Testing Kate

by Whitney Gaskell

  I groaned inwardly. It wasn’t just some dreadful—but fixable—error. We were actually going to be stuck with Professor Satan for another semester.

  At least this time I knew my foe. Ducking my head down in an obvious attempt to avoid eye contact would alert Hoffman that I didn’t want him to call on me. So instead I drew in a deep breath and forced myself to look right at him. His pale eyes slid from Dana’s face to mine, and I saw his thin lips twist up into a malevolent smile that made my fingers tingle with dread. But I forced myself to stay steady, and even raised my chin up a few millimeters in a silent challenge.

  I dare you to call on me, I thought. I dare you, you son of a bitch.

  My bluff worked. Hoffman’s eyes continued to slide past me.

  “Ms. Jans, give us the Court’s holding in Marbury v. Madison,” Hoffman said, calling on a chunky brunette sitting in the row in front of me.

  I exhaled slowly and deeply, uncapped my pen, and started taking notes.

  “Grades are out.”

  The announcement spread through the Con Law class almost immediately after Hoffman had finished his lecture. My stomach lurched, and my heart felt like it was thudding against my rib cage. This was it.

  “Did you hear that?” Nick asked, turning to look at me.

  I nodded slightly.

  “What?” Dana asked.

  “They’re saying that grades are out,” I said, jerking my head toward the back of the classroom, where, I assumed, the rumor had started when the students sitting in the last row had heard the chaos break out in the student lounge.

  “Oh, good,” Dana said, standing up briskly, swinging her knapsack over her shoulder.

  “You’re not nervous?” I asked.

  Dana shook her head and looked surprised. “No. I don’t want to sound conceited, but I’ve always gotten good grades.”

  “We all have,” Nick said. “Everyone who gets into this school was at the top of their undergrad class. We’re all A students.”

  “And now some of us are going to be B or C students,” I said. My throat felt like I was trying to swallow a handful of sharply edged stones.

  “Or worse,” Addison said cheerfully, also standing. “Let’s go get the verdict.”

  The buzz in the room was louder, more manic than usual, as we filed out of the room.

  “I heard that they give out only one A in every class,” Dutch Jackson muttered as he stacked up his books.

  “No, they give out more than one A per class, but there are more Cs than As and Bs combined,” Alicia Ramirez replied.

  Nick turned and rolled his eyes comically, mocking our classmates who were desperately trying to quell their own anxiety by freaking out their friends.

  “I heard that Hoffman gave out three Ds this year,” Brad Sobel said.

  “Aw, man, then I’m doomed,” Scott Brown replied in his thick Southern accent, grinning good-naturedly. He nodded at Nick and winked at me.

  Three Ds.

  I remembered the dot that Hoffman had placed on the corner of my blue book and felt queasy.

  It seemed like the entire One-L class was gathered around our hanging mail folders, jostling to pluck the crisp white envelopes out. I saw a broad-shouldered black student with a shaved head whom I recognized from one of the Bar Reviews—he was the guy Jen had wanted to set Addison up with—tear his envelope open and unfold the paper within. His shoulders sagged, and at first I thought he was getting bad news, but then he turned and I saw that he was smiling, the relief etched on his face.

  “Here, I got ours,” Jen said, appearing out of the crowd that she’d pushed her way into. She handed the envelopes out to Lexi, Dana, Nick, Add, and me. I looked down at mine. It felt light and insubstantial in my hand. My name was visible through a window in the envelope: BENNETT, KATE E.

  Lexi started to tear at hers and then hesitated. “Let’s go outside,” she said. “I don’t want to do this in front of everyone.”

  A woman I didn’t recognize burst into tears and sat down in one of the armchairs that lined the student lounge, staring disbelievingly down at the paper in her hands. Her friends squatted down next to her, patting her arm, but the woman was inconsolable.

  “My life is over,” she wailed.

