Testing Kate

by Whitney Gaskell

  “Come on, let’s get to work. We’re never going to get through the Torts assignment,” I said.

  “Kate, let me share your book. I didn’t get a chance to go home before I came here,” Nick said.

  After we’d gone over Torts and Crim, we decided to pack it in for the afternoon.

  “Did you drive?” Nick asked me as I stacked my books and notepads up.

  I nodded.

  “Can you give me a ride home? I left my car at the bar last night,” Nick said.

  We said good-bye to the rest of the group and began the two-block walk to where my Civic was parked.

  “I feel like shit,” Nick said. “I’m so hungover. Hey, can we go to Burger King?”

  “We could, but why would we want to?” I asked.

  “The Whopper is the world’s best hangover cure. Especially when accompanied by a chocolate shake,” Nick said. He glanced at me and frowned. “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “That thing on your back,” he said.

  “What, my knapsack?”

  “It’s enormous. It looks like the kind that people use when they climb mountains,” Nick said.

  “Yeah, I think that’s what it’s for. It’s from L.L. Bean. It just arrived yesterday. My leather one wasn’t big enough to fit all of my textbooks in it,” I explained.

  “Do you have a pup tent in there? A month’s supply of beef jerky?”

  “Well, if I do, smart-ass, I’m not sharing it with you,” I said.

  “I love it when you sweet-talk me,” Nick said, and I punched him playfully in the arm.

  Twenty minutes later, I pulled up in front of our house. Nick was clutching a greasy Burger King bag in his hand as he got out of the car.

  “What are you doing now?” Nick asked as we climbed the steps to our shared front porch. “There’s a Magnum, P.I. marathon on cable. Want to come over and watch it with me?”

  “Can’t,” I said. I nodded toward my door. “My ex—Graham—is waiting for me.”

  Nick’s eyebrows arched up, and he looked at me for a moment. “I’m sure there’s a whole long story there, huh?”

  “Probably. Although I don’t know what it is yet.”

  “Well…good luck finding out,” Nick said. He turned and unlocked his door.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  And then I went up to see Graham.

  “I think we should get back together,” Graham said.

  We were sitting on either end of the couch, half turned to face each other. Graham’s arm was draped over the back of the couch.

  “But…why?” I asked. I didn’t realize how abrupt the question sounded until I saw the frown pull at his face.

  “I’ve missed you. I miss us,” he said simply. “Don’t you?”

  “Sometimes,” I admitted. “But things weren’t going that well between us before.”

  Graham nodded. “I know. I think we were both too passive about our relationship. We got lazy.”

  Was that it? I wondered. Everyone always says that you have to work at a relationship, that you have to make an effort to keep things spicy. So how do you know when you have something worth saving, worth holding on to, something good that’s only gotten stale through neglect…and when you don’t?

  “A lot of the time I felt really alone,” I persisted. “And also that I was less important to you than the other things in your life. Your work, your hobbies.”

  Graham shook his head. “You were always the most important thing in my life, Kate. Always. And if you didn’t know that…” He closed his eyes for a minute. “Then that just makes me the world’s biggest asshole.”

  I smiled. “You’re not an asshole.”

  “Will you give me a second chance?”

  “But now you’re in Arizona, and I’m here,” I said.

  “I know it won’t be easy. But we can do the long-distance thing, and if it works out, one of us will move,” Graham said.

  “Meaning you want me to move to Arizona,” I said, deliberately—churlishly—picking at the scab of the well-worn argument.

  Graham shrugged. “Yes, maybe. Or maybe I’ll get as good of a job here. Or maybe we’ll wait until after you graduate and move somewhere else together,” he said, sounding so reasonable, I felt guilty for my earlier flash of temper. I rested my hand on his, by way of apology.

  Graham reached for me, sliding across the couch to close the distance between us. He wrapped his arms around me, and I relaxed into the embrace. And for the first time since law school began, I felt safe. The tide of strangeness—the new people, and schedule, and crushing workload—ebbed and receded, and normalcy returned. I buried my head into Graham’s shirt, sniffing in the sameness of him. He smelled of fabric softener and bar soap and oranges.

