Testing Kate (10 page)

“Jesus, that hurt!” I said, and this time I pushed him hard, shoving him away from me.

“What the hell?” Graham said. He snatched his hand back and used it to straighten the glasses sitting askew on the end of his nose. “What’s wrong with you?”

“How would you like it if I pinched one of your nipples?”

“Is that an offer?”

“No! I told you,” I said irritably. “My aunt—”

“Won’t know a damned thing. She’s sound asleep by now,” Graham finished. He stood up and glared down at me.

“Fine, then. I just don’t want to!” I was too annoyed to feel guilty.

“I guess I’ll go back to my couch,” Graham said coolly, turning toward the door. And before I could call him back, he was gone.

“Shit,” I said softly. I didn’t want this fight. Except for the Thanksgiving Day flare-up, the long weekend had passed amiably enough, and I wanted for us to be on good terms before we flew back to our new respective towns. Now that we were living apart, we couldn’t let these arguments fester the way we used to.

I should go find him so we can make up, I thought. And he’s right, we should make love. Even if I’m not in the mood now, I’m sure that will change once we get started. It usually does, with a bit of effort.

I looked back down at my Contracts book. I only had about six pages left to read.

I’ll go down when I finish, I decided.

But a half hour later, when I padded downstairs in my bare feet, Graham was already asleep. A book on photography—his latest passion—lay open across his stomach. Graham’s head was turned to one side, and his chest rose and fell rhythmically. I watched him for a minute, and then I lay down next to him on the couch, turning on my side to fit into the few inches of available space, and rested my head on the flat plane below his shoulder. Graham shifted, curling his arm around me and sleepily kissing the top of my head.

“Hi,” he mumbled.

“Shhh. Go back to sleep,” I whispered.

I felt him relax back into sleep, and I sighed, contented. I knew I couldn’t stay here all night, that I’d have to return to my room before my family woke up. But for now, with the length of my body touching Graham’s, and my breath matching his, I felt so calm and at peace, I didn’t want to move.

Chapter Thirteen

F
inals were hell.

My diet consisted of vending-machine food, and I ingested so much caffeine my hands shook and my stomach hurt. Personal-grooming habits slid too. I showered when I remembered but went days at a time without washing my hair.

I wasn’t the only one. Nick stopped shaving and walked around looking like a lumberjack. Lexi almost never left her favorite cubicle on the top floor of the library, holing up with every practice test she could find. Jen did most of her studying outside, sitting at one of the courtyard tables, chain-smoking and yelling at anyone who talked near her. Addison disappeared entirely. Only Dana seemed more or less her usual self.

“I feel ready,” she said, when I asked her how she was staying so calm.

“I wouldn’t admit that to anyone else,” I advised her.

On the morning of our first exam, the Contracts final, I was shaking with nerves when I sat down in my usual seat at the back of the classroom—we didn’t have to sit in our assigned seats for the exam, but I thought I’d be more comfortable staying with what was familiar—and began to set up for the test, lining up my various supplies across the table in front of me. My outline (the test was open book). My casebook. Scratch paper. Ten pens (in case nine of them ran out of ink over the course of the three-hour exam). Earplugs. Bottled water. Granola bars. A banana. Aspirin. Kleenex. Tums. I was wearing my favorite faded black sweatpants and a long-sleeve charcoal-gray T-shirt, and I had my hair pulled back in a tight ponytail.

“Hey,” Nick said, sitting down next to me. His face was pale under the stubble of his beard, and his blue eyes were watery and bloodshot.

“Did you sleep last night?” he asked.

I nodded. “Sort of. I kept dreaming that I was oversleeping, and then I’d wake up in a panic. Finally I just got up at six and came down here early.”

“I knocked on your door but you’d already left,” Nick said. He yawned widely. “I barely slept. I took a practice test yesterday and totally froze. It freaked me out, so I stayed up most of the night cramming.”

Lexi came in, followed by Jen and Addison. They all looked nervous, although Jen had thrown her head back and was laughing at something Addison had said. I noticed Addison was wearing his clip-on nose ring, like a good-luck charm. They waved at Nick and me but sat down in the front row. I glanced around to see if Dana was there, and she was, sitting to the right of the room, looking unnaturally calm as she chatted with a small, dark-haired woman whom I knew only as Ms. Bianchi.

Some of our classmates buzzed nervously, discussing in loud voices what they expected would be on the test, while others sat quietly, their hands clenched in fists. A few looked like they might actually be sick, something that was not an uncommon occurrence during first-year finals. Rumor had it that at least one student every semester ended up racing for the toilet, undone by the sickening anxiety that simmered in us all.

One of the heavy double doors opened, and we all fell instantly silent as Professor Legrande entered the room, carrying blue books and a stack of legal-size papers.

