Welcome to Law School Story, a novel about law school written by Glenna Goldis. Start reading the first chapter, then follow the link way at the bottom of the page to read more.
When you finish the chapters posted here, email glenna.goldis@gmail.com to receive a pdf of the rest.
More by Glenna Goldis:
“Need to see some ID,” the bartender said, and I fumbled it out. I’d finally made it to the trashy bar downstairs from the perfect lawyer’s apartment.
“I thought about taking over the jukebox but it was hopeless,” the perfect lawyer said. I understood. It was a very bad jukebox. We clinked the shots and swallowed, ugh. I sat on a stool with a torn cushion and she took the one closer to the door. We pretty much had the place to ourselves.
“You can do so much better than her,” the perfect lawyer said. “She’s kind of cliché looking.”
“It’s so hard,” I said. I looked away from her and leaned forward onto my elbows. She reached to rub my back and I stayed perfectly still because she might change her mind. “It’s so hard to connect with anyone.”
“I know. I know.”
The perfect lawyer rubbed my shoulder harder and I closed my eyes against some tears. I was almost crying because eventually she would leave. The jukebox played Forever Young.
“Oh no,” she said. “And now a song about death.”
“This isn’t about death, it’s a stupid prom song.”
“Oh, you’re probably right.”
First time here? Start at the beginning.
The next night I got a call from Audrey. She was an undergrad I’d picked up in the fall and made out with in her hallway. She’d told me she didn’t know what she wanted. I’d told her to call me when she figured it out. She hadn’t, but she wanted to before heading back to the South for summer break.
We planned to meet the next night at a bar in the East Village. I felt blasé because Audrey was two months younger than I. I hadn’t hung out with anyone younger in a year so I just assumed she’d be the opposite of the perfect lawyer-straightforward, attainable, weak. Plus, I’d been so drunk that night we’d hooked up. For all I knew she was unattractive.
I got to the area early and watched people from the bench-like rim of an elevated square with a tree growing out of it. All the buildings next to me were, at their base, bars. On my other side people walked in and out of the crooked rivulet of cabs. Everything was all lit up but there was still a drop of natural light on the sidewalk too. After a few minutes I spotted the perfect lawyer carrying her suit jacket in one hand and a stapled paper bag of dinner in the other. What a coincidence that she would be walking between the subway station and her apartment at 8:20. Her lips moved as she shouldered past the more lackadaisical pedestrians: “excuse me.” I felt a jolt of pride as her face brightened.
“Hey there, almost-2L!” We talked about exams for a little while before the perfect lawyer asked what I was up to.
“I’m meeting this girl… whatever…”
“Ooh-ooh! Can I wait with you so I can see her?”
I shrugged and hoped that Audrey would be attractive.
She was. She had long blonde hair with highlights and wore the red and white checked dress that was in the window display at Ralph Lauren Rugby. Unfortunately she was short though, and she wore at least three types of eye makeup. She waved and smiled a little as she approached.
“Hi,” the perfect lawyer said. “I’m the perfect lawyer. I was just passing by.”
I introduced her, everyone smiled, and then the perfect lawyer excused herself.
“Give me a call later,” she said. “But I understand if you don’t.”
As I opened the door for Audrey she said, “do you dance? Like ballet?”
I didn’t smirk. I hadn’t smirked since the first time a girl asked me if I were a dancer. The absurdly good luck of that come-on didn’t need to be noted anymore. Other people wrote the script, I just said my line:
“I have some classical training. Nine years. But I was expelled.”
God I’m so interesting! (They would say.) Yes I’m quite a character.
*
Audrey had impeccable taste in movies, TV shows, and writers. One obscure pick and one guilty pleasure in each category. I couldn’t think of any movies, TV shows, or writers that I liked. For the sake of conversation I provided some explanations for why I didn’t like movies, TV, or books, and that made Audrey laugh.
“What are you doing tonight,” she asked as I poured down the last pale drops of the second vodka cranberry.