  “Can we try?” Graham asked softly.

  I nodded. A second chance. “Yes,” I said. “I’d like that.”

  Chapter Six

  I sat in class, doodling on a yellow legal pad, while my thoughts drifted to Graham. He’d left Tuesday morning, flying back to Arizona. We’d slept together the night before he left, and it was…nice. Quite nice. Maybe it wasn’t the sort of epic romance Jen had been imagining, but how often did that happen in real life, anyway? It wasn’t like Graham was going to stare soulfully at me while I popped chocolate-covered strawberries in his mouth.

  I glanced up at the clock. Twenty more minutes until Crim class ended, and then I was free from Hoffman for the weekend. Despite my poor performance on the first day of class, Hoffman hadn’t called on me again. Instead, he seemed to delight in picking on different students every day, mocking them when stage fright caused them to stumble over the answers. So far, though, no one else had been caught unprepared or been forced to stand while Hoffman grilled them, so I still held that special distinction among my classmates.

  He’s such a sadistic prick, I thought. He probably tortures small animals in his free time. I wonder if the cats that live in his neighborhood have a tendency to go missing. Or, maybe—

  “Ms. Bennett?”

  The sound of my name cracked across the room like a whip. I looked up, horrified to see that Hoffman had turned his flat shark eyes on me. Shit. It was as if the asshole had been reading my thoughts. My stomach roiled nervously, and I had to force myself to meet his gaze while I waited for the interrogation to commence. But this time I was ready for him—this time I’d not only read and reread the assignment, I’d taken careful notes, complete with the fact pattern, case summary, and holding of every case. This time I wouldn’t make a fool of myself. I folded my hands in front of me on the table and waited for the question.

  “Well, Ms. Bennett, don’t keep us all in suspense.”

  Huh? Why was he looking at me so expectantly? Wait…why was everyone in the room looking at me? Oh, no…oh, no no no no no. Had he asked the question when I wasn’t paying attention? Oh, God. That must be it. Of all the times to zone out…

  “Would you mind repeating the question?” I asked, barely recognizing the high, thin voice as my own.

  Hoffman gave an exaggerated sigh. “Yes, actually, I would mind. This lecture is for your benefit, not mine. If you aren’t prepared to come to class and listen, Ms. Bennett, then I would suggest you not bother coming at all. I don’t care if you waste your own time, but I take great offense at your wasting mine and everyone else’s,” he said in a cold, biting tone that had its intended effect of making me feel like shit on a stick. “Mr. Fournier, please repeat the question for Ms. Bennett.”

  Mr. Fournier—I had no idea what his first name was—sat in the front row of class and was exactly the sort of law student who gave the rest of us a bad reputation. He constantly volunteered in class, took an obvious and annoying pleasure in hearing the sound of his own voice, and shamelessly brown-nosed all of the professors.

  Mr. Fournier now cleared his throat, and said, “You asked, ‘Is the failure to act included in the principle of actus reus?’”

  “Thank you, Mr
. Fournier,” Hoffman said. Mr. Fournier beamed up at him sycophantically.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d just gone over this last night. Surreptitiously, I flipped back a few pages in my notes and read over them quickly before I began to speak.

  “No. Although actus reus is not specifically defined in the Modern Penal Code, the basic requirement is that there be a willed act. Therefore, an omission to act wouldn’t be included under the commonly held definition,” I said.

  As soon as I heard Nick suck in his breath sympathetically, I knew I’d screwed up.

  “Is that so?” Hoffman asked. He looked at me the way a snake might look at a mouse just before consuming it whole. My stomach turned and dipped in a way that made it feel like it was falling out of my body.

  Oh, shit, I thought grimly.

