Blending Out

by Priyanka Bagrodia

  Without the protection of Jane and Lisa, she soon realized she was unfortunately not all that close to the broader friend group. The epiphany had come when she overheard two of them talking about a Secret Santa/Friendsgiving Extravaganza and realized they’d planned it without her, Jane, and Lisa—quite aggressively in October. So, although she still sat with them at lunch and still went with them to the movies, she was sourcing her options. She couldn’t forgive a Friendsgiving slight, and maybe she could hang out with high schoolers who lived the lives they showed in the movies.

  All too soon, they arrived at Anu’s house and Ryley walked up the familiar cobblestone pathway, ducking under a loquat tree peppered with small white flowers. Ryley, Anu, Harrison, and a couple of the other Indian kids had spent an afternoon in the spring plucking the small golden orbs and eating so many they’d all passed out, queasy, in the soft, freshly mowed grass with their sacks of loquats dumped beside them. It was one of her favorite memories of this house—the easy, wholesome fun, the way Anu’s mother had come out and brought them freshly-squeezed lemonade, while Anu’s father had run to get them a ladder to get the hard-to-reach loquats. Even before Anu pushed open the white wooden door, Ryley could hear tinkling laughter and shouts of Hindi as someone told the punchline to a joke. As the two girls entered the kitchen, the women, gathered at the table, immediately turned to them; the men were most certainly gathered outside.

  Ryley’s mom was in the middle of recounting stories from the fourth day of her cousin’s seven-day wedding, but immediately stopped mid-story to ask Ryley, “How did the event go?”

  Ryley gave her mother and the rest of the women a generic summary of the event, leaving out reference to the word assignments. That detail would be shared with her mother privately. Blessedly, Anu lost interest and left the kitchen as soon as Ryley began talking, so there was no one to fact check her generally upbeat, positive review. Her mother eyed Ryley suspiciously, undoubtedly knowing she was giving her audience a heavily redacted version of the event when the normally loquacious Ryley finished her overview in two minutes.

  Regardless, her mother didn’t push and began talking about the wedding again. Ryley tuned her out. She had felt incredibly ill-at-ease during that wedding and had no desire to relive the experience during story-time. Over the week-long objectively joyous affair, her extended family had flipped between English and Hindi easily, getting impatient with Ryley as she’d stumbled through wedding traditions core to their culture. They were almost overwhelmingly warm and loving, pushing helping after helping of food at her, but she could sense their surprise and dismay at how foreign she was. Although Ryley’s mother had not said anything, she’d seen the way they had looked at her mom disappointedly. As Ryley had predicted, the earrings had done minimal damage control.

  Feeling claustrophobic, Ryley yanked the screen door open, causing an unfortunate screech that sounded like a dying hyena to resonate through the house before settling down near her dad. She liked the cadence of his measured, confident voice as he talked about the economy. She began to nod along, happy to be sitting with the men, and happy to show support for whatever her dad was saying.

  Unfortunately, her enthusiastic nodding caused him to turn to her and ask, “Oh, Ryley, what do you think?”

  Flinching inside, she offered her half-baked opinion, formed on the basis of three articles she’d read.

  Her dad didn’t say anything for a couple of moments, but then he exclaimed, “Isn’t the American education system wonderful?” and she felt like a star once again. Unfortunately, too soon, the men inevitably fell back into speaking in Hindi, forgetting where they were momentarily as they riffed off each other, transported back to home and jokes she didn’t understand.

  Every time this group of Indian transplants gathered, Ryley would see them shed their American shell and emerge whole, and she would’ve liked to join them and pull out a fully developed Indian self from inside; however, her Indian self was a larva at best and even less developed than her American one. That had been made transparently clear at the wedding. So, instead, she tried to respect the order of things in this safe space of theirs, and when the women inevitably came to serve the men snacks, Ryley reluctantly and sadly hopped up to join them in bringing out everything for the men. She would’ve liked to ask why this was the done way, why this dynamic existed, but she stayed silent. She wouldn’t have minded so much if she had the easy possessiveness, the fond nostalgia for a home no one could doubt she belonged to, instead of looking through the window at them.

