“Um, I’m not the boss here so . . .” I made a gesture with my hands, indicating that I guessed he could sit there if he wanted to. If I were the boss at this school things would be so different.
He sat down, then greeted the girl behind me in Arabic.
Dude, if he knows her then why didn’t he sit next to her?!
Then I thought, of course he knows her. All the Arabic speakers at the school seemed to hang out together.
I put in my earbuds and turned on my music to drown out the chatter so that I could review my notes for the cases tonight. My smooth Reggaeton came on.
The music made me want to get up and dance. Instead, I settled for bobbing my head and moving my shoulders to the music.
My left shoulder itched where my bra strap was. It was still hot outside and I was a little bit sweaty, especially on my back where I had carried my backpack. I took my jacket off and draped it on the back of my chair.
I put my left hand lazily on the my left shoulder and moved my bra strap about a centimeter to the side, and scratched a little bit, not like a man-scratch, but slowly. I was aware that my bra strap was probably showing, but I didn’t care.
Then I felt a strange sensation. I couldn’t explain it. I suddenly had the urge to look to my left. I did so, and the Arab guy was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. I gave him a cold stare. He saw me and looked away quickly.
I shook my head. Looking is free, anyway. That’s all you’ll ever get to do, look.
But I wasn’t so sure that was right. A part of me believed that maybe he wasn’t as bad as I thought, that maybe he didn’t have ulterior motives or that maybe he really was just polite.
No, he’s like any other Millennial and any other foreign man I’ve ever met. They’re never any different. Jesus, Isabel, get a grip.
Class started. I turned my music off and took my earbuds out.
I left International Law class in a rush since I only had ten minutes until my next class began. I couldn’t believe that the Arab guy was in that class too, and that he had had the audacity to sit next to me.
On the whole, I didn’t really have a problem with it since he was eye candy, at least for me. I suddenly thought of my sister Lara then. She didn’t like goatees, but she wasn’t the one that had to look at him four days a week, so that was all right.
But his presence next to me was distracting. I found myself not wanting to make a fool out of myself for some reason. What the hell do I care what he thinks about me?
I don’t care what anyone thinks about me.
I walked to my Property class, which started at six p.m. Josh, Dinesh, Eric and Melanie were all in that class too. The gang would be all there, and I was looking forward to it. However, it would be impossible to save all of them seats, so I figured I wouldn’t save any.
I entered the classroom, which was a bit smaller than our Crim Pro class, but still stadium-style with three sections.
I sat in the center section, again in the second row, in the last seat on the right if you were the professor looking at the class. Melanie was already sitting in the seat behind me and Eric was next to her. The three of us greeted each other. I again hung my jacket on the back of my chair.
I took out my textbook and opened my laptop, switching it on. The property cases were dense, and I had read over them twice in preparation for class. I scanned my notes and the sections I had highlighted.
Suddenly, someone said, “Excuse me” and gingerly pushed past me.
Annoyed, I pulled myself further into the table to let whoever it was pass. Then I realized that that lilt sounded familiar.
I looked up a little to the right. Holy shit, that Arab dude. He sat to my right. Jesus Christ.
I looked away quickly, but not before sneaking a look at Melanie behind me. She was raising her eyebrows and gesturing toward me and, not so inconspicuously, toward him. OK, so apparently Eric wasn’t the only one who thought that this dude was my type.
The Arab guy started to set up his laptop and I saw him sneak a look at me out of the corner of my eye. I decided not to acknowledge his presence. He had deigned to talk to me earlier in the other class, but I had the impression that here he was a little intimidated because I had my posse with me.
OK, I figured. It’s not such a big deal that we have the same classes. If he had transferred here, he would have to take Property. The other two classes were coincidental, since they were electives.
The truth was, I was kind of a fatalist. My sister Ariel had told me that meant that I was a romantic to some degree, but I didn’t agree with her.
“It’s not the same thing,” I had said.
She had ignored me. “It is. But Isabel, you can’t mean that you don’t have control over your own destiny.”
“Oh, I believe that you do,” I had corrected her.
“Then you’re not a fatalist.”
“I believe that there are things beyond your control, and how you deal with them is up to you.”
“OK, so you’re like a fatalist ‘light,’ ” she had said, smiling.
I guess I was. Some things were fate, and some things were your own making.
I was abruptly brought out of my reminiscing.
“Hey, Isabel,” Eric said then, and I could hear the laughter in his voice. Shit, he was about to embarrass me.
“Got any hot dates or hookups planned this weekend?”
Ugh, I had been right.
“Screw you, jackass,” was my reply. I didn’t even look back at him.
Then I heard Josh’s voice. He had sat next to that Arab guy. Great. Now Josh and I would have to converse across this guy all semester. That was going to be awkward.
“She probably has a long line of men waiting. She makes them take numbers,” he told Eric.
Ugh. De Guatemala a Guatapeor. From bad to worse.
“Leave her alone, you guys,” Melanie said, the only one who came to my defense.
