The last few weeks before exams were a blur. Tasha and I stayed up late, studying, reviewing our outlines, and re-reading the Nutshell series for our subjects. Outlines were the key to law school success. In an exam, the professor would set out a fact pattern, just a narrative describing a series of events, and then you had to analyze the legal implications. The best responses, or at least the ones that scored the highest, were the ones that spotted the most potential issues. Once you had the issue spotted, you had to I.R.A.C. It stood for Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion. The ‘I’ was the most important part, because it allowed you to get to the rest of the process. You couldn’t analyze an issue you didn’t see. What the outline did was to get all of the various rules you learned during the semester into a couple of pages. Organized into broad categories and then sub-categories and sub-sub-categories. That way, when you were looking at a fact pattern, you could go through the outline in your head and look for facts that might fit a rule.

It was a strange experience and one that took me a while to get used to. Thankfully, the classes were graded on a curve and everyone else had the same adjustment issues. These days, I could knock out a two-thousand-word answer with full analysis in under an hour. I even cited the major cases we had read in class.

But this Evidence exam had me shook. For some reason, I kept forgetting one of the four Daubert factors for the reliability of expert witnesses. I looked over at Tasha, who was sitting so still she may have been asleep, her hand propping up her forehead. I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. They were dry from the air conditioning in the library.

“I’m going to go get some coffee, you want some?”

Tasha’s head dropped down out of her hand. She caught herself just before it banged against the desk. She had been asleep.

“Um, yeah, I guess. A double non-fat latte. Thanks.”

I hopped down the stairs toward the café on the main floor of the law school building. It felt good to get blood flowing in my limbs again after hours of sitting bent over my books. I had been more focused during this exam period than I could remember. The reason was simple. I wanted to focus entirely on the present and not think about what I was going to do after exams were over.

When I had come home from my introduction to Asher, I was sure that I would tell my uncle ‘thank you for the offer, but I will find another internship.’ The idea of working with that guy for a whole summer was deeply unsettling. I could handle arrogance. I could handle his superior attitude. But I was unsure I wanted to be around someone with such contempt for their own profession. How could you be motivated to work hard if you were so cynical?

When I talked to Tasha about it, she was singularly unhelpful.

“So, what did he look like?” was her first and most persistent line of questioning. I didn’t understand her. Who cared if he was good looking if he was such a jerk? I had no desire to subject myself to being around him for a whole summer. Even if he was an effective attorney and even if there were a lot I could learn from him, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I didn’t think I wanted to learn anything he had to teach me, because if what he knew made him into such a sour and cynical person at such a young age, those were lessons I could go without.

But, like any good law student, I forced myself to argue the other side. It was already late in the year to look for another internship. I had relied upon working at my uncle’s firm and hadn’t attended any of the internship fairs that came to campus periodically. I hadn’t done the networking and relationship building that would have been necessary to get a position at a good firm. And say what you will about Cramer, Williams, and Bryant, but it was a firm with a stellar reputation for what they did. It was hard to pass up having that as a line on my resume, especially when the other choices that were left to me were significantly less impressive.

Besides, if I was going to work as an attorney, especially if I wanted to work to protect people who have been oppressed, victimized, and exploited, I was going to have to come up against unpleasant people. As a lawyer, I couldn’t just avoid assholes, and I couldn’t just scream and yell at them. I had to find a way to work with them. I had to be professional, distant, and composed. Working with Asher would be good practice.

I had thoroughly convinced myself that working as an intern with Asher was going to be a great experience. That all of the negative elements, the annoyances, the hostility, the aggravation, were actually positive. They were a part of the learning process. And if I learned some tricks about criminal law in the meantime, that was a bonus. In my rational mind, I had won the argument and decided to follow through with the internship.

But in my gut, I still felt uneasy.

The Evidence exam came and went. After I finished, I went straight to my outline and found that I had completely forgotten to discuss a major issue. I hoped that I had done enough to at least get a decent grade, but I was disappointed. Luckily, Evidence was my last exam, so I could go out and forget about it.

“Hey, you ready to drink your problems away?”

Tasha approached alongside Emma and Kyle. Kyle looked like he had started his end of semester celebration already.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I was thinking rooftop at The Standard?”

I nodded my assent and we headed toward Figueroa to grab an Uber. It was a lot cheaper to take a ride the few minutes up to downtown than it was to pay for parking. It was safer, too, since I think everyone planned on getting pretty heavily intoxicated.

The Standard was a hotel in downtown LA with a retro vibe and a great rooftop bar serving fourteen-dollar cocktails next to a heated pool. The view from the rooftop was amazing, a panorama of the skyline and the mountains to the north. I hadn’t been there since my first year. There were so many different bars and clubs in LA that you could go to a new place every week. But I was glad we chose this spot. The open air, the view, the intimate setting, it was a relaxing atmosphere. The perfect antidote to weeks of studying and exams.

I ordered a drink with vodka and elderflower liqueur and grabbed a spot at a table near the edge. The railings were glass, giving a great view down to the street below. Being Southern California, there were heat lamps at every table to ensure that nobody had to sacrifice comfort or fashion to have a drink outside. Not that I was dressed very fashionably. I had stopped by my apartment to get a quick change of clothes, a comfortable but trendy jacket I’d gotten at H&M over a t-shirt and a skirt. Nothing fancy, but put together enough to avoid looking as disheveled as I felt. I didn’t even bother to do anything to my hair, keeping it in the same ponytail that I’d worn to take my exam. I had done barely anything with my makeup.

None of that mattered, though. I wasn’t at the bar to pick up a guy or to feel good because some guy hit on me. I wanted to relax with my friends and decompress for a night before the reality of my upcoming internship landed. I needed a night to forget everything, all the stress, all the effort, the constant feeling of not knowing enough. As I sat with my back against the glass railing, resting my elbow on the table, and feeling the warmth of the heat lamp radiate into my skin, I felt truly at ease for the first time in months.

And then I saw him.