Testing Kate (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

N
ick didn’t look at me when I sat down next to him in class. He bent over his notes, his head resting on one hand.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.” Hoffman’s nasal voice filled the room. “When we last left off, we were discussing the Commerce Clause, limping along at an excruciatingly slow pace, thanks to Mr. Chesney’s feeble analysis.”

I glanced at Brian Chesney, who had endured a scathing interrogation during the last class before spring break. He now looked down at his book, his puggish face red and his shoulders sagging.

“Today we’ll be covering the civil-rights cases. I hope you’re prepared, because we’re going to be moving through the material quickly to catch up to where we should be,” Hoffman continued. “First up will be
Heart of Atlanta Motel
. Let’s see…who haven’t we heard from in a while,” Hoffman mused aloud while he consulted his seating chart. I saw his eyes flicker toward me, and I immediately raised my hand.

“Ms…. Mallick,” Hoffman said, his flat eyes sliding pastme and onto Dana.

Dana inhaled sharply, and she began paging through her textbook with shaking hands. I glanced at her, not sure what was wrong. It wasn’t like she hadn’t done the reading. Dana was always prepared. Always. She’d even come to class when she had the flu.

“Ms. Mallick, we’re waiting,” Hoffman said, his voice louder and more peevish.

I looked back to Dana. She’d turned a sickly shade of white and looked on the verge of tears.

Oh, my God, she doesn’t know the answer, I realized. Dana—the academic Girl Wonder—had actually shown up unprepared. And now it looked like she was going to be sick right then and there.

I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and then thrust my hand back up in the air.

“Ms. Bennett, put your hand
down,
” Hoffman said. He didn’t raise his voice, but his tone was dangerously cold. “Ms. Mallick.
Heart of Atlanta Motel.
”

“I didn’t read the case,” Dana said, so softly I could barely hear her.

“We can’t hear you, Ms. Mallick. Please stand up,” Hoffman said.

Dana looked at him fearfully but didn’t move. I could see tears shimmering in her wide brown eyes, and her lips were pressed so tightly together, they were ringed with white.

“Ms. Mallick, are you deaf or merely dumb?” Hoffman said.

“Leave her alone!” I said, my voice cracking across the silent room.

“Kate,” Nick breathed, the word a warning. But it was too late. Everyone’s eyes were on me, just as they’d been on that first day of Criminal Law class. But this was worse, I knew. Then I’d only been yet another timid law student for him to bully. The transgression of openly confronting him in class was far more serious.

“I beg your pardon?” Hoffman’s voice was more incredulous than angry.

“I said, leave her alone,” I replied, trying to keep the quaver out of my voice.

Hoffman and I stared at each other, and for a moment it was as though we were alone in the room. Nick’s presence, Dana’s sniffling—they were both pushed to the periphery of my consciousness as I waited.

“Ms. Mallick. Stand. Up. Now.”

Dana pushed her chair back and, bracing her hands against the edge of the table, she pulled herself up.

“Thanks to your friend Ms. Bennett, you will be in the hot seat for the remainder of class, Ms. Mallick,” Hoffman said. “Now. The Court’s holding in
Heart of Atlanta
.”

“I…I didn’t read it,” Dana said again, this time a little louder.

She held on to the edge of the table. Her eyes were wide with fear and her mouth gaped open, giving her a vaguely fishy appearance. Hoffman stared back at her, his face cold and foreboding. I closed my eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and then stood up.

“In
Heart of Atlanta,
a hotel owner sought to have the Civil Rights Act of 1964 held unconstitutional,” I said loudly. “The Court rejected this claim, and—”

“Ms. Bennett, get out of my class,” Hoffman snapped.

Hoffman glared at me, and as I looked into his cold, pale eyes, I wavered. What the hell was I doing? Was I crazy? Had I finally snapped under the pressure? I wondered.

“The Court held that Congress had the power to pass the act, because the motel’s business had an effect on interstate commerce,” Nick suddenly said. He stood up too, so that we were shoulder to shoulder.

“Mr. Crosby. How nice of you to join us,” Hoffman said. “You’ve also bought yourself a ticket out of my class.”

