“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.
