Campbell
I’M REMARKABLY CALM, really, until the principal of Ponaganset High School starts to give me a telephone lecture on political correctness.
“For God’s sake,” he sputters. “What kind of message does it send when a group of Native American students names their intramural basketball league ‘The Whiteys’?”
“I imagine it sends the same message that you did when you picked the Chieftains as your school mascot.”
“Yes, and they’ve been members of the Narragansett tribe since they were born.”
“It’s derogatory. And politically incorrect.”
“Unfortunately,” I point out, “you can’t sue a person for political incorrectness, or clearly you would have been handed a summons years ago.
However, on the flip side, the Constitution does protect various individual rights to Americans, including Native Americans—one for assembly, and one for free speech, which suggest that the Whiteys would be granted permission to convene even if your ridiculous threat of a lawsuit managed to make its way to court.
For that matter, you may want to consider a class action against humanity in general, since surely you’d also like to stifle the inherent racism implicit in the White House, the White Mountains, and the White Pages.
” There is dead silence on the other end of the phone.
“Shall I assume, then, that I can tell my client you don’t plan to litigate after all? ”
After he hangs up on me, I push the intercom button. “Kerri, call Ernie Fishkiller, and tell him he’s got nothing to worry about.”
As I settle down to the mountain of work on my desk, Judge lets out a sigh. He’s asleep, curled like a braided rug to the left of my desk. His paw twitches.
That’s the life, she said to me, as we watched a puppy chase its own tail. That’s what I want to be next.
I had laughed. You would wind up as a cat, I told her. They don’t need anyone else.
I need you, she replied.
Well, I said. Maybe I’ll come back as catnip.
I press my thumbs into the balls of my eyes.
Clearly I am not getting enough sleep; first there was that moment at the coffee shop, now this.
I scowl at Judge, as if it is his fault, and then focus my attention on some notes I’ve made on a legal pad.
New client—a drug dealer caught by the prosecution on videotape.
There’s no way out of a conviction on this one, unless the guy has an identical twin his mother kept secret.
Which, come to think of it . . .
The door opens, and without glancing up I fire a directive at Kerri. “See if you can find some Jenny Jones transcript about identical twins who don’t know that they—”
“Hello, Campbell.”
I am going crazy; I am definitely going crazy. Because not five feet away from me is Julia Romano, whom I have not seen in fifteen years. Her hair is longer now, and fine lines bracket her mouth, parentheses around a lifetime of words I was not around to hear. “Julia,” I manage.
She closes the door, and at the sound, Judge jumps to his feet. “I’m the guardian ad litem assigned to Anna Fitzgerald’s case,” she says.
“Providence is a pretty tight place . . . I kept expecting . . . Well, I thought for sure we’d run into each other before now.”
“It’s not all that hard to avoid someone, when you want to,” she answers. “You of all people should know.” Then, all of a sudden, the anger seems to steam out of her. “I’m sorry. That was totally uncalled for.”
“It’s been a long time,” I reply, when what I really want to do is ask her what she’s been doing for the past fifteen years. If she still drinks tea with milk and lemon. If she’s happy. “Your hair isn’t pink anymore,” I say, because I am an idiot.
“No, it’s not,” she replies. “Is that a problem?”
I shrug. “It’s just. Well . . .” Where are words, when you need them? “I liked the pink,” I confess.
“It tends to take away from my authority in a courtroom,” Julia admits.
This makes me smile. “Since when do you care what people think of you?”
She doesn’t respond, but something changes. The temperature of the room, or maybe the wall that comes up in her eyes. “Maybe instead of dragging up the past, we should talk about Anna,” she suggests diplomatically.
I nod. But it feels like we are sitting on the tight bench of a bus with a stranger between us, one that neither of us is willing to admit to or mention, and so we find ourselves talking around him and through him and sneaking glances when the other one isn’t looking.
How am I supposed to think about Anna Fitzgerald when I’m wondering whether Julia has ever woken up in someone’s arms and for just a moment, before the sleep cleared from her mind, thought maybe it was me?
Sensing tension, Judge gets up and stands beside me. Julia seems to notice for the first time that we are not alone in the room. “Your partner?”
“Only an associate,” I say. “But he made Law Review.” Her fingers scratch Judge behind the ear—goddamn lucky bastard—and grimacing, I ask her to stop. “He’s a service dog. He isn’t supposed to be petted.”