“I don’t know,” I said. Her eyes were on mine. I could hook up with her. But not at my apartment. Then what if she refused to leave. Her place was thirty blocks uptown though, and the forecast said it might rain later. I decided to buy time while I came up with a subtle way to suggest we hook up in the bathroom. “What are you doing tonight?”
“Hopefully something involving… you.”
You! The word startled me. It was how she said it. As if she had an idea of me called you. The girl had been bending over all night collecting my stupid jokes and placing them in a box labelled You. Now she was trying to give me the box. I didn’t want it back!
“Oh, yeah… But you know I’m actually still in the middle of finals. I need to work on my outline tonight.” I pushed my mouth to one side in an expression of regret.
She picked my right hand off the table with both of hers. Red polished nails, and somewhat long. This girl knew even less about being a lesbian than I did. I pulled my hand out, angry that she was trying to manipulate me.
Jane: how do you do it? laws are boooooooring
Griffothy: you need to hate people more
Griffothy: doesn’t it piss you off that all those republican guys might make law review
Jane: no, just makes me think law review is for losers
Griffothy: douchebags, not losers
The day before the con law exam was beautiful again. 75 degrees and a breeze that changed directions often. People scurried through it on their way to and from the library. Ellipses and I sat on a bench on the edge of the courtyard and threw pebbles at the ones we knew. Some of the good postured girls smiled at us and waved hello. Griffothy looked up (the equivalent of someone of normal height looking down) and pretended not to feel the pebbles or hear us when we shouted his name. Nicko strode over and lied on the ground in front of us.
“Thank God, normal people!”
Someone had recently broken his heart and he wanted to talk. It was almost dinnertime so the three of us headed to a sushi place on Bleecker. We chose it because fish was brain food.
“It’s my library girlfriend,” Nicko said when we sat down. “She’s gay.”
“This is why you don’t talk to library girlfriends,” I said.
“So what,” Ellipses asked. I asked the waitress for a round of dollar sake.
“So she told me that after I fucked her all night. That’s like a year in finals time. I’m emotionally invested now.” I asked him who she was. “Tall, thin, eyebrow ring…”
“You hooked up with Emily,” I told him. “She has buzzed hair and wears a men’s leather jacket. How did you not know she was gay?”
“Hello maybe I don’t believe in stereotyping people?”
The dollar sake arrived and we ordered. For the third time that spring I caught myself thinking that sake tasted like low fat hemlock, then reasoned that dollar sake was probably not representative of the genre.
Nicko told us more about Emily. She took her boots off and sat on her feet in the library; her homepage was the BBC; she refused to kiss Nicko because of his beard. We ordered another round of dollar sake. I pointed out how the last person Ellipses had hooked up with was a gay guy and four of the past five girls I’d hooked up with were straight.
“You guys,” I said. “There’s something about us. We must be hot in some freakish way that transcends gender.”
“Yeah,” Nicko nodded and his eyes were wide. “Dude it sounds like a good thing but really it’s like a curse.”
“Or,” Ellipses said, “we seek these people out because we don’t actually want the responsibility of a relationship. In fact, we can’t even deal with the responsibility of rejecting someone. So we have to hook up with people who are guaranteed to reject us.”
“Are you listening to me? She did not. Tell me. She was-”
“Relationships aren’t that much responsibility,” I said. “On sitcoms in the 90s they used to make a big deal about forgetting your girlfriend’s birthday, but now with facebook notifications what’s the problem?”
“Yeah, can’t be more responsibility than law school,” Nicko said. The plates arrived. “Thank God brain food!”
“Law school responsibility is kind of optional,” I pointed out.
“See,” Ellipses said. “Maybe we blow off law school because we’re afraid of getting a job where we’ll have responsibility! That’s why we’re here drinking cheap Japanese booze while the competition is sticky tabbing their outlines for tomorrow. And we’re going to be miserable when grades come out, the same way we’re miserable when people reject us. But actually it’s our own fault because we refuse to grow up. In fact we’re miserable because we know we deserve exactly–”
“AAAAAH” Nicko said and covered his ears. “Evil evil evil evil!” I covered my ears too and we said “evil evil evilvieivlevilevil vievilevilevielvielvilvielv!”
