Blending Out

by Priyanka Bagrodia

  “Hey, wait, hold up a sec. You good?” Olivia lightly tugged on Ryley’s sweater sleeve, grounding her to a halt. They’d completely stepped out of the friend circle now.

  “Yeah. I am. I was just getting overheated.”

  Olivia looked at her disbelievingly, biting her lip slightly. “Okay. You know, everyone’s figuring things out day by day. You could stay in Big Law, go in-house, or do something completely outside the law. So many lawyers become writers or work in finance. We have so many options.” Ryley gave Olivia a soft smile. Even if Ryley had always secretly liked Olivia’s bravado, she found she liked an Olivia who explicitly showed she cared even more. However, David butted in before she could say anything in response.

  “I didn’t know you two were friends! You’ve been talking just the two of you for way too long. I want in!” David didn’t seem annoyed that Ryley’d effectively turned her back to him, but he moved his arm to be resting against hers again. “You know Olivia is super impressive, right, Ryley?”

  Olivia groaned even as Ryley said, “No, I didn’t. But I feel like you want to enlighten me?”

  David continued, “Well, Olivia graduated Summa from Harvard four years ago and then went on to start her own non-profit.”

  Ryley would have liked to know more about Olivia’s backstory, but Olivia said, “Okay, David, thanks. Let’s cut that off here. Anyways, I was not expecting to see John make the trek out from California for this. That’s some commitment.”

  Ryley inevitably tuned them out as they started talking about people from college, though they both did make an effort to consistently give her relevant backstories. Ryley made up for the way her eyes very obviously drifted during that conversation by staying with David, even as Olivia and Mark left to catch up with other friends. She subsequently tagged along with David and his friends to another Boston bar, popular with Harvard undergrads, though she would have liked to stay behind with Mark and Cassidy or get to know Olivia better.

  However, when she’d swung by to check in with her Section friend group, most had shooed her away, emphasizing she take the day to get to know David’s friends better rather than stick with them. The one exception had been Cassidy, who’d wanted Ryley and David to hold off leaving so they could meet her still-soon-to-arrive boyfriend. Mark had overruled Cassidy by clamping his hand over Cassidy’s mouth; seeing Cassidy’s face flush red even as her cheeks puffed out, Ryley had skedaddled rather than bear witness to the aftermath.

  Ryley made it her mission to make David feel special that day. She liked being part of a unit and the idea of having someone when Mark inevitably partnered up and Cassidy moved in with her boyfriend. So, trying to be the best girlfriend she could be, she recited a tasteful line here and there from the many stories David had regaled her with over the past couple of months, making his friends believe they were closer and more intimate than they were.

  Indeed, in response to her efforts, David’s face lit up and his wide lips stretched into a smile. “Isn’t she the best?”

  Ryley found it interesting that they seemed to get along as well as they did—Ryley’s intimacy hang-ups aside—given that he continued to say things suggesting he had only hung out with white people before meeting her. On their last date, before he asked her to go exclusive, he’d told her he never pictured himself with an Indian, immediately insisting he meant “no offense,” as she was contemplating whether to get offended or not. From a quick Facebook stalk later that night, she’d decided that given the way his life had been lived thus far, it was unsurprising he felt this way. He’d come from a small town in North Carolina, which seemed to only have white folk, and he’d appeared to have almost exclusively white friends in college. Ryley had given herself a high-five when she’d realized she’d broken David out of his mold, or alternatively, behaved so effectively white that he felt right at home.

  After David finished telling the story of their first date, of course, leaving out any mention of the small disagreement they’d had in the beginning, his best friend said, “Man, you seem really happy.”

  If possible, David’s smile stretched further as he responded, “Well, we’re very new, but I have high hopes.” David tacked on, almost as an afterthought, “I knew I was interested in her after we met at one of the first Section parties of the year. A friend told me she didn’t think Ryley would be interested, so I was slow in asking her out.”

  Ryley frowned and asked, “Which friend?”

  David froze, clearly realizing his happy, drunken glow had caused him to lower barriers he’d normally have firmly intact and stuttered, “Oh, nobody you know. Just a guy. You don’t know him.”

