Yes, I’m generalizing, but my opinion is based on my experience. Did they really know how difficult life was? Well, at some point they will get a rude awakening; at least, I hoped so.
Technically, my sisters were part of the Millennial, or Generation Y, segment of the population. However, having lost our father when we were all young, we knew what it was like to have to work for everything. Our mother had to go back to work after our father died, so a lot of the time there was no one at home for us. There was just me. From the time I was fourteen years old, my “youth” had basically consisted of cooking for my sisters, driving them around, and generally making sure that they were safe and stayed out of trouble. I didn’t go out with friends or have anything resembling a social life. But I hadn’t really minded, either. I preferred to be alone with my thoughts than out with vacuous, superficial people who didn’t appreciate what they had.
I was brought out of my reminiscing when I saw Eric, a friend of mine. He greeted me with a shoulder bump. One time he had tried to chest-bump me. Ah, I don’t think so, Eric, I had told him.
After the shoulder bump, he greeted me with a kiss on each cheek. Eric had a Brazilian father and an American mother, but had grown up in Brazil and had adopted the Latin American way of greeting, which was familiar to me and was how I always greeted my family and Latin friends.
Eric was a couple of inches taller than me, and had an easy smile. He was always laughing. He was attractive with a shock of thick, dark brown hair and beautiful blue eyes. He was also about nine years younger than me. He had started the full-time law program when I was in my second year, so we would graduate the same year. Eric was also an amazing dancer, with easy, fluid moves that seemed totally natural.
“¿¡Isabel, como estas?!” Eric spoke Portuguese and Spanish. I would occasionally practice Portuguese with him, but we mostly spoke in Spanish and English, depending on who else we were speaking with at the time.
“Estoy bien, lo mismo,” I shrugged.
“What, do you have a hot date tonight?” he asked, looking me up and down. Eric also joked a ton, and liked to embarrass me. I usually just brushed him off. If he really pissed me off, I would give him the finger. For some reason, he thought it was hilarious that a well-put-together woman would flip him off, and he always laughed when I did it, even if I was angry. He was probably riling me up on purpose, but I almost always enjoyed our exchanges.
I think that Eric gravitated toward Josh, another Latin friend, and me because he had come to DC straight from Brazil and didn’t really know anyone. He spoke English very well, though, since he had always spoken it with his mother. He was friendly with everyone but mostly hung out with Josh and me. Eric and I were going to be in Criminal Procedure class together.
“Josh and I are sitting over there, if you want to join us,” Eric said, pointing to a small table in what the students referred to as the “lounge” area. I went to join Josh.
Josh and Melanie were my best friends at law school. The three of us had started the evening program together. Josh was the same age as me, and worked full-time for a law firm doing patent work. He had a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering. Despite that fact, he also had a great sense of humor. Josh had a Venezuelan father and a blonde American mother. He and I spoke sometimes in Spanish, and sometimes in English.
When he saw me, Josh stood up and greeted me with two kisses, just like Eric. I had trained both of them to greet me with two kisses, which was the proper greeting in Spain. The first time Josh greeted me, it was with only one kiss on the cheek, and he embarrassingly left me hanging, with my face in the air waiting for the other kiss. “¡En España son dos!” I had said. From then on, he had tried to remember.
“How’s it going?” Josh asked then.
“All right,” I told him. I sat down and took out my Criminal Procedure book.
Josh was taller than me, about 5'10", with dark blond hair that was quite wavy, and brown eyes. He wasn’t as skinny as Eric; he practiced martial arts, and was in shape. I had always thought Josh was handsome. And he was a real gentleman, which was rare enough these days. He opened doors for me and even offered to give up his seat on the metro.
Since I had met him, I thought it strange that he didn’t have a girlfriend. He said there weren’t that many eligible women where he worked, and, in any case, he didn’t think it too prudent to date anyone where he worked. He was probably right about that.
Even though Josh was great, I wasn’t interested in him romantically. He and I had political differences, and argued about them constantly. I said he wasn’t being logical, and he said I didn’t know what I was talking about. Eric always tried to veer us away from these arguments.
Josh was like a brother to me and, like I had told my mother countless times when she asked about my love life, I couldn’t picture being in a romantic relationship with him. My mother thought I should be more open-minded, that I should go out and meet people and just have fun.
Fun. What the hell does that mean? If “fun” means “sex,” then that was no problem because I could pretty much get all the sex I wanted.
But sex for me at this point was only the fulfillment of a physiological need. Well, sometimes it was “fun.” It wasn’t really romantic, but I didn’t think that I needed romance, anyway.
Fun for me was arguing in law school class and pulling an A+ on an exam. Well, “fun” was also occasionally going out dancing with Josh and Eric, and occasionally laughing at jokes that they made. So I do occasionally have “fun” as my mother would describe it. I almost smiled. Maybe I wasn’t totally a lost cause.
“Did you do the reading?” I asked Josh.
“No,” he smiled.
Of course he didn’t. Josh rarely did all of the reading, but he was smart enough to do decently on the exams.
Just then a small blonde girl came over to talk to Josh. She gave me a deep scowl. I smirked at her in derision.