  CHAPTER 8

  NOVEMBER 2018

  Ryley skidded into Property, barely getting settled into her seat before Professor Kilmer started talking. They’d lost about a fifth of the class at this point; these students had realized attendance wasn’t actually mandatory and didn’t count toward the grade, so they’d just started skipping, deciding they might as well learn from supplements and materials online than risk being humiliated through a cold call. Ryley had yet to miss a single class; she couldn’t fathom the idea of not showing up at all. A lifetime of being a participator could do that to a girl.

  She swiveled her head around now to see if David was there. He also had yet to miss a single class, and there he was, shooting her a grin from the front row. He was quite serious and regularly spoke in class, but he would only ever raise his hand to give a measured, unique opinion. Nothing that could be read off textbook pages. Certainly, he had never played coy about his ambitions: he wanted to be a judge, someone of influence, and had made clear that academics would take precedence over everything else for him. But he showered her with compliments and emphasized her social fluency and level-headedness. They’d spent the last couple of months feeling each other out, and he’d finally asked her out last week; they were planning to get dinner together that night. She was thrilled she was doing the grad school experience right. She didn’t let herself think about it much beyond that.

  As Professor Kilmer glanced over at her now, she realized she hadn’t finished setting up and belatedly pulled out her name placard though she would’ve liked to keep it in her bag to see if he remembered her name. She forced herself to start writing as the professor began his lecture in earnest, finding it helped her to pay attention and prevented her from completely drifting off. It was only when Mark raised his hand to ask a question and launched the class into a discussion about ethics, outside the scope of the homework assignment, that she gave herself permission to start drawing little stick figures with small, pointed swords engaged in a furious war with each other. She drew upside-down Vs on all their heads, gave them all slight chests and hips, and felt good about it. She was unfortunately limited by her artistic capabilities, so she couldn’t come up with too ornate backstories for any of her characters, but she’d replaced her daydreaming with doodling out of necessity. She was trying to focus, and she only allowed herself to doodle when it was an absolute necessity for her brain to take a mental vacation during class; during those not infrequent occurrences when Mark asked a question unrelated to the subject matter.

  She was still generally confident she would pull through, that everything would be okay when she buckled down and started studying for finals, but her recent memo performance had startled her. In their Legal Research and Writing class, a hallmark class of One-L, they’d been tasked with writing a memo summarizing the rule of law on a given issue. The “grade” didn’t count for anything and instead was just meant to serve as a temperature check of sorts, in case certain students such as Ryley were deluded enough to think they were doing fine when in reality they weren’t. But Ryley refused to let herself worry about it. She knew it was just a fluke. She hadn’t given the work her all yet.

  Ryley looked back up at Professor Kilmer as she scribbled her initials in a loopy, lazy signature at the bottom corner of her doodle only to suddenly find him looking back at her. She froze, frightened, feeling out of sorts entirely. She’d thought he would be engaged with Mark, who’d recently started
participating much more, possibly to help compensate for the fact that Zeke had started participating much less after the first month. Zeke was still only ever diligently and furiously taking notes, but his opinions on the casebook readings were no longer an intrinsic part of the curriculum.

  As she heard the passion rising in Mark’s voice as he spoke again, she forced herself to look away from Professor Kilmer and at Mark, even as her hands began to slightly tremble. She knew what was coming, but she could barely get Mark’s words to filter into her brain, and all she could think about was how sad it was that Pluto had been demoted from planethood. She didn’t even like astrology.

  As she’d predicted, as soon as Mark finished speaking, Professor Kilmer called on her. “Ms. Agarwal, do you have any thoughts?”