  He’d said she a moment ago, so Ryley simply said, “Olivia?” and the manner in which David’s eyes darted away was tell enough. She decided not to dwell on it and risk ruining the generally happy mood around her but stored the knowledge very firmly in her Grudges compartment. She switched the conversation back to being about David’s friend and felt David’s visible exhalation of relief, even as he pulled her slightly closer.

  When she finally reached home for the night and plopped into bed—Ryley still hadn’t slept over at David’s and wasn’t sure how much longer she could put it off—she found she was somehow not surprised to receive a message saying, hey. Harrison gave me your number. good seeing u today. see u around. Ryley would throw a like onto Olivia’s message tomorrow.

  CHAPTER 12

  NOVEMBER 2018

  Ryley’s phone screen lit up with a text from Cassidy, letting her know which study room they were in, as Ryley made a beeline for the cafeteria even though she was already running late. All the treadmills had been taken once again so she had had to dither around on a mat. By the time a treadmill finally freed up, she was running so late that the stress of keeping Cassidy waiting effectively canceled out any endorphins she could have hoped to gain.

  Ryley made it to the cafeteria in record time, making a game of weaving through the bodies without cutting pace. She gave muttered, canned excuse mes and sorrys even as she continued squeezing between people and cutting around them. She wasn’t shaving more than a couple of seconds off her tardiness, but at least she was moving faster than everyone else. Going straight to the Grab-N-Go section, she grabbed a power bar and a Gatorade, a too-frequent meal choice of hers. She strode over to Jenny to check out. She liked Jenny even though she had taken to offering Ryley her advice each day because Ryley came to the cafeteria every day. Her mom had made sure she knew how to make some basic Indian dishes—gobi aloo, bhindi and tofu matar—before she left for college, but Ryley had a pathological aversion to cooking, so here she was for the umpteenth time.

  Jenny rang up the four white people before her without comment, but of course, gave her a “Honey, you’ve got to put some more meat on those bones,” and then Ryley was through the crowd. She liked how all the cafeteria workers had adopted her, giving her free food when she realized too late that she’d left her credit card at home one day, or giving her a “you look so pretty!” on the days she had taken special care with her presentation, throwing on a wool dress with tights because she’d needed to break up the monotony of skinny jeans, sweater, and thick overcoat.

  Just last week, Leo had said, “It’s so good to see you here, working hard. We need more of us here.” He wasn’t Indian, just someone else who was non-white. She’d given him an instinctive nod of thanks and a smile as he had handed her a helping of pasta, even as Cassidy, standing next to her, had shot her a confused look, silently urging her to correct him. Ryley had not explained the incident later, even as Cassidy had let the silence rest between them on their walk back to the classroom. Ryley hadn’t even known where to begin, instead talking about a story from her prep school days. Cassidy had immediately relaxed and hooked an arm through hers.

  Ryley looked down at her phone now to see another text from Cassidy. I’ve relocated to room 1057 if you ever arrive.

  As she rounded the corner and skipped down her preferred choice
of side stairwell, she ran abruptly into Mark at the bottom. Taking a few steps back to properly look at him, she said, “Oh, I just texted you—why’d you skip class?”

  He shrugged in response. “I wanted to work out. But wait, what’s going on with you?”

  “Nothing, why?” she asked, giving her outfit a once-over. She had thought she looked cute today.

  “You look kinda ill?” Mark shot her a hesitant half-grin and reached out to grab her hand loosely.

  “Excuse me?” Ryley scooted to be closer to the large window framing the side of the stairwell, breaking his grip in the process. She leaned against the glass pane, soaking in all the warmth she could. She was leaving for Los Angeles tomorrow and Thanksgiving couldn’t come soon enough.

  “It’s fine, you just need to hydrate more and make sure you log those hours of sleep and your skin will be back to its usual Milky Way glow.” He moved with her to lean against the glass pane as well.