  “A mother is mopping the floor. Her small child comes upon the bucket of water and falls into it, headfirst. The child begins to drown, flailing his little arms and feet around helplessly,” Hoffman said, in the disinterested monotone voice one might use to read a weather report aloud. “The mother turns and sees that the child is struggling. But instead of retrieving the child from the bucket, she walks out of the house, sits on the front porch, and proceeds to smoke a cigarette while the toddler drowns. Did the woman commit a crime?”

  I hesitated. “Yes,” I finally said.

  “Please do enlighten us, Ms. Bennett—what was the crime?” Hoffman persisted.

  I don’t know what happened. Everyone was staring at me, their faces alternating between sympathy and smugness. I could hear the tap-tap-tap of someone typing notes directly into a laptop. The fluorescent overhead lights buzzed. A woman coughed. And try as I might, I couldn’t remember one thing about actus reus, criminal law, or just about anything else that would resemble an answer. In fact, it felt like my mind had been stripped clean of all knowledge, except, bizarrely, for the lyrics to Milli Vanilli’s song “Girl, You Know It’s True.”

  It was the diving competition all over again.

  Girl, you know it’s true, ooh, ooh, ooh, I love you.

  Think, damn it, THINK! I thought desperately. Surely, leaving your child to drown in a bucket must be a crime…right? Or was it a trick? I looked down at my notes, praying they’d hold the answer, but I couldn’t make sense of anything I’d written.

  “Um. She committed a crime by…leaving the bucket of water out?”

  “Are you asking me or telling me?” Hoffman said.

  “She committed a crime by leaving the bucket of water out for her child to fall into,” I said more firmly.

  “No!” Hoffman screamed. He hit his hand on the top of the lectern, and the cracking sound echoed around the classroom. The sudden movement caused a strand of his hair to break loose from its comb-over and fall forward over his shiny forehead. “No, Ms. Bennett, that was not the crime! Dear God, it’s as though my students get dumber with every passing year!”

  This statement deflated some of my smugger classmates. They stopped smirking at me and turned back to their casebooks.

  “If you had done your reading—you are capable of reading, are you not?—you would have known the answer. Your pitiful response can mean only one of two things. Either you didn’t do the assigned reading, or you did and you were too stupid to understand it. Which was it?” Hoffman continued, his hissing voice echoing across the lecture hall.

  Still there was nothing. Just a big, sucking emptiness where my brain used to be.

  Girl, you know it’s true, ooh, ooh, ooh, I love you.

  “Well, Ms. Bennett? Are you now also incapable of speech?” Hoffman sneered.

  “I did do the reading. And I thought I understood it,” I said shakily. I couldn’t believe it. I was nearly thirty years old, and I was being screamed at and condescended to by a middle-aged prick with a severe case of megalomania. Anger pressed at my chest and buzzed in my ears. “If I didn’t, I apologize. But I thought that’s what class was for. To learn material we don’t yet know,” I added, my anger emboldening me.

  “Do you think you can come into my class unprepared and I’ll just spoon-feed you the syllabus? Is that right, Ms. Bennett?” Hoffman said. He was no longer shouting, but in a way, this new, icier tone was even more menacing.

  “Isn’t that your job?”

  There was a collective gasp from my classmates. Under his breath, Nick muttered, “Jesus, Kate.”

  I don’t know how it happened. I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, I really hadn’t. It was as though the words had been spit out of my mouth beyond my control. Was it possible I had multiple personalities? Specifically, an evil multiple personality intent on ruining my life?

  Sybil, I thought. I’ll call my evil multiple personality Sybil. At least now I finally have someone to blame for all of my bad luck.

  “Are you trying to embarrass me?” Hoffman asked, biting the words out.

  “No! No, of course not…,” I said, willing myself to apologize, although the words stuck in my throat like stones.

  Should I tell him about Sybil? I wondered. No, he’ll just think I’m crazy. Although maybe that wasn’t so bad at the moment. An insanity defense would be apropos for Crim class.

  Hoffman stared at me with his pale malevolent eyes in a way that made my skin crawl.

  “Every year,” he said in a soft, menacing voice, “I have one student who is convinced that he or she knows more about the subject of criminal law than I do.”