Julia looks up, surprised. But before she can ask, I turn the conversation. “So. Anna.” Judge pushes his nose into my palm.
She folds her arms. “I went to see her.”
“And?”
“Thirteen-year-olds are heavily influenced by their parents. And Anna’s mother seems convinced that this trial isn’t going to happen. I have a feeling she might be trying to convince Anna of that, too.”
“I can take care of that,” I say.
She looks up, suspicious. “How?”
“I’ll get Sara Fitzgerald removed from the house.”
Her jaw drops. “You’re kidding, right?”
By now, Judge has started pulling my clothes in earnest. When I don’t respond, he barks twice.
“Well, I certainly don’t think my client ought to be the one to move out.
She hasn’t violated the judge’s orders. I’ll get a temporary restraining order keeping Sara Fitzgerald from having any contact with her. ”
“Campbell, that’s her mother!”
“This week, she’s opposing counsel, and if she’s prejudicing my client in any way she needs to be ordered not to do so.”
“Your client has a name, and an age, and a world that’s falling apart—the last thing she needs is more instability in her life. Have you even bothered to get to know her?”
“Of course I have,” I lie, as Judge begins to whine at my feet.
Julia glances down at him. “Is something wrong with your dog?”
“He’s fine. Look. My job is to protect Anna’s legal rights and win the case, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“Of course you are. Not necessarily because it’s in Anna’s best interests . . . but because it’s in yours. How ironic is it that a kid who wants to stop being used for another person’s benefit winds up picking your name out of the Yellow Pages?”
“You don’t know anything about me,” I say, my jaw tightening.
“Well, whose fault is that?”
So much for not bringing up the past. A shudder runs the length of me, and I grab Judge by the collar. “Excuse me,” I say, and I walk out the office door, leaving Julia for the second time in my life.
When you get right down to it, The Wheeler School was a factory, pumping out debutantes and future investment bankers. We all looked alike and talked alike. To us, summer was a verb.
There were students, of course, who broke that mold.
Like the scholarship kids, who wore their collars up and learned to row, never realizing that all along we were well aware they weren’t one of us.
There were the stars, like Tommy Boudreaux, who was drafted by the Detroit Redwings in his junior year.
Or the head cases, who tried to slit their wrists or mix booze and Valium and then left campus just as silently as they had once wandered around it.
I was a sixth-former the year that Julia Romano came to Wheeler.
She wore army boots and a Cheap Trick T-shirt under her school blazer; she was able to memorize entire sonnets without breaking a sweat.
During free periods, while the rest of us were copping smokes behind the headmaster’s back, she climbed the stairs to the ceiling of the gymnasium and sat with her back against a heating duct, reading books by Henry Miller and Nietzsche.
Unlike the other girls in school, with their smooth waterfalls of yellow hair caught up in a headband like ribbon candy, hers was an absolute tornado of black curls, and she never wore makeup—just those sharp features, take it or leave it.
She had the thinnest hoop I’d ever seen, a silver filament, through her left eyebrow. She smelled like fresh dough rising.
There were rumors about her: that she’d been booted out of a girl’s reform school; that she was some whiz kid with a perfect PSAT score; that she was two years younger than everyone else in our grade; that she had a tattoo.
Nobody quite knew what to make of her. They called her Freak, because she wasn’t one of us.
One day Julia Romano arrived at school with short pink hair.
We all assumed she’d be suspended, but it turned out that in the litany of rules about what one had to wear at Wheeler, coiffure was conspicuously absent.
It made me wonder why there wasn’t a single guy in the school with dreadlocks, and I realized it wasn’t because we couldn’t stand out; it’s because we didn’t want to.
At lunch that day she passed the table where I was sitting with a bunch of guys on the sailing team and some of their girlfriends.
“Hey,” one girl said, “did it hurt?”
Julia slowed down. “Did what hurt?”
“Falling into the cotton candy machine?”
She didn’t even blink. “Sorry, I can’t afford to get my hair done at Wash, Cut and Blow Jobs ‘R’ Us.” Then she walked off to the corner of the cafeteria where she always ate by herself, playing solitaire with a deck of cards that had pictures of patron saints on the backs.
“Shit,” one of my friends said, “that’s one girl I wouldn’t mess with.”