Testing Kate

by Whitney Gaskell

  It had a prominent fold on the corner.

  “What’s that?” Hoffman asked.

  “Ms. Bennett, is this your student identification number?” Sullivan asked, handing me the blue book.

  I glanced down at it, already knowing the answer. I recognized the handwriting in black ink scrawled across the cover.

  “Yes,” I said, handing it back to her.

  “And, as you can see, Richard, there is indeed a fold across the corner,” Sullivan said.

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” Hoffman said. “Bennett probably folded it herself so she could accuse me of trying to mark her down, the same way she did after she scored poorly on her Criminal Law final.”

  Aha, I thought. So he had known about my complaint.

  “Perhaps,” Teresa Sullivan said slowly. “But then, it’s not just her word…. I’ve had three students come to see me this afternoon. They all told the same story—that they saw you bend the corner of her blue book down when you collected the exams.”

  Three? I wondered. I’d assumed that Nick had been the only one.

  “Friends of Ms. Bennett’s, no doubt,” Hoffman said.

  Teresa Sullivan just looked at him. She finally spoke. “As you know, I don’t have the authority to reprimand a professor. But I will be referring this matter to Dean Spitzer immediately, and I anticipate he’ll take action on it before his retirement.”

  This time it was Hoffman who flushed, his face going purple with rage. The cold eyes bugged out a little, and specks of spit foamed on his lips as he spoke. “I’ve got news for you, Teresa,” he sneered. “Spitzer’s not about to fire me on the word of a few students. Especially when the student in question is already on probation.”

  “Perhaps not. But you can be sure the search committee will hear about this,” Teresa Sullivan said quietly, but with just as much force. “You’re never going to be dean, Richard.”

  “You…you…bitch!” Hoffman snarled, standing up suddenly, towering over Sullivan.

  The room was suddenly far too small and warm, and Hoffman’s hands were curled into fists. The spittle still hanging on his lips gave him a deranged look, and his features were twisted into an expression of pure, malevolent fury.

  But Sullivan seemed completely nonplussed. She sat calmly looking up at him, one eyebrow arched. “Are you planning to hit me, Richard?” she asked mildly, tipping her head slightly to one side.

  Damn, she’s tough, I thought admiringly.

  Hoffman took a step back, knocking into the visitor’s chair with the back of his legs. His fists uncoiled, and I could see him struggling to smooth the anger from his face. But his face remained florid, highlighting the pale silver of his eyes. Tufts of grayish-brown hair rose up from his head, and he’d shut his mouth into a thin, drawn line.

  “Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, his voice cold but controlled.

  Sullivan continued to gaze at him until Hoffman finally broke off eye contact. He strode to the door and wrenched it open so hard, I half expected it to split off its hinges.

  “You don’t have the final say on the search committee,” Hoffman said, glancing back at Sullivan. And then he looked down at me, his eyes like two ice chips. I stared back at him. A moment later he was gone, the door banging shut behind him.

  “Asshole,” Sullivan muttered, sinking back in her chair. She glanced over at me. “You didn’t hear that.”

  “No, ma’am,” I said, although I couldn’t stop the grin from blossoming on my face.

  Sullivan pressed her fingers to her temples and closed her eyes. She held this position for so long, looking like the before picture in an aspirin commercial, I thought she’d forgotten I was sitting there.

  “Um…should I go?” I asked.

  Her eyes flew open, and the hands dropped down from her face. “No, I’m sorry. It’s just…I really thought he was going to hit me.”

  “I did too,” I admitted.

  “Anyway, we should probably talk about what happens next,” Sullivan said, slipping back into her professional mode. “Now, as far as your Constitutional Law exam, no matter what Dean Spitzer decides to do about Professor Hoffman, I can promise you that a neutral party will grade your exam book. And I think there’s ample evidence of bias to warrant having another professor look over your Criminal Law exam book from last semester, to see if the grade you received in that class was fair.”