“How’s everyone feeling this morning?” Professor Legrande asked in a strong Cajun accent, smiling kindly around. He was my favorite professor, not because his lectures were particularly scintillating—this was Contracts, after all—but because he seemed to be a genuinely nice man. He was younger than most of the professors, probably in his early forties, but was already mostly bald and carried about fifty extra pounds on his broad frame. During lectures, when he was probing one of the students on the drawbacks of a particular policy, if the student answered, “Increased litigation” (a popular One-L answer), Legrande would clap his hands together and bellow, “No! You’re a future lawyer; increased
litigation
is a good thing!”

“I always wear my lucky tie to finals,” Legrande said, holding up the tie for us to see. It had a picture of Bugs Bunny silk-screened on it. There was a rumble of nervous laughter from the class. “All right, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to pass out the blue books and the exams. When you get your exam, please lay it facedown on the table. Once everyone has an exam, I’ll start the clock and give you the go-ahead, so that y’all will start at the same time.”

A swell of nausea rose inside me. This was it.

Nick glanced over and gave me a tight-lipped smile. “Good luck,” he said, holding out his fist.

“You too,” I said, bumping my fist against his.

“Before you hand in your test, don’t forget to sign the Honor Code statement printed on the back of each blue book,” Legrande said. “Are you ready? You may begin. Good luck, ladies and gentlemen.”

My heart lurched and then began to race. I flipped the test over, and I started to read the directions, even though I already knew them by heart from having gone over Legrande’s back exams that were kept on file in the library.

So far so good, I thought, as I finished reading the instructions and moved on to the first question. And, just like that, my ability to read suddenly left me. My eyes wouldn’t focus, and the typed words swam around the page. My neck and back seemed to stiffen, and a sharp pain throbbed in between my shoulder blades. My lungs felt like they were shrinking to the size of grapes.

Relax! I screamed at myself, as though silently berating myself could possibly have that effect. You have to calm down! Relax! Focus! Concentrate! You can do this!

And somehow—miraculously—it worked. The words came back into focus, and suddenly I was reading a hypothetical question about a wholesaler of tiles and a subcontractor who installed them. The question went on for eight long paragraphs, but as I was reading it, I began to make sense of the issues. I wiped my moist palms on my T-shirt, popped the earplugs into my ears, picked up my pen, and began to take notes on a sheet of scratch paper.

I was so absorbed in the exam that—even though I was just finishing my answer to the last question when Professor Legrande gave us the fifteen-minute warning, his voice muffled by my earplugs—I was startled and dropped my pen. Most of the people sitting around me were bent over their desks, scribbling furiously in their blue books. I took a deep breath and flipped back through the test, luxuriating in the extra time I had to recheck my work.

And then Legrande was suddenly calling time, and we all put down our pens and passed our papers back to the ends of the rows. We weren’t allowed to speak until all of the exams and blue books had been collected, which seemed to take an inordinate amount of time. When Legrande was satisfied that he had all of the papers, he smiled at us and said, “Contracts One is now officially over. Good luck on the rest of your exams, ladies and gentlemen.”

“How’d you do?” Nick asked, as we stood stretching muscles that were tight from sitting still for three straight hours.

“All right,” I said, breathing out. “I think.”

But then I heard someone behind me say, “Did you get that unjust-enrichment angle in Question Two? I almost missed it and didn’t notice it until I was going over my work,” and a tremor of terror shook me. Unjust enrichment? Had there been an unjust-enrichment angle in Question Two?

“Was there an unjust-enrichment issue in Question Two?” I asked Nick, my voice dropping to an anxious whisper.

He nodded and looked serious. “Yeah, I think so. You don’t remember that part?”

“No, I don’t think I wrote anything about that.” I groaned. “Oh, God. I am so screwed.”

Nick shook his head. “You don’t know that. Let’s get the hell out of here. It’s not going to help to hear everyone rehashing the test,” he said.

I threw all of my test supplies into the knapsack that I’d stashed by my feet. Nick was striding ahead of me, walking quickly and not stopping to talk to anyone. I hurried after him. I was glad when I saw that Lexi and Jen were huddled around Addison while he looked up something in his textbook and they didn’t notice us leaving. Nick was right—the last thing I wanted to do was relive the exam.

“How’d you do, Kate?” Scott Brown called after me.

I shrugged and smiled but didn’t stop to talk. Outside in the hall, Nick had finally slowed down and was waiting for me, watching our classmates trickle out of the lecture hall in groups of two or more, chattering loudly about the test.

“Everyone’s going insane,” he said, looking disgusted. “They’re all just torturing themselves.”

“No, they’re trying to make themselves feel better,” I said as we turned and walked down the hall and out the front doors of the law school together.

“Where did you park?” Nick asked as we turned east down Freret.

I shook my head. “I didn’t dare drive this morning. I took the streetcar.”

“Probably a smart move. Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

“What are you doing now? Are you going to study?”

“No way. I’m too burned out after that exam,” Nick said. “I should probably take a nap, but I’m too revved up to sleep. Hey, you know what I want to do?”