Dinesh had come in and had sat behind Josh, next to Eric.
“What’s this about having a hot date, Isabel?”
That was it. I would stop this before they got to talking about my hookup habits.
I whirled around, so fast that I saw the surprised look on Dinesh’s face.
“That’s it!” I was pissed off, but embarrassed as well. I didn’t want the whole school to know about what I did on my “time off,” so to speak.
“The three of you, shut up right now! Or—” I was staring them down, pointing my finger.
They were all looking at me. I saw the Arab guy trying to sneak a look at me out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t dare look directly at me.
“Or what?” Eric said, laughing.
I had an epiphany then. “Or none of you will get any of my notes for the rest of the semester. No! For the rest of the year! I don’t care what the reason is. I don’t care if you broke a nail, or if you got the swine flu, I don’t care!”
“Jesus, Isabel, OK,” Eric said, and his smile immediately disappeared. He, most of all, couldn’t risk me not sending him any notes. Otherwise, Eric would actually have to pay attention in class and do the reading without relying on me to help him. The three of them all knew that my notes were excellent, too. Josh and Dinesh wouldn’t be able to survive without me sending them notes when they had to miss class to work late.
But I wasn’t done.
I continued in an angry half-whisper. “And don’t talk about me or to me for the rest of this class or I will seriously reconsider my relationship with you three. In fact, I’m already wondering what the hell I get in return for giving you my notes when you don’t bother to show up.”
I turned around to face my laptop screen and Eric had written me a message. “Do you mean for the rest of this class today or the rest of class this semester?”
“Shut up!” I said out loud, glaring at Eric. A guy sitting in front of me jumped out of his seat.
“But I didn’t say anything!”
“That goes for
electronic and phone communication, too.”
Dinesh was holding in a laugh. I turned around and faced my screen. Then I heard something. I swiveled my head slightly to the right.
The Arab guy was laughing a little, very softly, trying not to draw attention to himself.
I softened a bit. I suppose that if I had been an outsider during that exchange, I would have laughed, too.
I couldn’t help smiling. It actually was funny how I had put the three of them in their place so quickly.
“If you think that’s funny, you should see us on the weekends,” I said in a low, neutral tone of voice, without looking away from my screen.
The Arab guy looked at me then, turning his head a little to the left. He still didn’t dare look at me directly. I got the feeling that he wasn’t sure whether I was talking to him or not.
I smiled and continued reviewing my notes.
Then he spoke. “Is that an invitation?” he asked, almost under his breath, in his soft French accent.
Still looking at my computer screen, I put an incredulous, what-the-hell look on my face.
“No,” I said carefully, not moving at all.
“Who is she talking to?” I heard Dinesh ask Eric.
“I don’t think she’s talking to us,” Eric replied.
Class had ended. I had a meeting that night for one of the few extracurricular groups I was involved in, not that I was that involved in them. But at least at the beginning of the semester I felt obliged to attend the meetings. There would also be free pizza there, and that would take care of dinner.
I had tried to persuade Josh to attend.
“No thanks,” he had said with a mischievous grin, “I’m really not that interested in the Federalist Society.”
“Well, we probably wouldn’t want you there anyway,” I had told him.
I didn’t bother asking Eric. Eric wasn’t serious about much, except for Law Review. I couldn’t believe he had made Law Review. I had to admit, though, that he was intelligent. But he also liked to party. Work hard, play hard, that was his motto.
Dinesh didn’t do any extracurriculars either. He was swamped with work as it was and his firm was paying his law school tuition, so of course he felt obliged to exceed his billable hours.
Melanie was in a rush to get home that night.
So there was only me.
I grabbed my stuff and said goodbye to my friends, ignoring the Arab guy. I literally ran out of the classroom and found the room where the meeting was going to be held. People were already helping themselves to pizza.
The Federalist Society is a national organization that has law school chapters for law students. It’s a group of conservatives and libertarians who are interested in protecting the Constitution. Now that I think about it, you don’t need to be conservative or libertarian to respect the Constitution, but what do I know?
The group is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to the United States Constitution, and that it is the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be. I certainly agreed with the group’s ideas that there were too many activist judges, who wanted to craft the law as they thought it should be instead of deferring to the law as written. It made me depressed to think about how some “progressives” in this town wanted to bypass the Constitution.
I was busy enough without doing the extracurricular stuff, but I wanted to be involved and do something before the very principles on which this country was founded were eroded.
I dropped my stuff at the end of one of the long tables and grabbed some pizza. Not my ideal dinner, but it would do.
I sat down and started munching. I didn’t eat daintily after eight p.m. I ate like a ravenous horse. By this time, I was usually starving. If my mother could see me now, shoving food down my throat like a frat brother.
“You should be more ladylike,” she would say.
I wanted something to do because I really didn’t know anyone here that well, so I took out my Crim Pro book and started looking at next week’s cases. I was able to tune out most noise. At work, I had to translate almost all day in a cube environment, with other people talking around me. I was used to tuning them out.