  But before she had finished speaking, I was already shaking my head.

  “That really won’t be necessary,” I said.

  Sullivan frowned. “But you have an excellent chance of grading onto Law Review. If you do as well on your exams this semester, that is. I would have thought you’d welcome a chance to have your Criminal Law grade reviewed.”

  “It’s not necessary because…I’m withdrawing from school,” I said. I was amazed at how calm and clear my voice was. “I won’t be returning in the fall.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  You’re dropping out? But why?” Teresa Sullivan asked. “Is it Professor Hoffman? Because Two and Three-Ls get to choose all of their own classes. You don’t have to ever take another course with him.” She paused. “If he even remains at the school, that is.”

  Hoffman really made a mistake screwing with her, I thought. She wasn’t going to forget what he’d done—or how he’d towered over her, his face purple and his hands clenched in fists.

  “No, that’s not why. I’m not leaving because the work is hard or because of Hoffman. I’m leaving because I finally figured out that the law isn’t the right path for me,” I said.

  Dean Sullivan nodded and looked thoughtful. “It does get easier, Kate.”

  “I’m not looking for easy. I just want to do something meaningful with my life. Meaningful to me. And I know that the law will never be that. If I stayed here, it would only be because I was too afraid to admit I’d made a mistake. Too afraid to leave. And I’m tired of being afraid.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to revisit your Crim grade? If nothing else, I’d think that you’d want to know if another professor thinks it warrants a higher grade. Don’t you want to find out if you made Law Review?”

  I shook my head again. My hair was tied back in a short ponytail, and the curly ends dragged against the base of my neck.

  “No. If I did grade onto Law Review, it might make me want to stay. But I wouldn’t be staying for the right reasons,” I said, wondering if it made as clear sense spoken out loud as it did in my head.

  Sullivan looked at me levelly, and then finally she smiled and closed my file shut.

  “Good luck, Kate,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said, returning her smile. “I’ll take all the good luck I can get.”

  The thing about huge life changes—breaking up with a lover, leaving a job, dropping out of school—is that there isn’t always a clear future to fall into. As much as you might want to think that you’re moving toward a different and better future, there’s always that one lucid moment when you suddenly realize that you don’t have the first clue about what’s going to happen next.

  Which is pretty much exactly how I felt when I stopped at my locker after leaving Sullivan’s office. My hands were shaking as I twisted the combination on my lock and then pulled the door open and stared into the space that had, for the past academic year, housed the flotsam and jetsam of my life as a law student. I pulled out the extra legal pads and pens I’d stashed there, the casebooks and the mirror with a magnet on the back that had hung on the door, the textbooks and Nutshells, and stuffed them all into the enormous camping backpack that I’d been dragging around all year like a punishment. I leaned down and grabbed my bag, and then heaved it up onto my shoulder for the last time as a student at the Tulane School of Law.

  Nick was waiting for me on our front porch when I got home. He was sitting on a folding beach chair, tossing a football up into the air.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hi.”

 
Another storm had blown through and moved on, leaving the sticky hot humidity in its wake. It felt like we were living inside a clothes dryer. Sweat beaded up on my forehead, and the green T-shirt and khaki shorts I was wearing had wilted, molding damply against my skin.

  “Did you talk to Sullivan?” Nick asked.

  I nodded. “She told me you’d been to see her. Thanks for that,” I said. “And for sticking up for me in front of Hoffman.”

  Nick shrugged and looked down at his football. “I don’t know what good it will do. Your word, my word…we’re not exactly the administration’s favorite students. I doubt they’ll do anything.”

  “They already have. I was there when Sullivan confronted Hoffman. She pulled my exam book out of the stack and saw for herself that the corner was folded down,” I said.

  “No way! Really? What did Hoffman say?”

  “He was pissed,” I said. I smiled at the memory. “His face went purple, and that vein on his forehead was throbbing.”

  “Oh, man, I would have given anything to see that!”