  Ryley hemmed and said, “I’m not sure,” her voice audibly shaking and embarrassing her further. She had no idea what was going on; she’d zoned out for at least the last ten minutes. Unwilling to let her off the hook, he asked Mark to repeat himself. Mark said something about a lawyer’s role morally to always do the right thing for their client.

  Ryley hesitated and then finally said, “I think it’s important to always try to do the right thing, but if a partner were to ask me, a first-year associate, to do something I considered morally gray, but it wasn’t against the law, I think it would depend on the situation and what’s at stake. I wouldn’t presume to know better.”

  Professor Kilmer said nothing and instead nodded at Mark, who had immediately raised his hand again.

  “We need to look outside ourselves and push ourselves to make a difference. There are too many people who think nothing needs to be done if they have the safe harbor of the law. But the world is the way it is because of people like Ryley, because people stick with being safe. Because people just go along with the existing way of doing things. We need to recognize that we have more power than we think we have.” Mark’s voice was wavering too, in a way that was especially noticeable because he was normally so calm and composed.

  Ryley shrunk into herself, keeping her gaze firmly locked on her notebook, feeling the flush spread throughout her neck as she looked down. She’d been called safe before, but not in this context. Then, the word had been used to signal she was too naïve, too immature. She’d grown up and had learned how to behave, but now the word was once again being used as a weapon against her, this time to signal she’d done too good a job at learning the rules. Mark had only ever been nice to her, had seemed to genuinely like and respect her, but she should have known something was going to give. The water had been too calm.

  She listened with only half an ear from then on as others raised their hand and continued to validate Mark’s point. Cassidy spoke in an emotional, ringing tone. Even Sophie, rarely a participant, raised her hand, confirming that although it took strength to push the envelope forward, it was a moral necessity.

  As the class finally ended and Ryley avoided making eye contact with anyone, feeling incredibly exposed, Professor Kilmer called out, “Ms. Agarwal, could I speak with you for a moment?”

  Ryley felt the choking tightening of humiliation in her throat and a concomitant pressure behind her eyes, but she kept her head high and simply nodded as others made a show of turning their heads to gawk at her. A couple of students hesitantly approached the lectern, used to staying after class to discuss the finer minutiae of the cases with the professor. He cut them off with a “Not today,” and the two shot Ryley half-pitying, half-baleful looks as they exited. After the last of her Section-mates had left the classroom, Ryley forced herself to leave the safety of her seat and approached Professor Kilmer, situated commandingly in the center of the room.

  He heaved a sigh as he looked at her standing in front of him, uncertain and contrite. She’d never been asked to stay back by a professor in her life—at least in regard to doing something bad.

  “Ryley. When I’ve called on you, you’ve always delivered good answers, and you have potential, reciting some of the finer nuances of the fact patterns; however, you lose focus frequently. You need to build up your stamina and you need to learn how to think about the law.” He paused to check in with her, to see if she had anything to say for herself. She didn’t.

  She forced herself to maintain eye contact, even as she clenched and unclenched the fist she had jammed into one of her pockets.

  He continued, “I bet you did well before just based on your knowledge of facts and details and knowing more material than the next guy. Here, though, you need to become smart in learning how to interpret and apply the law. By refusing to meaningfully engage in class discussion that will push your understanding of the material and allow you to learn the law beyond the facts on the page, you are crippling yourself right out the gate. Learn from your fellow students; learn how they present their opinions in a convincing way.”

  Seeing she was rather frozen and unsure of how to appropriately respond to his unsolicited advice, he gave her a fatherly pat on the arm before adding, “You don’t have to want to ace this class or spend every waking moment studying the law, but you owe it to yourself to develop the skills to interpret cases and to learn to argue generally so that when you find the area of law you love, you can hit the ground running.”

  Ryley finally responded, “Yes, got it. Thanks for the advice. Makes sense.” She took a step backward, hoping she could be excused.

  “How did you do on your closed memo?” He was not quite done.