  I shook my head vigorously from side to side. No, no, no, that was the last thing I thought. I know nothing about the law. Nothing. Less than nothing.

  “And, interestingly enough, every year that student always ends up getting the lowest grade in my class. Something for you to think about, Ms. Bennett,” Hoffman continued. He turned to the lectern, picked up his notes, and then strode down off the teaching platform. No one moved as Hoffman stormed up the stairs, heading straight toward me.

  Is he going to hit me? I wondered, horrified and yet unable to move. Unable to look away.

  But Hoffman was not coming for me, he was simply exiting the room, abruptly ending class early. He pushed open the door and then suddenly wheeled around.

  “Come Monday, Ms. Bennett, perhaps you will be so kind as to take over the lecture. I’m sure we’ll all be thrilled to hear more of your brilliant insights into criminal law.”

  And then he turned and left the room, the door banging behind him.

  No one moved or spoke for a few beats. It was as though we were all expecting him to come storming back into class. But as one moment passed, and then another, and yet another without his reappearance, the silence began to break. A nervous giggle here, a loud whisper there, the thud of a few dozen textbooks closing.

  I exhaled a shaky breath and turned to look at Nick. His face was gray.

  “You are so fucked,” he said, shaking his head from side to side.

  And only then did I realize the extent of my trespass: I’d turned the meanest, most sadistic professor in the school into a personal enemy.

  Once again, I was the favorite subject of One-L gossip. After class, as I made my way to my mail folder, I could hear the buzz of chatter surround me as news of my second disastrous standoff with Hoffman spread.

  “He, like, totally took her apart,” I heard a tall blond guy with vacant eyes and a surfer-dude drawl say.

  “It was ugly,” a woman with the sharp, pointed features of a rat agreed.

  I gritted my teeth and pushed through the crowd of congregating students.

  “That’s her,” I heard Rat Girl say. “Is she crying?”

  I paused for a minute, my back stiffening. No one could blame me for beaning her over the head with my Crim textbook, right? But then I sighed and pressed on. Violence never solved anything, as satisfying as it might be.

  There was nothing of interest in my mail folder. I looked up at the corkboard and saw the usual assortment of multicolored flyers posted there. One announced a Bar Review next week at the F&M Patio B
ar. Another advertised the Public Interest Law Foundation’s bake sale. One had been posted by a Two-L eager to sell his One-L course outlines, claiming that he’d used them to grade onto Law Review. And then my eyes settled on a plain note card with a carefully handwritten message: RESEARCH ASSISTANT NEEDED. IF INTERESTED CALL ARMSTRONG MCKENNA. 555-7823.

  Armstrong McKenna. I knew the name, of course. McKenna was the historian and biographer who had, in recent years, penned the best-selling biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. He was a frequent guest on the Sunday-morning talk shows that Graham was so addicted to (and which I only half listened to while I worked on the crossword puzzle). I hadn’t known he lived in New Orleans, though. And now he was looking for a research assistant.

  I reached up, pulled the note card down, and stuffed it into the outer pocket of my knapsack.

  At four o’clock that afternoon, I was driving down Prytania Street looking for the address that Armstrong McKenna had given me when I called about the research-assistant position. I knew that with my current study load it was crazy to even think about a part-time job, but just the thought of working for McKenna sent a ripple of excitement through me. To have something of my own, something outside the stifling confines of law school, was just too tempting to pass up. And I’d always been a history buff; I’d even majored in American History in college. I’d considered going on for my master’s degree, but there wasn’t exactly a thriving job market for history grad students.

  I’d been surprised that McKenna had wanted to see me so soon, but he’d insisted.

  “What are you doing now?” he’d asked in a thick Southern accent over the phone.

  “Wh-what…You mean right now?” I asked.

  “That’s precisely what I mean.”

  “I have a class this afternoon. Civil Procedure,” I added, unnecessarily.

  “Then come by after you’re done,” McKenna said breezily. He gave me his address and rang off, and it was only after we’d disconnected that I realized he hadn’t asked what time that would be.