top of the class
935 Words
She stood there with her papers, something tight and useless sitting in her chest. She refused to name it.
She didn't need luck. She didn't need anything from William Cole.
The pre-law seminar room was on the third floor of Aldridge Hall. It smelled like old books, central heating, and ambition.
Cindy got there at 8:52 for a 9:00 class. Left side, three rows from the front. Notebook, two pens, laptop. She uncapped one pen, recapped it, uncapped it again.
She was fine.
Students filed in. A few faces from orientation. Nobody sat next to her, which suited her — she had a system. Spread out slightly. Make the seat look taken, not with hostility, just with business. It had worked for two years.
The seat stayed empty until 8:59, when someone dropped a textbook on the desk beside her and sat down without a word.
She didn't look.
She looked.
William Cole was pulling a notebook out of his bag with the focused energy of someone who had not thought about her once since yesterday — who had absolutely no idea she'd spent forty minutes last night reminding herself that being in the same program as a rich legacy kid was not a problem. It was a minor inconvenience. It was nothing.
He sat. Pulled out a pen. Glanced at the board. Glanced at her.
A flicker of recognition. "You sit left of center."
"So do you, apparently."
"I usually sit front row."
"So why aren't you?"
He looked at the front row, where Jordan Walsh was sprawled across two seats, apparently asleep. "My friend's territorial."
She almost laughed. Caught herself.
Professor Whitman walked in at exactly 9:00, and the room went quiet the way rooms do when someone commands it without raising their voice. Mid-fifties, grey at the temples. He set his briefcase down and looked at the class a full five seconds before speaking.
"I don't curve. I don't do extra credit. I don't accept late work." He looked around. "What I do is prepare you, if you let me, to think like lawyers. Any questions?"
Nobody moved.
"Good."
The first class was a diagnostic — a short argument analysis, handwritten, forty minutes. Cindy had done three of these at Columbia Community and felt the settling feeling she only got when something required her to actually think. She wrote steadily, didn't second-guess herself, finished with four minutes to spare.
She glanced sideways without meaning to.
William's pen was still moving.
She looked away.
---
Rankings went up on the departmental board Friday morning.
Maya found out first, via the pre-law group chat she'd somehow infiltrated despite being pre-med, and she was sitting on her bed reading off names in ascending order when Cindy came back from the shower.
"Okay so you're definitely in the top five "
"Don't."
"top three "
"Maya."
"okay, you're second."
Cindy stopped towelling her hair. "Who's first?"
Maya's expression said everything.
"Of course," Cindy said.
"By like, half a point. It's very close."
"How is that supposed to help?"
"I don't know, I'm pre-med, I thought you'd appreciate the data." Maya tilted her phone. "Also Zara Voss is third and she looks absolutely furious in her profile picture, which I find personally delightful."
Cindy sat down on her bed and looked at the ceiling. She'd crossed three boroughs, left everything familiar, moved into a room with a stranger — and she was half a point behind a boy whose father had a building on this campus.
"Hey." Maya's voice changed, quieter, real. "Second in the whole program, your first week. That's not nothing, Cindy."
Cindy looked at her. Maya was watching her with the direct, uncomplicated warmth of someone who hadn't learned yet to be careful with it.
"I know."
She didn't say: *it has to be first.* She didn't say: *I can't afford second.* She didn't say anything about the scholarship clause, or her mother's voice on the phone last week trying to sound easy about the late bill — the way she always tried to sound easy.
She just said "I know" again, and picked up her phone to check the class schedule.
The seminar that afternoon ran on case debate. Whitman threw up a brief, split the room into argument and counter-argument, gave them ten minutes to prepare.
Cindy got argument. William got counter.
The debate ran twenty minutes. They disagreed on every point — not performatively, not to score off each other, but the way people disagree when they've both actually thought about something and landed somewhere different. She cited precedent. He challenged it. She challenged the challenge. The class had gone quiet in that specific held-breath way, and she knew it and didn't care, because she was right and she needed him to know it.
"The precedent holds," she said.
"In that jurisdiction," he said. "Which isn't the jurisdiction of this case."
She paused. Half a second. He was correct. She pivoted without showing the pivot. "In analogous circumstances, the court has repeatedly —"
"Analogous isn't binding."
"No. But it's persuasive. And in the absence of direct precedent, persuasive is what you build with."
Silence.
"Mm," Whitman said, which from him seemed to mean quite a lot.
William wrote something in his notebook. She couldn't see what.
After class, Jordan pulled him away before she could see his face properly. She gathered her things and left, and did not think about the look he'd had when she made the persuasive-argument point.
She thought about it a little.
She thought about it the whole walk home.
That evening she called her mother.
- Writer