Why Josh tolerated this girl, I would never know. Josh was nice to everyone. That was his best quality and also his main character flaw, in my opinion.
This girl was Sorority Girl. Her name was Ashley, or Adriana, or Alyssa, or something with an A or an R. I didn’t remember because I didn’t care to. In fact, I wish that I could erase every trace of memory about this girl from my brain, because I couldn’t even stand to think about her.
I called her Sorority Girl, or SG for short. She had started in the evening program, and she had transferred to the full-time program. So she would graduate this coming May, and I wouldn’t have to see her ever again, hopefully.
Sorority Girl represented all that I hated about the law school crowd that was in law school only because they didn’t know what the hell to do with themselves, and Mommy and Daddy were paying for their tuition and their posh condos.
She was short, bottle-blonde and super skinny. Her parents had graced her with a trendy name so that people would automatically adore her.
She also wasn’t very smart. She had been in all of my first-year classes and had hardly ever spoken. However, when she did speak in class, her comments made absolutely no sense. My friend Dinesh especially couldn’t stand her or her comments. When she spoke, Dinesh put his hands over his ears and shook his head. I totally tuned her out.
She felt so entitled. She hung around with a bunch of guys who fawned over her and her blondeness. Dinesh and I couldn’t stand how she talked about her weekend conquests. She hated me because I totally laid her out a bunch of times in class. She also hated me because she had heard the rumor that I had a 4.0, and she wanted to get better grades than me, of course. Don’t know how the hell she expected to do that, anyway.
The rumor was true, I was happy to admit, although I never officially talked about my grades with anyone.
As soon as Sorority Girl saw me now, she said something quickly to Josh, and then left. She hated being anywhere near me. Well, the feeling is entirely mutual.
Melanie joined us then.
“Hey!” she greet
ed me animatedly. I stood up and gave her a huge hug.
Melanie and I went way back. “I missed you,” I told her.
“I missed you too!” she said. Melanie was beautiful; she was about my height, lean with light caramel-colored skin and huge, bright brown eyes. She had short, dark hair that framed her gorgeous face. God, her skin is perfect; not one flaw. I looked in the mirror and all I saw were dark circles under my eyes and lines at the outer points when I smiled. I tried not to smile too often.
Melanie was in the evening program too. She worked as a paralegal in a law firm in the city. Like me, she was dressed professionally, having come straight from work. She preferred sundresses over business attire, though. I always knew when she hadn’t gone to work because she would come to class in a sundress and strappy sandals.
“Oh my God, you look great!” she told me then, elongating the words in her Texas drawl. “Turn around!”
I obliged her as she adjusted her dark-rimmed eyeglasses. Sometimes she also slightly embarrassed me. She didn’t mean to. I just didn’t like having attention drawn to myself.
“You look incredible in that skirt!”
Thank you, I thought, for drawing everyone’s attention to my ass.
“Thanks,” I said.
Melanie was, like Josh, a true friend. I would trust her with almost anything. That was another reason I was happy to have gone to law school. I had more friends than I had had before.
Melanie asked how my sisters were. I was telling her that Ariel had moved in with her boyfriend about three or four months ago, and they were happy.
I envied my sisters their happy relationships. I always told my mother that I didn’t need a man, and that was (partly) true. I needed occasional physical contact but I didn’t need a man around all the time. I could do everything myself.
“It’s better to be alone than to be with someone who is not a good partner for you,” I had told my mother.
“Yes, I agree,” she had responded, “but I don’t believe that in a city as big as Washington, DC, there is no man that could be a good partner for you.”
She was wrong about that, I knew. First, in this town, there were many more eligible women than men. Second, the eligible men in DC were all jerks. You only had to listen to one of Melanie’s dating stories to know that.
“Men don’t really ask women on dates anymore,” Melanie had said. “It’s sad. They text to ask you what you’re up to that night, and you know that at the same time they’re texting like twenty other women, and that their end goal is just to hook up.”
Melanie had stories about meeting men to go out, men who had asked her out and then who stuck her with the bill, who left her to go dance with other girls, and other such abominations.
My way was easier. Just sex and no strings attached. No relationships. No dinners out. No paying for anyone. I’m gone before the morning and no phone calls afterward.
But then I would go home alone and would feel empty. I would go to sleep alone and wake up alone. It didn’t matter. I didn’t want a relationship anyway.
“You have to live,” my mother had told me once, before law school, when all I was doing was working. “If you live, I mean, really live your life, good things will happen to you.”
“I have been living my life,” I had told her. Besides, what my Mom said wasn’t true. We were living our lives and then Dad died. But I hadn’t said that to her.
“No, you haven’t,” she had corrected me. “You go through the motions. And you’re looking for something. When you’re constantly looking for something, you won’t find it. You have to live.”
What the hell is she talking about? I had thought. More profound words of wisdom from the overly dramatic Argentine oracle.
I hadn’t known how right she was, but I was about to find out.
It was about 5:40 p.m.. I got up to walk upstairs to Crim Pro. Melanie, unfortunately, wasn’t in our Crim Pro class, but we would have Property together on Wednesday, so we said goodbye until then.