Turned out Ellipses had scored adderall that morning.
A few nights before the admin exam I agreed to meet Nicko for a quick slice of pizza at 8.
We chose a place on MacDougal and had the usual conversation. “This shit SUCKS dude,” etc. Two-thirds of the way through my slice of pepperoni, I caved and bought a bottled water. I didn’t want to have to cut the dinner short out of thirst.
“I feel like it’s immoral to hang out at pizza places all night instead of gunning for A’s,” I said.
“You mean because you’re letting the assholes beat you,” Nicko asked. “That’s not immorality, it’s self-sabotage.”
“Self-sabotage is immoral if you believe you’re better than everyone else, like we do. We’re hurting the world by not giving ourselves to it completely.” I nibbled the last streak of sauce from my crust while I waited for Nicko’s reply.
“Getting A’s doesn’t have anything to do with giving yourself to the world,” he said. “I’m going to give my whole damn life to regular New Yorkers as soon as I’m qualified to. But for now I’m not kidding myself. I study because if I ever see another B-plus I’m going to punch Mr. Cat in the face. Oh sorry, forgot you’re friends with him. Pretend I said someone else.”
“You got B-pluses?”
“Fine, Miller gave me a B. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You got a B-plus in torts? You didn’t even make your own outline. Two nights before the test you found one in a recycling bin in the library.”
“Not just any outline, dude. It was the best one in the recycling bin all week.”
*
After the admin exam Ellipses and I went to Washington Square. The day was warm, the trees were complete, and the fountain in the middle was a mast. I shrugged the backpack off my shoulders, down my arms, and onto the ground. Then I stepped onto a bench. It was time to study for con law.
“I want to describe this,” I said. “There are people who could describe this park accurately. Draw it. Paint it. Literally, look, there’s a girl with an easel over there.”
“Do we like accuracy now?” Ellipses asked. She stood guarding our backpacks like eggs, her hand above her eyes.
“Yeah, duh, that’s what art is.”
“Nah, art’s persuasion…” Ellipses smiled down below me. She was relaxed in that weird post-exam way, brain still bouncing like a basketball dropped from the 14th floor Dag terrace. “Artists are dead set on making you see trees and bushes like they do.”
“Fine, whatever, you’re right.” My B-minus performance hadn’t energized me. I felt more like a young adult who’d been dropped from a first floor window. “I’m totally full of shit. But man I hate being a lawyer. It’s boring and yeah, call it corny but I do wish I could lie in the sun writing about this park instead of arguing about theories about words all day.”
“Don’t freak out about con law,” Ellipses said. “It’ll be just like every other exam.”
“Don’t you think Feldstein will try to mess with us?”
“Nah. You heard about how he asked Throw Up Guy to be his research assistant, right? Second week of the semester. Because he heard how well he did on Miller’s exam.
“Throw Up Guy is a super dedicated student,” Ellipses rambled on. She was sitting on the bench now, pretending to be enraptured by the splooging fountain. “Hence his insistence on coming to class that day when he was sick.”
I’d thought he was showing off his hangover. That might be compatible with the dedicated student theory.
“Don’t be jealous of Throw Up Guy, friend.” She was talking in a sing-song now, her voice wandering around just like her eyes. I didn’t say anything.
Sun, pigeons, fountain, all kinds of students except law students wading in the basin around the fountain, jersey dresses, naked calves, four ice cream carts, trees on the outskirts–I didn’t really feel like describing Washington Square Park.
Which is too bad, because Washington Square Park changed. Right now it’s under construction, as braced and taped up as Vosburg. When the bandages come off, the fountain will line up perfectly with Fifth Avenue and you won’t be allowed to walk around in it.