  “Fine.” She didn’t want him to think he was right about her, that he had her pegged. Given his long look, she was sure he didn’t believe her anyway. She wouldn’t have believed herself.

  Thankfully, he didn’t seem to have anything more to say, so Ryley repeated her thanks, said, “I’ll try harder,” and walked quickly away at his nod. Ryley jammed her headphones in as she walked toward the door, hoping to disguise, or at least blend, the ringing in her ears with music. In the past, the more things went off the rails, and the more anxious she got, the worse the ear ringing was; headaches usually followed. She drew in a breath through her nose and expelled it through her mouth in a measured count. The professor’s talk after the graded memo was a bit too much of a one-two punch, and she pulled out her phone to text David asking for a raincheck. However, upon exiting the classroom, she saw Sophie and Cassidy there waiting for her.

  After making inadvertent eye contact with the two for a split second, Ryley immediately veered to the right. If called out about it later, she would say she’d been in a rush. Naturally, Cassidy was not to be so easily dissuaded and reached out to tug on Ryley’s coat sleeve, grounding her to a stop.

  “Hey, hold up for a second. What happened in there?” Cassidy asked, her voice coated in a velvet layer of care and sincerity, her brown eyes soft like melted caramel.

  “Nothing. He just noticed I’ve been drifting off in the last two classes or so and wanted to check in on me,” Ryley answered, smoothing out the story and packaging it incredibly neatly on the fly. She doubted her composure would last long, however, and thought it prudent to cut the conversation short. “Well, I have to get going.” After being met with blank expressions, Ryley said, “In a rush and all.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. But you don’t even have two minutes?” Cassidy asked, managing to make the request more of a command than a question.

  Ryley stuttered when put so overtly on the spot and finally said, “Sure, I have one minute.”

  Sophie took the lead this time. “We wanted to make sure you were okay. You looked pretty upset earlier today. You know Mark means well, and we hope you didn’t take our agreement with him personally; I think we all just want to try to make the world better, to not just accept the status quo.”

  “Yes, sure. Okay.” Ryley didn’t think petulantly saying she wanted to make the world a better place too would win her any points.

  “That’s not much of a response.” The reprobation was clear in Cassidy’s tone.

  “I’m not quite sure what you wa
nt me to say,” Ryley said, flinching when she heard how heavy and resentful her words sounded. “Sorry. I mean, I get it. I’m not mad at him. Or you both. But I do have to go. Excuse me.”

  “Glad we’re all in agreement and there are no hard feelings.” Cassidy waited until Ryley nodded before switching her tone to be light and airy once more. “Have fun on your date with David tonight. Let me know how it goes.”

  Ryley gave them both quick grimace-smiles—those were her specialty—and strode rapidly away. Mark must have told Cassidy of her date. She decided she should go after all; even if the day hadn’t been a good one thus far, she could possibly recover with a win in the romantic sphere. She’d rush over to the gym to get a quick workout in to decompress though. Short-circuit her mind.

  The concept of alone time, which had once been so crucial to her, was non-existent, and she began to wonder if she’d made up the fact she liked being alone. David had begun to rub off on her and she found herself liking how having a jam-packed schedule made her feel. She’d fallen into a rhythm of sorts—classes in the morning and afternoon followed immediately by a workout and a couple of hours of studying in the evening. She’d also joined a law journal and signed up for a couple of Saturdays’ worth of work, so she felt she was really leaning into the whole law school thing.

  There was never a time she was not doing something and on weekend nights, she was usually just getting more drunk than necessary with Mark, Cassidy, David, and whoever else was free in that group. She hadn’t expected there to be as much drinking as there was in law school, but she’d been fast disabused of the notion. There was a student body-organized drinking event every Thursday and beyond that, there were happy hours, casual hangs, and house parties; as a drunk third year had told her when he pulled her gleefully aside, lawyers had the highest rate of alcoholism.