Look Closer

Yeah, you know that. You’re smiling at me with that patronizing, blue-blood smirk, that aura of cutthroat privilege. You don’t mind that the hierarchical levers were pulled on your behalf. Hell, you’re proud of it, and you’re happy to let me know it. Sure, I didn’t submit my materials, so ultimately I was a good little boy, but how dare I even think of applying for that seat when you applied on the first day and let the world know that REID SOUTHERN wanted that position. How dare I even consider challenging your ascension to the throne. Really, who do I think I am, contemplating that I am even remotely on your level?

Right, Reid?

“Congratulations,” Anshu says to Reid. “I look forward to your joining us.”

“That’s good of you to say, Professor,” Reid replies. “By the way, Simon, I read your blog the other day,” he adds, calling me by name after referring to Anshu by his title. Yeah, I notice things like that. “Something about the Eleventh Circuit and the third-party doctrine?”

“Right.”

“It was a fun piece,” he says.

A fun piece? I dissected that court opinion and exposed it for the circular reasoning that it was.

A fun piece. Our courts are lying down and allowing the government to expand its reach beyond anything anyone would ever have envisioned, and it’s a fun piece?

I smile at him.

Easy now, Simon.

I pat my pocket, pull out my phone like I just got a text. “Will you guys excuse me one minute?”

I step away while they chitchat. I take a breath.

Easy now. Good, clean thoughts. Calming exercises, go.

“Tear” and “tier” are pronounced the same but “tear” and “tear” are not.

“Fat chance” and “slim chance” mean the same thing.

I dig into my email. Not the In-Box or the Sent but the Drafts folder.

“Arkansas” and “Kansas” are pronounced differently.

We drive on a parkway but park in a driveway.

If a vegetarian eats vegetables, is a humanitarian a cannibal?

Fuck it. I’m done being calm. I find the email for Joyce Radler in administration and read it over:

Dear Joyce: Please find enclosed the full set of materials for my application for full professor, in PDF format as requested. Please let me know if I can provide you with any additional information.

I hit “send.” With three and a half hours to spare.

With the massive attachment, it takes a good half a minute to send. When my phone belches a confirmatory tha-woop, I look up and smile.

So now I’ve applied, Reid. It’s you and me, vying for the slot.

Yeah, I put all the materials together, just in case. I didn’t really think I’d submit them. Especially because now the dean will go with the nuclear option and destroy me and my future with the law school, if not with academia writ large.

Or maybe he won’t.

I would’ve let this go, Reid. I would’ve taken my beating and hoped for a better result the next time a slot opened. But you had to goad me, didn’t you?

I mean, I try to be reasonable. But sometimes, I let things bother me more than they should.

38 Christian

“Let’s go out,” Gavin says when he shows up at my apartment, making a beeline for my booze in the kitchen. “Let’s get some tickets to the Cubs, then hit some clubs.” He seems to like that idea, humming “Cubs and clubs, Cubs and clubs” as he pours himself a bourbon.

“Not sure I’m up for it,” I say.

“Not up for the Cubbies? Okay, just the clubs, then. We’ll grab a steak and then hit the West Loop.”

I moan.

“The Triangle, then,” he says. “Maybe Tavern.”

“I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know? It’s Friday night. What, you wanna stay home?”

“Maybe. I’m tired.”

He shakes his head. “No, no, no. Nicky isn’t tired on Friday night. Nicky gets loaded with his buddy Gavin, then he takes his pick of fillies home—”

“I just don’t feel good, G. Sue me.”

Gavin takes a long sip of the bourbon and eyeballs me. With a wag of a finger, he says, “How’s it going with Number 7?”

“Good. All good. Got her right where I want her.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, we can have a drink or two here before we go,” he says. “Tell me about her.”

“That’s not the deal.”

“Well, not her name, but I mean, y’know, generally. I mean, what’s her story?”

I shrug. “Not much of a story. She was a runaway, best I can tell.”

That surprises him. It surprised me, too, when I looked her up, but then it didn’t. The more time I spend with Vicky, the more I see that she’s a loner, a fighter. Most of the women I target—all six of the previous targets, in fact—had pretty normal, privileged lives. None of them had lives that remotely resembled mine.

“Like she ran away from home when she was a kid?” Gavin says. “What’d she do?”

“I don’t know. She won’t talk about her past. Nothing online I can find.”

“You know what she did,” says Gavin, pouring himself a second bourbon.

“I don’t.”

“What else would she do? She runs away from home, has to fend for herself?”

“Shut up, G.”