But Nick’s help bolstered my courage.

“The Court struggled with the fact that their holding was a pretext but concluded that the ends justified the means,” I said, projecting up from my diaphragm so that my voice rang across the room.

“I want the two of you out of here now. Get out of my fucking class!” Hoffman shouted. He banged his fist against the lectern, and his notes flew up into the air and scattered on the ground. Wisps of Hoffman’s hair floated up over his face, which was turning a violent shade of purple.

The silence that had been holding the class broke in a swell of gasps and murmurs. The noise seemed to snap Hoffman out of his rage, and he visibly struggled to gain control of himself. He smoothed his hair back down with one hand, gripped the edge of the lectern with the other.

“Before your continued presence disrupts us any further,” Hoffman continued, his voice cold and tight.

“Fine,” I said, and I leaned over and grabbed my notepad off the table and shoved it into my knapsack. Dana looked at me fearfully, and I shook my head at her. Walking out of the room right now pretty much guaranteed not being able to return, and there was no reason for Nick and me to drag Dana down with us. “Just sit back down,” I whispered to her, and she sank into her seat.

The class went silent again as I walked down the aisle and up the staircase, Nick following behind me. The room was thick with scandal, and it seemed to take forever to reach the exit. When we finally got there, I held the door open for Nick and then followed him out into the corridor. The hallway was empty, except for a group of Two-Ls who were sitting in the student lounge, so when the door shut behind us, the loud clatter echoed ominously.

I paused just outside the door, pressing my hands against my cheeks to cool them. What the hell had I just done? I was doomed.
Doomed.
Nick too. What had he been thinking jumping in like that?

Nick hadn’t waited for me. He kept walking down the short hall toward the front door of the law school. His shoulders were squared, and his step was determined. He seemed intent on getting away.

“Nick!” I called out. When he didn’t turn back or even break his stride, I hurried after him and grabbed his arm.

“Hey,” I said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

Nick just looked at me as though I were a stranger. As though we hadn’t spent nearly every day together for seven months. As though he hadn’t just seen me naked less than a week ago.

“Neither did you,” he said.

“What do you think Hoffman’s going to do?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. But I can’t think about it now. I have too much work to do.”

“Yeah, me too.” I tried to think of something to say, something that would dispel the strangeness between us. I wanted my friend back.

“I hear congratulations are in order,” Nick said casually.

“What? Oh. Thanks,” I said. I touched my engagement ring self-consciously. “Look, Nick—”

“I’ve really got to get going. I’ll catch you later,” Nick said. He turned and strode off down the hall, rounding the corner out of sight.

The reprisals came almost immediately. When I got to school the next morning, there was an official-looking missive on school letterhead waiting for me in my mail folder. It notified me politely, but tersely, that I was to report to Teresa Sullivan. Immediately.

I remembered the last time I’d been summoned to a dean’s office.

It had been back in my undergrad days at Cornell. A phone call from the Dean for Student Affairs had woken me up so early on a Saturday morning, I’d incorporated the ring of the telephone into my dream at first before it shook me awake. When I finally did answer, I fumbled with the receiver before finally hitting the on button.

“Hello…is this Kate Bennett?”

I hadn’t recognized the voice. It was male and sounded older, official.

“Who is this?” I’d asked groggily. I was hungover from the Amaretto sours the night before. My head pounded and my throat felt dry and fuzzy.

“My name is David Bell. I’m the Dean for Student Affairs…. I need to see you immediately,” he’d said. My mouth went dry with fear when he added, “It’s…it’s very important.”

I’d never crossed campus so early before. The sun was just starting to rise as I hurried across a freshly salted walkway from my sophomore dorm to the administration office building. The winter light was weak and the freshly fallen snow was as yet unmarred by footprints, giving the campus a beautifully eerie look. The wind had been bitterly cold, and it stung at my eyes—the only part of me not bundled up in a coat or scarf or hat—causing them to water so much I could hardly see where I was going.

I’d known even before Dean Bell had emerged from his office to greet me in the empty reception area that something was terribly wrong.