  “Yes, outside,” I agreed, and our group moved quickly to get away from the frenzied crowd. The shouts of triumph were as disconcerting as the bitter moans. I clutched my envelope a little tighter, so that it creased in my hands, and wondered what it contained. A plum job at a top law firm, or years spent slogging it out with a firm of ambulance-chasers that ran cheesy commercials during daytime television and officed in a strip mall?

  “Out here,” Jen said, and she darted to the left, into the center courtyard of the law school. I’d never been back here before. The patio was full of wrought-iron garden tables and chairs, and apart from the six of us, it was deserted.

  “Are we supposed to be back here?” Dana asked doubtfully.

  “Not really,” Lexi said. She dropped her leather bag on a table and tore open her envelope, hesitating before she pulled the paper out. “Come on, you guys, don’t watch me. Don’t you want to open your own grades?”

  I looked down at the envelope. No, I did not want to open it. But my shaking fingers started to tear at the seal, acting all on their own. I heard the quiet sound of envelopes ripping around me, and I turned, so that my back was to my friends, before I pulled out the paper containing my grades and unfolded it.

  BENNETT, KATE E.

  TORTS, Gupta

  A-

  CONTRACTS I, Legrande

  A*

  CRIMINAL LAW, Hoffman

  C

  CIVIL PROCEDURE, Chandler

  A

  I stared at the paper, my eyes running over the list of grades again and again.

  Hoffman had given me a C.

  In theory, the As should have cushioned the C, but I’d never gotten a C before in my life…. The lowest grade I’d received in college was a B in my Mythology class the semester my parents had died, when I’d been walking around in a thick cloud of grief, wondering if I should have, as my adviser urged, taken the semester off.

  “So who’s going to go first?” Addison’s voice cracked through the silence. “Should we go around in a circle, or just announce it all at once?”

  I turned around, taking in the pale faces, the tight jaws, the hands clenching the thin papers that foretold our future more surely than a deck of tarot cards ever would. Dana alone was folding her paper back up and tucking it into the outside pocket of her knapsack.

  “I have to go,” she said abruptly, turning and walking quickly to the door that led back into the interior of the law school.

  “You okay, Dee?” Addison called after her, but she didn’t respond or look back, and we watched silently while the door closed behind her.

  “Maybe one of us should go after her,” I said.

  Addison shook his head. “She’ll be fine. She’s tougher than she looks,” he said.

  I looked at him quickly, but Addison’s face was closed. If he knew any of Dana’s secrets, he wasn’t sharing them.

  “Shit,” Jen said softly. She was staring down at her paper. “This isn’t good. I got two Cs and two Bs. That gives me a solid 2.5 GPA. Guess I’m out of the Law Review race, not that I had any hopes I’d be in it.”

  “I didn’t do much better,” Addison said. “I got a C-plus—in Contracts, that exam kicked my ass—a B-minus, and two Bs. Thankfully, they’re not going to tell us what our class rank is until the end of first year. I can only take so much bad news in one day.”

  “I actually did okay,” Lexi said. Her voice was thin with relief. “An A-minus, two B-pluses, and a B. I can’t believe I actually got an A-minus from Hoffman. I was sure I’d bombed that test.”

  A poisonous stream of jealousy snaked through me. Lexi had done better than me in Criminal Law? I’d studied twice as hard as she had. Hell, I’d been the one who outlined Crim for our study group. Le
xi—who’d never even gotten the principles of Resulting Harm down—had used my outline to get a better grade than I had.

  “Nick? Your turn,” Jen said.

  Nick colored, but he was smiling. “I did pretty well,” he admitted. “I got an A in Contracts, two A-minuses, and a B-plus.”

  Addison whistled. “Dude, that’s amazing.”

  “You’re going to make Law Review,” Jen said.

  “I don’t know about that,” Nick said, but I could tell that he was pleased.

  “All right, Kate, your turn,” Lexi said.

  “Hoffman gave me a C,” I said tightly. “And that was the class I was the most prepared for.”