  “He and Sullivan really went at it. She told him she was going to scuttle his nomination to be the new dean, and he called her a bitch and stormed out of her office,” I said. I leaned against the railing that enclosed the front porch.

  “Then you’re off the hook!” Nick said, delighted. “They can’t let him grade your exam now.”

  I nodded, not yet ready to tell him about my decision to drop out of law school, not now when we were—for the moment, anyway—back to the easy companionship from which our friendship had originally sprung. And I didn’t want him to think that what he’d done for me, standing up to Hoffman in front of the entire class, had been for nothing—because it meant so much to me.

  “What if we both make Law Review? Wouldn’t that be amazing?” Nick said. He grinned at me.

  “What are you doing this summer?” I asked.

  “Going back to D.C. I’m going to work at my dad’s firm,” Nick said.

  “That’s fantastic. It’s hard for One-Ls to get summer associate positions,” I said.

  “That’s nepotism for you. It’s going to be awful, but at least the pay is decent.”

  “Are you staying with your parents?”

  “No, I’ve got a buddy in the city whose roommate is going to be away for the summer, and I’m going to sublet his room. How about you? What are you doing?”

  “I have absolutely no idea,” I said honestly.

  “I can have my dad ask around and see if anyone’s hiring interns,” Nick offered.

  “Thanks, but I think I might stay here for the summer. My lease runs through August, so I have to pay rent on the apartment no matter what. I’ll see what summer in New Orleans is like.”

  “Hot,” Nick said.

  I laughed. “Yes, I expect so.”

  Nick tossed his football up in the air, caught it easily, before tossing it to me.

  Nick stood. “Throw it back.”

  I looked at him. All I wanted to do was dive into his arms and feel his body wrap around mine. In fact, I wanted it all—the cinematic ending, complete with crashing waves, a thunderous drumroll, and a fireworks spectacular. And for just a moment, as we stood there staring at each other, I could sense that it was there, just a heartbeat away.

  I tossed him the football.

  One step forward, I thought. One step, and I’ll be able to touch him, to brush my finger down the angle of his cheek. One step, and I won’t be alone.

  Nick opened his mouth, about to speak. But I shook my head, stopping him.

  “Have a good summer, Nick,” I said, turning to unlock the door to my stairwell.

  I didn’t look back. I didn’t want to lose my nerve.

  Epilogue

  Self-Study

  Five Months Later

  At first, I wasn’t sure whether I would stay in New Orleans. But I loved working for Armstrong and was thrilled when he offered me a full-time position as a research assistant for his new book. I spent my days holed up in his book-lined library or trolling around the D-Day Museum, downtown in the Warehouse District.

  “Blasted Internet,” Armstrong would mutter, peering at the blue computer screen over his bifocals and pecking at the keyboard with his index fingers. “My editor sent me a list of websites she thought would be helpful, but I can’t understand how the damned thing works.”

  “Give me the list, and I’ll look them up to see if there’s anything useful,” I’d say, and leave him to his writing while I tracked down bits of history, like a detective chasing clues.

  I loved every minute of it.

  One Sunday afternoon, while I was walking through the Quarter, I saw a sign hanging on a house on Chartres Street that read: THE BEAUREGARD–KEYES HOUSE. Something about the place intrigued me, so I typed the name into Google when I got back to the office, and a moment later I was reading all about the house’s racy past. It turned out that the original construction had been financed with the sale of the pirate Jean Lafitte’s plunders. Over the next one hundred fifty years, it housed a chess champion, a Confederate general, the writer Frances Parkinson Keyes, and, in the early 1900s, when it was owned by the Sicilian Corrado Giacona, it had been the scene of a bloody gunfight.