“Kate,” he’d said, taking my hand in his and looking down at me through thick glasses. He was mostly bald, except for some white fringe hanging about his ears, and there was a large liver spot covering his prominent forehead, like Mikhail Gorbachev’s. Despite the early hour, the dean was dressed in a natty three-piece gray flannel suit and a blue-and-red-striped Brooks Brothers tie. A power tie, I’d noticed, like the kind the President wears.

“Your parents were in a car accident. They…they didn’t make it. I’m so sorry,” the dean had said.

Those words cracked open my world, and everything familiar slipped away.

Whatever happens this morning with Dean Sullivan, at least it can’t be as bad as that meeting was, I reminded myself. When I looked back down at the letter her office had sent me, I saw that my hands were shaking, gently rattling the linen paper.

I climbed the stairs to the second floor of the law school and crossed the hall to the administration offices. The same obnoxious receptionist was manning the front desk. She was examining her teeth in a makeup compact when I entered.

“I’m Kate Bennett. Teresa Sullivan asked me to come see her this morning,” I said.

“
Dean
Sullivan will be with you shortly,” the receptionist corrected me. She snapped the compact shut.

Before I even had time to sit in one of the cherry wing chairs, the door to Sullivan’s office swung open and Nick walked out, looking incredibly pissed off.

“What happened?” I asked him softly when he passed by on his way out the door, but Nick just shook his head.

“It’s total bullshit,” he said. He didn’t look me in the eye.

“Kate, come right this way,” Teresa Sullivan said. She was standing in the doorway, her arms crossed in front of her. Today she was wearing a red suit with big black buttons and black patent pumps squared off at the toe. She waited at the door, closing it after I’d entered her office.

“Go ahead and take a seat,” she said.

Once Sullivan had settled back down behind her desk, I said, “So…am I expelled?”

“No. But you are on probation, which means that any further incidents could result in expulsion,” Sullivan said. She sighed, and shook her head. “Why did you go out of your way to provoke him, Kate? I’m not supposed to tell you this, but both you and Nick are at the top of your class after last semester. You both have an excellent chance of grading onto Law Review. Why screw it up over an egomaniacal professor?”

I didn’t know what startled me more—that I was in the running to grade onto Law Review or that Sullivan had actually just called Hoffman an egomaniac.

“So, you know what he’s like? Then why haven’t you done anything about him?” I asked, the words tumbling out.

“Because if we fired every professor for egotism, we wouldn’t have much of a faculty left,” Sullivan said, allowing herself a thin-lipped smile.

I shook my head. “None of my other professors is as bad as Hoffman,” I insisted. “He just goads and picks at you, waiting for you to screw up….”

“But he didn’t overstep the line. You did,” Sullivan said.

“How can you say that? He was ridiculing Dana.”

“I heard what happened. And no, not just from Professor Hoffman,” Sullivan said, interrupting me before I could protest. “But even if he was being a jerk, he was acting within the boundaries. However, when you stood up and interrupted his questioning of Ms. Mallick,
you
violated the Code of Student Conduct.”

“What happens now? Do you put me in law-school jail?” I asked, my mouth twisting.

“Would that I could, if it would keep you out of trouble,” Sullivan said, and this time her lips curved up into a genuine smile. “Professor Hoffman has decided that the two of you won’t be returning to his class. Which means that there are only two options open to you. One, you receive a failing grade for the course and then retake it next year. There’s little chance that you’d still make Law Review.”

This grim possibility hadn’t occurred to me. I’d have an F on my transcript, which every law firm I ever interviewed with would see.

“What’s my other option?” I asked.

“You can take the final at the end of the semester,” Sullivan said. “You’ll have to study on your own, but at least you’ll still have a shot at Law Review that way.”

It really wasn’t a choice at all. And, actually, being able to study on my own was far more appealing than having to sit through any more of Hoffman’s sadistic lectures. My friends would surely let me copy their notes, and there were plenty of commercial study guides available that would cover the rest of the material.

Although there was the obvious downside to this option.

“Will Hoffman be the one to administer the exam?” I asked.

Teresa Sullivan looked at me and nodded once. “I looked into your charges that Hoffman marked your blue book, and there was no conclusive evidence that it happened,” she said.