Conflict of Interest

I had exactly one goal in Torts that morning: survive until 10:50 without saying anything out loud. I made it to 10:42. “Ms. Marlowe,” said Professor Hargrove, peering over his glasses. “You’ve been furiously shaking your head for four minutes. Would you like to share your objection with the class?” No, said the sane part of my brain. “Yes,” said my mouth. Thirty-eight heads turned. One of them was perfect. Theodore Vale sat in the third row, exactly where he always sat. He had his sleeves rolled to the elbow, his pen capped, and his notes arranged like a surgeon’s tray. He didn’t turn around. He just stopped writing and waited, the way a cat waits before it knocks a glass off a table. I hated him so much it was almost a hobby. “Mr. Vale’s reading of Palsgraf,” I said, standing up, “assumes that a man carrying a package of fireworks owes a duty to the entire planet.” “That’s not what I said,” Theo replied, still facing forward. His voice was low and calm, the kind of voice that could read you a parking ticket and make you feel seen. “You said the railroad should’ve foreseen the injury.” “I said it was arguably foreseeable.” “To who? A psychic?” Someone in the back snorted. Priya, probably. I could feel her grinning at the side of my head. “To a reasonable person,” Theo said, finally turning around. Oh no. He was wearing the glasses. Black frames, slightly crooked, pushed up his nose with one knuckle. They were the glasses he pretended didn’t exist, and the whole school pretended not to notice, and I noticed every single time. His eyes were storm-grey behind the lenses. They landed on me and stayed. My brain did something stupid. It briefly stopped working. “A reasonable person,” I repeated. “Yes.” “Like you.” “I’d like to think so.” “Right,” I said. “Because you have never once been unreasonable. You’ve never been late, or wrong, or had a feeling in public.” The room went very still. Professor Hargrove cleared his throat. “Ms. Marlowe, is there a legal point approaching, or should I call for a medic?” “There’s a point,” I said, with more confidence than I had evidence. “Then please arrive at it.” I looked down at my notes. They were covered in coffee stains and doodles of tiny gavels with legs. I had no point. I had a mouth, a grudge, and a four-hundred-dollar casebook I’d bought used for sixty. “My point,” I said slowly, “is that if the law only protects people who are reasonably predictable, then it doesn’t protect the rest of us. The chaotic ones. The ones who run across the platform to catch a train because they’re already late and they’ve been awake since five.” Theo’s eyebrow lifted a quarter inch. “That’s a very personal example,” he said. “It’s a hypothetical.” “You’re holding a lint roller.” I looked down. I was, in fact, holding a lint roller. I had pulled it out of my bag at some point during my rant and was gripping it like a sword. Laughter rolled across the room. Heat climbed up my neck and settled in my face, where it lived rent-free for the rest of the day. “Sit down, Ms. Marlowe,” said Professor Hargrove, not unkindly. “That was almost an argument.” I sat. Moose, two seats over, leaned across the aisle and whispered, “Best thing I’ve seen all semester. Ten out of ten. Would watch you lose again.” “I hate you,” I whispered back. “No, you hate him. I’m the one who brought you a muffin.” He had. It was blueberry. I ate it under the desk like a raccoon. “You brought a lint roller to a duel,” Priya said, for the fourth time. We were crammed into the campus coffee cart line, which in Boston in October meant standing in sideways rain with forty other caffeine-starved law students, all of us holding umbrellas like tiny, useless shields. “It’s a tool,” I said. “It’s practical.” “It’s hilarious.” “It was self-defense.” Priya Nair, my best friend since the first week of 1L, flicked a drop of rain off her perfectly sharp black bob. She was five-foot-nothing and had the energy of a courtroom thunderstorm. In ten years she would be the scariest prosecutor in the state of Massachusetts. At the moment she was just the scariest person in the coffee line. “Jo,” she said. “He wore the glasses.” “I noticed.” “You noticed for a while.” “I did not.” “You stopped talking for three whole seconds. I timed it.” “I was recalibrating.” “You were staring.” “I was assessing a threat.” Priya looked at me with all the pity in the world and none of the mercy. “You’re so far gone it’s actually kind of beautiful,” she said. “Order, please!” called the barista. I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, a black coffee that tasted like burnt pennies. Priya got an iced oat latte with an extra shot, because she was a psychopath who drank iced coffee in thirty-eight degrees. We found a dry corner under the library awning. Rain tapped on the stone like a hundred impatient fingers. “Okay,” Priya said. “Real talk. Why do you let him get to you? You’re better at this than he is.” “I’m not,” I said, too fast. “You ranked second after the first-year exams.” “Because he ranked first.” “By half a point.” “By a point and a half, and it was Property, which I should have crushed.” “Jo.” “He ruined my curve, Pri. Every single class. He sits there with his binder and his perfect posture, and he never gets anything wrong, and I’m over here wearing a blazer I bought for six dollars because it smells like a nice grandma.” “It does smell like a nice grandma.” “Thank you.” She stirred her drink