“Let’s go,” I said to Josh and Eric. “I want to get a seat up front.”
Josh was talking to some girl I didn’t know. He was always talking to some girl.
“Of course you do. I’ll be right there,” Josh said. “Save me a seat.”
“I’ll try.”
I grabbed my bag and my purse and headed upstairs. Eric came with me.
The classroom for Crim Pro was one of the largest lecture halls on campus, stadium-style. It could probably accommodate about 200 students. At the front was a desk, a podium and a microphone for the professor. In front of the seats were long tables, shared by the students. There were three sets of these tables and chairs, one set in the middle and two on the sides.
The room was already full of students, and it was loud. Everyone was chatting excitedly, and the energy in the room was palpable. I smiled to myself sardonically. In about twelve weeks, the animation in this room would turn to tension, and another week after that it would turn to sheer terror as final exams rounded the corner.
I walked toward the front of the room. My theory was that the further to the front I sat, the better my final grade would be. I theorized that that was because I paid more attention, since the professor was looking right at me and I couldn’t start to daydream. I also had the idea that the people who sat far in the back were called on more frequently. So sitting in the front would also give me a bit of a respite. At least, that was my theory.
I sat in the center section of chairs, in the second seat from the right, if you were the professor looking at the classroom. I saved the seat on the end for Josh.
Eric sat behind me. “The second row is too far up front,” he told me. “But I’ll compromise and sit in the third row.”
I put my Crim Pro book on the table to my left, in front of the seat I had saved for Josh. Then I took out a protein bar and started munching. I wouldn’t eat dinner for another three and a half hours. After working out at lunchtime, I never knew how hungry I would be later.
Dinesh walked in then. He was Indian, but had obtained his Ph.D. in the U.S. Since then he had been working for a law firm in DC doing patent work. He and Josh had a lot in common, and the three of us hung out pretty frequently. Our first year, we had had a standing Thursday night drink date. Our second year had been busier, and we had gone out less frequently. Josh and Dinesh both had jobs that were higher-pressure than mine. They often had to go back to work after class, but I always headed home. As patent agents working for firms, they had billable hours to meet. I had deadlines at work, but fortunately I didn’t have to bill a minimum number of hours.
Dinesh sat to my right. The seats were filling up quickly.
“What’s going on?!” I asked him animatedly. Dinesh was very friendly and was always laughing about something. He was a good guy.
He smiled. “Not much. How have you been?”
“All right. No complaints.” That is, no complaints other than my usual ones about politics, the Millennials, the fate of the world, my own mortality, my mother, etc.
“Have you already done all the reading for the first three weeks?” Dinesh asked me then, on the verge of laughing.
“Of course! I have a reputation to maintain.” I smiled.
Dinesh laughed.
“No, dude, seriously, I’ve only done the first week’s reading,” I told him truthfully.
“Where’s Josh?” he asked.
“Downstairs, talking to some girl I don’t know.” I shrugged and gave Dinesh a half-annoyed look. “He told me to save him a seat but if he doesn’t get here soon he’ll be SOL.” I had already given three people dirty looks, in effect telling them not to sit there.
“Excuse me, is this seat taken?” a deep voice said to my left.
I whipped my head around to say “yes” but my words instantly left me.
I was staring at possibly the sexiest man I had ever seen.
He wasn’t very tall, a few inches taller than me. He was lean, and most defi
nitely Arab, with light brown skin and piercing, dark eyes. His eyes were alive and alert. His hair was jet black, thick and curly. He must put some product in it, otherwise it would be frizzy.
He also had a carefully trimmed beard and goatee. It wasn’t a full beard; it was barely enough to cover his jaw. It looked like he had just trimmed it. Of course. A day program student who had probably woken up at like 3 p.m.
I had never seen him before. I would definitely have noticed him. He must have transferred here or something.
I finally found my voice. I don’t know what possessed me to say it, but instead of my usual gravelly, intense stare, and words of dismissal, I said something else.
“It was but—I don’t think he’s coming so—go ahead,” I said without smiling. I took my book away from the spot I had been saving for Josh.
“Thank you,” he said, smiling. His smile was gorgeous and it lit up his eyes.
I hadn’t been particularly friendly. He looked younger than me. He was clearly a Millennial, and I couldn’t stand most of them. I had also had enough of foreign men at work. He probably has aspirations to work on the Hill, maybe to work for some pro-Arab lobbying group. He was probably one of those people who thought that the U.S. was a horrible country that must atone for all the wrong it did in the world. DC law schools were populated with people like that.
Well, he was eye candy, anyway. I didn’t mind looking at him, but I wouldn’t talk to him.
I flipped open my laptop and turned it on. I began scanning the first case for that night, which I had already read, and looked over the sections I had highlighted. I logged into my personal email account to check if I had any messages from my sisters. I was admiring my nail polish, dark burgundy, almost black, when an instant message popped up from Eric.
Josh will be mad that you gave his seat to that Arab guy you think is hot.
I wrote back.
I don’t think he’s hot.
That’s a lie, Isabel. He is totally your type.
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