  Jen sucked her breath in sympathetically as she lit a cigarette. The smell of butane from her Zippo lighter—a Christmas present from Addison to make up for all the cigarettes he bummed off her—floated through the air.

  “He’s an asshole,” Lexi said. “He’s been after you since the first day.”

  “How else did you do?” Nick asked.

  “Better,” I admitted. “I got an A in Civ Pro and an A-minus in Torts. And I think I got an A in Contracts, although there’s an asterisk next to the grade, and I don’t know what that means. Maybe it’s provisional or something.”

  “You got an asterisk?” Lexi asked, her voice sharp. I glanced at her, startled by the tone. Her lips were pinched up and her thin nostrils were flaring.

  Jen stared at me, shaking her head. She exhaled a plume of smoke and sat down heavily on one of the metal chairs. “You don’t know what that means?”

  “It means you fucking rocked the class,” Addison said. “You got the highest grade.”

  “What?” I asked, staring back at the paper. “How do you know that?”

  “They told us at orientation,” Nick said.

  “I wasn’t there,” I said.

  “It’s a big deal. They give you an award for it,” Jen said.

  “Congratulations, Kate. That’s great. I’ll see you guys later, have to get going,” Lexi said abruptly. She tucked her shiny dark hair behind her ear and stalked out of the courtyard. I stared after her.

  “What’s up with her?” I asked. “She did really well.”

  “But you did better,” Nick said.

  “And now she’s angry at me?”

  “Not angry. Jealous,” Nick said quietly.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When I was in the fifth grade, my school held a fire safety assembly. The local squad of firefighters was there, wearing the pants and black rubber boots of their uniforms strapped on with suspenders, their helmets perched on their heads. The fire chief had a thick Boston accent and dotted his speech with a lot of “ums” and “ahs” that suggested a lack of experience with public speaking. He explained to us how to check a closed door for fire on the other side, how to wedge damp towels at the bottom of the door to keep smoke from leaking in, and how second-story bedrooms should all have an emergency exit ladder rolled up in the closet. And then he gave us a handout, faded from the copying machine, to plan our family’s fire strategy.

  When I got home from school that day, I set myself up at the kitchen table with my drawing tablet and markers and drew a picture of our house, carefully labeling the exits and where everyone slept. My mom sat with me, sipping from a mug of chamomile tea, and we planned out what our emergency exit path would be and which of our neighbors’ driveways we would meet in.

  “We’re supposed to have a fire drill,” I’d said. “One night when we’re all asleep, you have to hold a match up to one of the smoke detectors, so that we can practice how to get out. We’re also supposed to get out our fire ladders, to make sure we know how to use them.”

  This was the exciting part. It’s not every day that you get to climb out your bedroom window.

  “We don’t have a fire ladder,” my mother had said. She blew on her tea, her breath making tiny ripples across the surface.

  “Then we have to get one,” I’d insisted. “The fire chief said that every second-story bedroom should have a fire ladder stored in the closet. He said it can make the difference between life and death.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get one,” Mom said, and she smiled at me with that distant look that I knew from experience meant she wasn’t really listening to me anymore. What did she think about when her thoughts wandered? Was she wondering what direction her life would have veered off in if she had accepted that postcollege job offer in Los Angeles instead of turning it down in favor of my dad’s marriage proposal? Or was she contemplating whether she should paint over the border of stenciled-on pineapples that circled the kitchen walls?

  I wish now that I’d thought to ask her.

  My parents never did get a ladder for my bedroom, and we never had an emergency fire drill. And for years after, I’d fall asleep worrying that someone would leave a candle burning too close to the drapes or that the toaster would spontaneously burst into flames, and we’d be totally unprepared for it. My parents wouldn’t remember which emergency exit they were supposed to take, nor where we were all supposed to meet up together outside, away from the danger of the fire.

  And I decided that if I had to get out my window, I’d knot my sheets together the way the fire chief had instructed, tie a corner to the bedpost, and lower myself down one inch at a time.