with the little paper straw. “So write about it.” I stilled. “Write about what?” “Don’t play dumb. You’ve got the blog.” “Shhh.” “Nobody’s here,” she said, waving a hand at the crowd of thirty people. “Jo. That’s the whole point of it. You said it yourself. You can’t hit him, so you hit him with a keyboard.” She had a point. She usually did. I took a long sip of my terrible coffee and watched the rain run down the old iron lampposts. “I’ll think about it,” I said. I had already thought about it. I’d been thinking about it since the lint roller. The thing about being broke in law school is that nobody tells you the real price of the degree. It isn’t tuition. The scholarship covers most of that. It’s the quiet math in your head all the time. Rent. Textbooks. My dad’s physical therapy bills, which came in the mail every month like a rude little reminder that he’d fallen off a ladder at a job site two years ago and the hospital had decided the ladder was my problem. Forty-one thousand dollars. I knew the number the way some people know their own birthday. That was why the Harlan Cup mattered. That was why the Okafor clerkship mattered. Judge Naomi Okafor was a legend, and a clerkship in her chambers came with a salary that could actually make a dent. It wasn’t about pride, even though I had plenty of that. It was about the ladder. So at 11:30 that night I sat cross-legged on my bed in the tiny apartment I shared with Moose, with my laptop on a pillow, a pencil stuck through my bun, and one thought. Okay, Mr. Perfect. Let’s see how you like it. I opened a new post on The Dean’s List of Disasters. I’d started the blog the summer before 2L, mostly as a diary. It was supposed to be something just for me, a place to scream into the void about the tragedy of cold-calling and the ethics of reading cases in the bathroom. It had gotten a little bigger than that. Four thousand followers. All anonymous. I never used my name, my school, or even my city. I was just “the Disaster,” and my readers were mostly law students and lawyers who’d lived through the same chaos. They wrote me paragraph-long comments about their worst moments in court, and I loved every single one. And in a year of blogging, I had one recurring villain. I typed the title. THE TRAGEDY OF MR. PERFECT, PART 14: HE WORE THE GLASSES Dear readers, Today I embarrassed myself in front of thirty-eight people and one very large tort. It started like any other day. Mr. Perfect arrived at 8:52 a.m. precisely, sat in his assigned seat in the third row, and unwrapped a granola bar with the focus of a man defusing a bomb. He is the only person I know who can make breakfast look like a legal proceeding. Then Professor H. asked a question, and I made the mistake of disagreeing with him out loud. Mr. Perfect turned around. And he was wearing his glasses. Reader, let me be clear. I do not find him attractive. I find him statistically inconvenient. There’s a difference. It’s the way a thunderstorm is inconvenient. Or a tax audit. Or a very tall man with a jaw like a legal citation who rolls his sleeves up to the elbow like he’s about to rescue a kitten from a burning building. He has never once made a mistake. I have made eleven this week. I counted. He doesn’t need glasses to see me. I’m quite sure he has already filed me away in a color-coded folder labeled “Chaos, Minor.” I say this with love, and also with a lint roller. Until next time, The Disaster I read it over three times. It was funny. It was mean, a little, but only the way you’re mean to someone you privately think is a brick wall with good lighting. I hit Publish. Then I pulled my knees up, rested my chin on them, and waited for the comments to roll in, the way they always did. Little hearts. Little laughs. A comment from a second-year in Chicago who’d cried laughing about the lint roller. I made tea. I stared at the ceiling. I told myself not to refresh the page. I refreshed the page. Eleven comments already. omg the lint roller 😭😭 — bluebookbaby not him wearing GLASSES. girl. — gavelgirl_22 “statistically inconvenient” I’m putting this on a mug — torts_and_tears I grinned into my knees. And then I saw the username at the very top. Sustained_1. My smile slipped. Sustained_1 was my most loyal reader. They had been commenting on nearly every post since my second month of blogging, usually something dry and observational that made me laugh out loud. They never used emojis. They never gave away anything about themselves. Not a name, not a school, not a single clue. They were, I’d decided, probably a retired judge with a lot of free time and a sense of humor. I clicked on the comment. You’re wrong about one thing. The tie wasn’t grey. It was navy. I sat there. I read it again. Then I read my own post again, scrolling up to find the line I’d written, the one I’d been so proud of two minutes ago. Mr. Perfect wore a grey tie today. I had written it in the second paragraph, almost as an afterthought. But that wasn’t the part that made my stomach drop. I had never mentioned the tie in the published version. I’d deleted that line. Right before I hit Publish. My heart started pounding in a very slow, very heavy way. I looked at the comment one more time. You’re wrong about one thing. The tie wasn’t grey. It was navy. And I realized, with the cold, creeping clarity of a witness who’s just seen the exhibit that destroys her story, that somebody had read my draft. And that somebody had been in my class.