Everyone knew about the Harvard professor who lied in his own exam instructions. The guy set a word limit of 3000 on an exam to be taken at home over 24 hours. Then he gave the only A in the class to someone who’d written 5000 words. On the course website he explained that the essay was so good, so comprehensive, that it didn’t seem fair to penalize it for the technicality of running over.
Of course law school exams were about quantity, not quality. After all, you had one essay to prove that you studied like a dog for four months.
Two of my exams were eight hours long and word-limited. My friends and I argued a lot over whether the word limits were for real or just tricks like that Harvard prof’s exam. We concluded that Feldstein was sincere about the word limit. He probably set it low for the straightforward reason that he didn’t like reading exams. If he gave A’s to longer ones, word would leak out and next semester he’d end up with a thousand pages to grade. As for crim, that prof seemed less rational. But I wouldn’t reach the word limit anyway. I hadn’t touched the book or taken a note since early March.
*
The first exam of spring was admin. I don’t really know what admin was about, except that the prof drew a confusing chart for us on the second day of the semester. It compared different theories to each other, most of which were normative (how judges should make decisions) but one of which was descriptive (how judges actually make decisions). The descriptive theory and all the little boxes under it hung on the blackboard like gristle. I hated the prof for confusing me, I hated myself for being confused on day 2, and I hated admin.
Six months later I took a legal philosophy course and found out that she’d messed up the chart (she wrote “Legal Realism” where she should’ve written “pragmatism,” the thing that was practiced by Legal Realists). By then I’d drawn up a superior confusing chart (“if this legal theory were an animal, which would it be?”) and happily posted a B-minus in admin.
Nicko: did you ask carmen yet
Jane: no, you try your guy first
Nicko: i can’t i think he’s in love with me
Jane: well carmens annoying
Jane: and she might gossip
Nicko: dlers dont gossip um not a rational bznss plan
Jane: you know shes not rational. ask the guy who loves you
Nicko: there are only two sundays left till finals anyway
Jane: yeah we’re screwed no matter what, might as well save our $
“Hey has your buddy Sara come out of the closet yet?”
“If by coming out you mean started wearing black plastic-rimmed glasses.” We both giggled into our drinks. “I don’t know, Jane, maybe she’s straight.” I stirred my ice too fast and the glass tipped. “I mean how else could she reject you?”
Griffothy stepped through the crowd, his head above the stream as usual. Patrick tagged along in his wake. The perfect lawyer greeted them with a smile and I lifted my chin. We moved to a table in the back corner. Of course Griffothy and Patrick took over the conversation from there. Mostly we talked about classes.
“Feldstein is such a joke,” Patrick said. “The guy runs class for his own amusement. He comes totally unprepared and then just throws out a random question for the freaks to fight over for two hours. I’m renaming con law ‘rec law,’ short for recreational law.”
He might have been referring to that Wednesday’s class, about the pro-gay marriage decision in Massachusetts. Feldstein asked, “did the court’s reasoning sell out polygamists?”
“Whatever Patrick,” I said. “I’m glad he doesn’t follow a script. It feels less like a reality TV show that way.”
“Of course you’re defending him,” Patrick said.
“Yeah, big surprise,” Griffothy said. “You know he just engages you because you’re hot.”
Aha! Over to the perfect lawyer.
“Griffothy, that’s so sexist,” she said.
“Fine, bite my head off,” Griffothy said.
I looked at her and tried to think of a gesture of appreciation. She was still glaring at Griffothy. What a relief to see her put him down. It confirmed that everything she’d said before about not being able to stand up to him was ironic.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ve thought the same thing. I mean, he always ignores Griffothy’s comments even though they’re super smart.”
Griffothy had said that gay marriage was good for polygamists. Now if they were arrested for trying to marry more than one person, they could bring habeas petitions about being discriminated against for their sexuality (if someone else in the marriage was of the same sex).
“Thanks,” Griffothy said, blushing.
“Feldstein’s just intimidated because you understand the cases better than he does.”