  “Great. Thanks, Mark,” she responded in a flat tone. The four nights following the Harvard-Yale game had been rough ones and the dark patches under her eyes must be unflattering. Usually a strict devotee of eight hours a night, she had only been getting five hours of sleep as she had tried to churn out a legal memo due the day after Thanksgiving break and had begun the transition into Finals Ryley. That Ryley pored over every single detail of the textbook while factoring in time for her brain to shut down, even as her fingers typed out mindlessly regurgitated synopses of the cases. She could not fathom how certain students (i.e. Zeke) had kept this pace all year, consistently staying in the library until two in the morning, but she’d always been more of a sprinter than a marathon runner. That being said, she was not going to cop to the fact that she was increasingly getting as stressed as everyone around her, especially when Mark seemed just dandy.

  Faced with her continuing silence, he said, “You know I’m just being real with you. That’s why you keep me around.” Ignoring her wrinkled eyebrows, he continued, unfazed. “Anyway, you won’t believe what happened to me this morning. I ran into HB on the way to the cafeteria, and although he’s way too crazy for me, he could not take his eyes off me!”

  HB stood for Hot Brian. Ryley had gotten used to Mark’s code-names within two weeks of knowing him. She, however, could not find it within herself to fake excitement and felt that she had been given too short a shrift to be annoyed. Wanting to soak in her sulk a bit more, she said, “Well, your skin has its usual pasty glow, so I can see why he was staring.”

  Mark laughed in response. “Got it out of your system?”

  Ryley gave him a sheepish shrug and smile and then said, “I’m going to the study session with Cassidy, Sophie, Zeke, and David. You didn’t respond in the group chat. Are you coming?”

  Mark paused, mulling it over. “I wasn’t planning on it, but why not? I want to see how you handle Study Group Cassidy. She went after Zeke last week when he started speaking to her in his professor voice.”

  Ryley cringed preemptively. “Well, hopefully, this will be good for me. I want to do law school right.” Left to her own devices, she would never have joined, but Professor Kilmer’s words had continued to circle around her brain at night and she wanted to make sure she wasn’t too far behind. Her mother had also brought up Legally Blonde the other day and Ryley wanted to at least do the whole study group thing once.

  Mark reached for her hand again. “I think study groups are definitely worth it. Though people, as in Cassidy, can get pretty argumentative, so be prepared for that. Are you heading there right now?”

  She let him keep ahold of her this time. “Yep. Do you have your stuff with you?”

  He nodded in agreement and they began to make their way over to the study room, arms lightly brushing. She’d begun to look forward to his touch, given how non-presumptuous and affectionate it was. He also never acted annoyed when she’d shake his hand off, and she shook him off less and less as they began to spend more time together in the aftermath of their talk at the Harvard-Yale game. She hoped she would reach that point with David soon.

  As they walked over, he asked, “Did Cassidy tell you she and her boyfriend are taking a break?”

  “No!” She was unsurprised that Cassidy had shared the information with Mark and not with her, especially because she and David had left before meeting Cassidy’s boyfriend. Ryley would have to do a bit of penance and validate Cassidy’s role in her life, especially if she had a boyfriend now and Cassidy didn’t. “How was his personality? I wish I’d gotten a chance to meet him.”

  “You didn’t miss out on much. He seemed like he looked.”

  Ryley responded with a light laugh. Although she’d not seen him in person, she’d left little heart emojis in a comment on a picture Cassidy had put up on the Sunday following the game. Cassidy’s boyfriend had been only slightly taller than Cassidy, with mousy brown hair, vintage, round wire spectacles, and a shy, tentative smile. They must have broken up almost immediately after Cassidy had taken the photo.

  Ryley finally responded, “I’ll see if she voluntarily brings it up; otherwise, I’ll let it lie.”

  Their conversation tapered off as they finally reached the study room in which Cassidy sat ensconced with her back to the door. Ryley thought better of making the girl get up to let them in and instead shuffled around in her bag. She fished out her ID and pressed it against the card reader to gain access to the study room. She supposed the school only wanted to allow veritable scholars of law access to the facilities though she found it hard to imagine anyone trying to infiltrate the rather barren law school study rooms. Perhaps it was to preserve the veneer of prestige? Remind students the Harvard name unlocked doors that otherwise stayed closed. As they swung open the door, Cassidy kept her gaze on her textbook, though her fingers twitched distractedly as her body betrayed her desire to acknowledge that another being had entered the room.