I continued shoving pizza in my face until the meeting was called to order. At that point, I wiped my mouth, swallowed the last bit of food and took a sip from my water bottle. Then I looked up.
I’d be damned if that Arab guy wasn’t sitting in the row in front of me, two seats to the right. He was looking to the left a little bit and when our eyes met, he smiled briefly. I quickly whipped my head away and looked to the front, to focus on the speaker.
An Arab dude in the Federalist Society? This had to be a first.
Maybe he was doing opposition research. He wouldn’t be the first person to do that, I was sure.
My cousins in Spain had this saying that two coincidences were just that, coincidences, but three “coincidences” were not coincidences at all. Well, this guy was in all three of my classes and was here too. Maybe this wasn’t a coincidence at all. Was I a fatalist or way too paranoid? I didn’t know.
I got home late that night, but was still a little wired. I put water to boil to make herbal tea and turned on my laptop.
After deliberating for a couple of minutes, I said out loud, “Screw it.”
I went to the university’s law school homepage, and logged into my account. Fortunately, you could search by your registered classes and get a list of the students in that particular class.
I brought up the list of students in my International Law class, since that class was smaller and, hence, the list would be more manageable. The students were listed in alphabetical order with their photos and full names.
I saw the photo of the Muslim girl who sat behind me. Her name was Zara. A beautiful name.
Then I found who I was looking for. The Arab dude.
His name was Tarek Cordiez. His last name immediately piqued my interest. I had thought that his French accent when he spoke English was because he was from a Middle Eastern country that was a former French colony and, therefore, would still have French-system schools. I had assumed that he had learned Arabic and French simultaneously and, subsequently, English, and that that explained why he spoke English with a bit of a French accent.
However, his last name was French. At first glance, some people may think it was Spanish, pronouncing it “Cor-dee-es” or, in peninsular Castilian, “Cor-dee-eth.”
In all earnestness, it was difficult to definitively ascertain the exact origin of the name Cordiez. However, first, it was decidedly not Arabic. Second, while it was possible that, linguistically, it did not derive from French, I had encountered the name as a last name of French people.
This bit of knowledge was actually informative. It told me that this guy’s father’s family was most likely French. In fact, maybe even his father himself was French. That would also explain why his skin tone was a bit lighter than that of the other Arabs at the university.
It would also explain why this guy seemed to be more approachable than the other Arabs I knew, both at work and on campus. There was an intensity about him, but there was also a kind of openness. He certainly wasn’t going out of his way to avoid me. In fact, now that I considered it, there was something decidedly French about his mannerisms, about the way he held himself and his expressions, and also the way he held (or tried to hold) my gaze when our eyes met. It was almost like a playfulness, with his eyes alive and twinkling. That was typical of French men. When I lived in Paris, I had actually found it quite attractive.
Okay, so he grew up in France, or at least lived there for a while. Or, alternatively, he had a French father, from whom he picked up those mannerisms.
I was very interested now. Maybe he wasn’t doing opposition research at the Federalist Society meeting after all. Maybe he, like me, an immigrant or the child of immigrants, had embraced the opportunities
and the civil liberties that our families were denied in their home countries.
Don’t get ahead of yourself. For all you know, this guy is just after a good lay. Well, weren’t we all?
Except that this “guy” had a name now. Tarek. I immediately regretted looking up his name. Now he was a person instead of some lame law-school non-entity. A person with an actual name was much harder to ignore than a nameless, faceless, vapid, verbal diarrhea-spouting law school student.
Tarek. It was an aesthetic-sounding name. Well, Tarek, it looks like it’s going to be quite a long semester.
I had no idea how right I was.
FIRST WEEK: THURSDAY
Our International Law professor was nice and very young. It was a depressing thought that my professor was younger than me. He was counsel at a prestigious law firm, and had clerked at the International Court of Justice.
I had briefly entertained the idea of working in public international law, but had come to the conclusion that that type of law was too aspirational, too pie-in-the-sky. The ICJ decisions had no enforcement mechanisms which, sometimes, was a good thing. The bottom line was that it seemed to be to be a complete waste of time.
Yesterday, the first day of class, the professor had talked about how the ICJ decisions were educational and instructive. It was a different way of looking at the law.
I preferred contracts, transactions, things I could sink my teeth into. I liked to get lost in the little details. Interpreting legal language was, on some level, not unlike my day job translating foreign-language documents.
Class had started. The Arab guy, uh, I mean, Tarek, was next to me, as usual. He was wearing a long-sleeve button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and jeans. God, he looked good. I didn’t dare look too closely. I didn’t want him to catch me looking at him. I took a breath and directed my attention to the professor at the front of the class.
About halfway into the class, I was beginning to lose my patience. The professor had been talking about, theoretically, whether or not the Supreme Court should formally consider ICJ decisions and international law and treaties in its decisions. Some lame punk was commenting that the Supreme Court should, in fact, do so. That made no sense, in my mind.
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