“No, what?”

“Go to a movie,” Nick said. “You want to?”

“We can’t,” I said immediately, although when Nick said, “Why not?” I couldn’t think of a good answer.

The idea did have enormous appeal. The idea of being able to hide in the darkness and zone out to a celluloid fantasy while gobbling down handfuls of buttery popcorn sounded heavenly.

“Okay, let’s go,” I said happily.

The movie theater was mostly empty when we arrived for the one o’clock showing of a horror movie starring glossy young actors who were all ten years younger and thirty pounds lighter than me. It wasn’t the type of movie I’d normally see, but it was the only thing playing that wasn’t a melodrama or a cartoon, and Nick and I had been in agreement that we couldn’t take anything too heavy.

Nick bought my ticket, and when I protested, he simply smiled and said, “It’s okay. You get the popcorn and we’ll be even.”

We stopped at the concession counter, where I bought the biggest tub of popcorn they sold, with extra imitation-butter topping, along with two sodas and an enormous box of Milk Duds.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” I said. “It feels so…so reckless.”

“Wow, you really do know how to walk on the wild side, don’t you?”

I elbowed Nick playfully in the side. “You know what I mean. Most of our class probably went home and started studying for Torts on Friday,” I said.

“There’s no point in studying right now. My brain is fried,” Nick said.

We sat in the middle of the row, halfway up the theater, and both of us slouched back in our seats as we waited for the movie to start. Now that the tension was starting to leave my body, my neck and back ached.

“I’m starving,” he said, his voice muffled through the mouthful of food.

“Milk Dud?” I offered him.

“Definitely. There’s a secret to the ultimate movie-theater snack that not many people know about. But I’m going to let you in on it,” Nick said.

“Tell me.”

“The secret is to first take the popcorn.” Nick stuffed a handful of popcorn in his mouth. “Then add the chocolate.” He tossed a few Milk Duds in. “And then chase it down with a splash of Coke.” He slurped some Coke through the straw.

“That’s the secret?”

“Yup. Popcorn plus chocolate plus Coke,” he said through his popcorn and candy-stuffed mouth. “It’s the patented Nick Crosby Movie Snack.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “Do you really think you’re the only person who’s figured out that popcorn, chocolate, and soda taste good together? Popcorn, chocolate, and soda make up three of the four pillars of the concession-stand marketing strategy. Of course they taste good together; they’re supposed to,” I said.

“That may be true, but they taste better when you eat them in the patented Nick Crosby Movie Snack sequence.”

“Stop saying that.”

“You’re just jealous. What’s the fourth pillar? Nachos?”

“No.”

“Hot dogs?”

“Eww. No. Twizzlers. Actually, all of the synthetic-fruit-based candies, as opposed to the chocolate-based candies. Twizzlers, Sour Patch Kids, Jujubes.”

“All inferior.”

“Be that as it may, they’re still the fourth pillar.”

He stuffed another round of popcorn and Milk Duds into his mouth, and then sucked up some Coke through a straw. “The fourth pillar isn’t holding its weight,” Nick said.

The Torts exam on Friday and the Civ Pro exam on Monday were pretty much what I expected, although they left my brain feeling numb.

“One more test and then we’re done forever,” Jen said as we dragged ourselves out of the Civ Pro exam.

“You mean until next semester, when we get to do this all over again,” I said.

“Don’t remind me,” she sighed.

“Hey, chickies, wait up,” Addison called, jogging to catch up with us. “What did you guys put for Question Two-B—the one about the plane crash in Brazil?”

“No! No postmortems! It’s too depressing,” I said.

“And I can’t even remember. I think that was around the point where I lost my mind,” Jen said desolately.

We walked outside into the law-school courtyard and sat down on one of the cement benches. Jen pulled out a white box of Marlboro Lights and smacked it against the heel of her hand.

“Let me bum a smoke,” Addison said.

“What a surprise,” Jen muttered. “I hate Social Smokers. They never want to buy their own cigarettes, because they think that will make them a Real Smoker, so they just mooch off those of us who are honest about our bad habits.”

“I’ll buy you a pack if you give me two cigarettes now,” Addison bargained.

“Deal,” Jen said. She flipped open the box, pulled out two cigarettes, and lit one. She handed the lit cigarette to Addison and then lit her own.

“That was traumatic,” Lexi said as she exited the law school. She looked dazed as she sat down next to Jen and sighed heavily. “May I have a cigarette?”

Jen rolled her eyes heavenward but produced a cigarette for Lexi. While Lexi lit her cigarette, Nick and Dana walked up. Nick looked absolutely awful—dark rings under his eyes, a heavy beard, and wearing rumpled sweats and a faded T-shirt that looked as though he’d slept in them. Dana, in stark contrast, was serene. She was wearing ironed khakis and a black sweater, and her curly hair was caught back into a neat ponytail.