I always got a perverse thrill out of telling Griffothy that his comments in class were smart. We all took intelligence so seriously. Calling Griffothy ’smart’ in public felt like a way to devalue the trait.
*
The next morning I got an email from the perfect lawyer. It was a link to the website that told us the wrong time for the play. “The ticket guy was wrong,” she wrote.
First time here? Start at the beginning.
The next time I got the perfect lawyer alone was a few Sundays later. We’d planned to see some play on Bleecker Street because it starred our favorite actress from the L Word. When we went inside, though, we found out it wasn’t showing. There’d been a typo in an advertisement. She argued with the ticket guy for a few minutes and then we went next door for a drink.
We were at Von, the same place we went for Griffothy’s birthday. We sat at the bar. The place felt especially dark because sun rays still brightened Bleecker Street. Von was like one of those fish tanks set in a wall, only one of its faces exposed, so we got to be goldfish.
I asked the perfect lawyer how her religion was going. Griffothy had told me that she went to church on Easter and subsequently decided to be a Christian again, with some idiosyncrasies. For example, gay sex was okay and so was shoplifting from large stores.
She told me it was going well. “I need to believe there’s a trap door, you know what I mean? Every day is the same obstacle course. I can’t keep living to make my boss happy, or Griffothy. And I already ran a marathon.”
I thought about church. Colorful windows, domes, a certain type of discussion of moral philosophy…
“I wonder if finding God is supposed to be harder than running a marathon.”
“Stop making fun of me!”
“I’m not! I totally know what you mean. I need something besides like going to class… eating pizza… procrastinating. What’s the church like, is there singing?”
“Yes!”
“Oh. And holding hands during the Our Father?”
“Yes!” On second thought, I could probably just find some essays about Christian philosophy online.
“I wonder what else you can do with your life,” I said, “besides read and go for walks.”
“You can get into sado-masochistic relationships,” she said. There was a pause. “With a judge.”
“So tell me what’s wrong with living to make Griffothy happy,” I asked, breaking my personal rule not to solicit gossip about Griffothy from the perfect lawyer. I feared that if she vented just a little, I’d tell her what a jackass he sounded like in con law and ask her to marry me.
“Because I can’t hate myself for his problems. I learned that from hundreds of hours of psychotherapy.” She sneered again, the same way. “I used to blame myself every time his cell phone broke.”
“Oh…” I was confused.
“You know, his cell phone breaks if he holds it up to his head for too long.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s so ridiculous when you think about it.” Of course; all the robot signals tangled with the phone’s. Griffothy thought too hard.
“That sucks,” I said. “But you’re right, it’s not your fault.”
“And if I ask him to do the simplest chore, I mean sometimes it’s fine, but sometimes he just starts yelling at me-’You’re using up all my memory!’” She mimicked him by speaking in a lisp and bending her wrist in front of herself. “And it’s like I’m just supposed to know automatically that he has something on his mind.”
“Right…” Did the perfect lawyer not know that her own husband was a robot? Even Patrick knew, and he didn’t strike me as a social genius.
“And he’s never gotten a single cavity in his whole life! I’ve had two.” The perfect lawyer sighed out her nose and squinted ahead, not at me. She really didn’t know. I ordered another drink.
“Do you ever confront Griffothy with, you know, just facts and stuff?
“No! That’s just it, I can’t stand up to him,” she said, her pitch rising. “I can’t not be nice or I feel like, like a… bitch. I’m always the bitchy one!” She exhaled because she had sworn and I glowered because this conversation was becoming a parody of itself. If she wanted to make some post-structuralist point about how gender-specific language forms our identities, why didn’t she just come out and say it? She continued in an even tone, “I can’t divorce him. If I did I’d have to pay him tons of alimony, since he helped put me through law school.”
The perfect lawyer’s phone vibrated on the bar. She cocked the screen toward her.
“Oh good, it’s Griffothy. I texted him when you were in the bathroom earlier. He’s on his way here from the library.”