  “I thought I’d find you out here,” Nick said.

  I looked up at him from the faded orange plastic chair I was curled up in, a throw blanket warming my lap. Nick was standing at the French doors that led out to my petite balcony overlooking Magazine Street. It wasn’t much of a view—there was a boarded-up Cuban restaurant directly across the street, and next to that a burned-out storefront. There were some lovely homes nearby, but to see them I’d have to lean way over the balcony, and I didn’t have enough faith in my landlord’s maintenance of the wrought-iron railing to risk it.

  Nick sat down in the mate to my chair and glanced at the mug I was holding in my hands.

  “Coffee?” he asked. “I didn’t see any brewing when I came in.”

  Graham—who’d apparently memorized every crime statistic about New Orleans—nagged me to keep the doors to my apartment locked at all times, but I’d gotten in the habit of leaving the back door unlocked. All four tenants in our house shared the small paved backyard, and Nick and I could visit each other by climbing up and down the flight of wooden steps that led up to my back door. And since Nick shamelessly sponged coffee off me, it was easier to just leave the door unlocked for him, rather than get up every time he knocked.

  “Wine,” I said, nodding to the bottle of merlot resting next to my chair.

  “Pass it over,” Nick said. I handed him the wine, and he took a swig right from the bottle.

  “You’re all class,” I said. “Just don’t backwash.”

  The late afternoon was chilly and getting even colder as the sun shrank down from the sky, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to go back inside, where I knew I’d just end up staring at my grades, which I’d left facedown on my desk, as though that would somehow lessen their power.

  Lexi’s jealousy aside, I didn’t understand how I’d managed to get the highest grade in Contracts class. Of all my exams, that was the subject I’d been the shakiest on. My strongest subject had, ironically, been Crim. Fearing Hoffman’s wrath, I’d prepared for his class twice as thoroughly as the other classes and knew the case law inside and out. There was no way I could have done better in Contracts but so much worse in Criminal Law.

  Unless, of course, I was right and Hoffman had flagged my exam and purposely marked me down. Over the past few weeks, I’d tried to convince myself that I’d just imagined the whole thing, but now it seemed that my worst fear had been realized. It could have been worse, I thought. I could have gotten one of the three Ds Hoffman was rumored to have given out. But somehow that didn’t make me feel much better.

  “Congrats on your grades,” Nick said. He held up the bottle in a toast, and I clinked my mug agains
t it.

  “You too,” I said. “You really did amazing. I haven’t heard of anyone who’s done better.”

  Nick shook his head. “I’m sure that’s not true. And you did just as well. Even better, Asterisk Girl.”

  “Did you talk to Dana?” I asked.

  “No, but Add saw her later. She told him she did fine. All As and Bs,” Nick said.

  “So why was she so upset?”

  “I don’t think she’s used to getting anything other than straight As.”

  “At least she didn’t get a C,” I said ruefully, taking a swig of wine.

  Nick was quiet. “You should talk to Dean Sullivan about your Criminal Law grade,” he finally said.

  “No way.”

  “Then why don’t you talk to someone else in the administration? Like Dean Spitzer?”

  “Because he wouldn’t take me seriously. No one would. They’ll want to know why I didn’t make the Honor Code complaint right after the Crim exam. It’ll sound like I’m only complaining now because I got a low grade. Which is true,” I said.

  “Maybe they’ll talk to Hoffman. Or transfer you into a different Con Law class,” Nick said.

  “It didn’t do any good to complain last time,” I said. I stretched my legs out, so that one white Tretorn sneaker poked out from underneath the blanket, and balanced my foot against the black metal bars that surrounded the balcony. “I’m just going to try to stay out of Hoffman’s way this semester. Not give him any reason to go after me.”

  “Sounds like the safest course of action,” Nick said.

  His words hit me the wrong way. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just what I said,” Nick said.

  “No, you said it in a pointy way.”