “No, it’s just a party the law school hosts at a bar near campus. They’ll have free beer there for law stu
dents. It may be lame, but I thought we could check it out.”

  “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

  It 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 someone, although, yes, that would be nice too. But something else—a different career, a different path, a different life.