  Suddenly I was envisioning writing the colorful history of the house as a kind of biography. Coaxing out the words, smoothing over the passages, laying out the rich details. Or maybe, I thought, with a thrill of excitement, I’d write it as a historical narrative. When I closed my eyes, I could practically see the French Quarter as it was in 1828 when the first bricks were laid—the dusty streets lined with horses twitching their tails and stomping their feet, the rattle of carriage wheels, the swish of the colorful silk dresses favored by the Creole women sauntering down the narrow sidewalk, the steamships clogging the Mississippi River.

  And before I could even think it through, I had fished out a yellow legal pad from the box of school supplies I hadn’t bothered unpacking and started to take notes.

  When the lease was up on my Magazine Street apartment, Armstrong overheard me on the telephone with yet another landlord advertising in the classified section of the Times–Picayune, trying—and failing—to convince them that, yes, I technically did have a dog, but Holmes was so small he wouldn’t damage whatever shoddy property they were renting.

  “Why don’t you move into my carriage house? Rent-free,” Armstrong offered.

  “No, I couldn’t do that,” I protested.

  “Absolutely. It’ll help make me feel less guilty for the truly paltry salary I’m paying you,” he’d insisted. “Really, it’s disgraceful how underpaid you are.”

  “I have a dog,” I warned him.

  “He can keep Elvis company.”

  For my part, I was glad I took Armstrong up on the offer. The little carriage house had a working fireplace, high ceilings, and was furnished with squishy armchairs and antiques that glowed with lemon oil. Tucked away in the back house, which was shaded under ancient oak trees and perfumed from the honeysuckle vines creeping up the east brick wall, I sometimes imagined that I lived in an earlier, less complicated age. And Holmes loved chasing lizards around the yard and barking at bigger dogs walking by, from behind the safety of a wrought-iron fence. It very quickly felt like home.

  “How’s school going? What’s it like being Two-Ls?” I asked Lexi and Jen when I met them for lunch at Martin Wine Cellar, a deli housed inside an enormous liquor store.

  It was the first chance the three of us had had to get together. I missed them but understood that they were busy with school.

  “Same old, same old,” Jen said.

  “Except that now we finally get to choose our own classes,” Lexi said, as she took a delicate bite out of her turkey club sandwich. “Thank God.”

  “Have you heard from Dana?” Jen asked. “I got a postcard from her a while back, but that was ages ago.”

  “We’ve talked a few times. She checks in from time to time to find out how Holmes
is doing,” I said. “She really misses him.”

  “I assume she’s not coming back to school,” Lexi said.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “She’s going to start working on her master’s degree next semester, though. I think she’s planning to live at home and commute in to school.”

  “Good for her,” Lexi said. “What’s she getting her degree in?”

  “Psychology,” I said.

  Jen whistled. “That’s ironic.”

  “And she’s dating someone. Dana said they’re taking it slow, but I think he sounds pretty special.”

  “Good. I’m happy for her,” Lexi said.

  “Hey, have you heard the news about Hoffman?” Jen asked.

  I shuddered. Just hearing his name made my stomach feel sour. “No, I’m totally out of the law-school loop,” I said.

  “They fired him,” Jen said. She leaned forward as she dropped this bombshell, her eyes sparkling. “And Professor Legrande is the new dean.”

  “No? Really?” I gasped.

  “Yup. Our national fucking nightmare is over,” Jen said.

  I looked to Lexi for confirmation.

  She nodded. “It’s true. Officially Hoffman’s on a leave of absence, but Jacob told me that he’s being forced to take an early retirement.”

  “Jacob?” My eyebrows rose. “Are you and he…?” My voice trailed off in a question.

  “God, no! I just bumped into him the other day at school. But he did ask me what I was doing this weekend.” Lexi smiled coolly. “I laughed and told him that he’d missed his chance.”

  “Are you still seeing that Swedish guy?”

  “Ian. Yeah,” Lexi said, nodding. “Things are going really well between us. You should meet him.”

  “I’d like that.”

  Jen had become uncharacteristically quiet during this exchange, focusing all of her attention on her ham-and-brie croissant.