  Ryley cleared her throat. “Sorry I’m late. I picked up a stray on the way.”

  Cassidy looked up then. “Oh, hey Mark. Well, Sophie just stepped out to go to the bathroom and Zeke and David still aren’t here. They went to get coffee from Hi-Rise and the line is supposedly a disaster.”

  Ryley checked her phone to see if David had texted if he was going to be late or had offered to get her a coffee. He hadn’t. She didn’t let herself get irritated. It was Cassidy’s study group and she was the one they needed to report to. Ryley wasn’t irritated.

  As Mark and Ryley got settled, Cassidy asked, “Want to look at the contracts assignment? I doubt the professor is going to read the mock answer, so it would probably be helpful to do it together.”

  They nodded and Ryley hauled the heavy textbook up out of her bag to start going through the material.

  Cassidy looked at her aghast. “What are you doing?”

  “Flipping to the relevant readings?”

  “You should download the Libya outline from Too Dope instead. It got a DS last year,” Cassidy said. Too Dope was an outline bank every student knew about: students from past years uploaded outlines laying out and explaining subject material and indicated the grade they’d gotten in the class so students would know they could be trusted. A DS, or dean’s scholar, was the highest grade a student could get.

  “I would rather create my own outline,” Ryley answered. That was a bit extra. She hadn’t needed to share that.

  “If you would rather create your own, then you can do it on your own time, Ryley,” Cassidy said, a tad exasperated. “I, for one, have been supplementing the Libya outline all year with my own notes, so it’s basically my own. But for someone who hasn’t started on an outline, i.e., you, Libya is a good starting point.”

  Ryley muttered, “Okay,” and navigated to the database and downloaded the document. Ryley decided not to mention that she had in fact started on her own outline, if only a quarter of the way done, and pushed down the part of her that wanted to force Cassidy out of the protagonist role. Ryley could play as good an Elle Woods as Cassidy
. She’d never seen an Indian successfully pull off blond hair though.

  As they started going through the question and discussing the fact pattern of the case they’d been provided, Ryley found every answer she gave was rebutted by Mark and Cassidy.

  “I think there’s a question of whether there is even sufficient consideration to make this a legitimate contract,” Ryley said.

  “Hmm, no. I don’t think that consideration is really at issue,” Mark replied, almost immediately.

  Ryley insisted, “But the buyer is not obligated to do anything or give up anything. It just says, ‘whatever amount they choose to order.’”

  “Ryley, that’s a side issue you shouldn’t waste time on in the exam; it’s clearly an enforceable contract. There is good faith built up between the two parties. It’s understood that the buyer was going to buy something,” Cassidy said. “Let’s move on to the economic duress bit.”

  In the study room setting, Cassidy and Mark spoke even more confidently than they normally did, playing up the formality of their speech, throwing around words like “dispositive” easily. As they continued, Ryley found herself contributing less and less, especially because they seemed ready to disagree with everything she said. Unfortunately, Ryley hated arguing, and especially arguing with friends; this was summarily disadvantageous to anyone training to be a “zealous advocate”—which was, according to Harvard, their raison d’être.

  When David, Sophie, and Zeke eventually trickled in, she found herself growing even more tentative. She tried to reflect on the fact that she loved that David, Mark, and Cassidy had such strong personalities, inevitably competitive but transparent about their drive. And all three had shown they cared about her; Ryley unapologetically excluded Sophie and Zeke from her reflections. They’d never broken past being Group Friends and never spent any time one-on-one. Ryley decided, as she sat there quietly, half-absorbing what they were saying but mostly evaluating the relationships, that David, Mark, and Cassidy were the people with whom she felt closest at law school. Picking a fight wasn’t worth losing their companionship. So, instead, she became gradually more sullen and closed off even as Cassidy became more dictatorial and David continued to look to Cassidy over Ryley.