11. Jae
Chapter eleven
Jae
Itake the stairs two at a time, my backpack knocking against my spine with every step.
By the time I reach the second floor, I can feel the strap digging into my shoulder. I shift it higher and keep walking.
Thornfield Hall Library is bigger than it needs to be. Two floors of dark wood, old stone, arched windows, and enough carved molding to make the whole place feel less like a university library and more like someone decided a cathedral needed a place to store books.
The afternoon light comes through the tall windows in long, dusty beams. It catches in the air above the shelves and makes the whole second floor look slightly hazy.
Somewhere below me, a cart rolls across the hardwood with a squeaking wheel.
Someone laughs near the reference desk. Then everything settles back into the particular quiet libraries have—not silence, exactly, but the collective agreement that nobody is supposed to be loud.
I pass the self-help section, then the reference desk, and head toward the back corner where the study carrels are tucked away from the main floor.
Amiyah is already there, in a pink crop top and jean shorts, perched in one of two facing chairs with her back to the wall, her ballet flat dangling from her foot.
Her laptop is open in front of her, the screen casting a soft glow across her face.
A single lamp sits between the two chairs, throwing warm light over the table and leaving the shelves behind her in shadow.
There's a plastic boba cup beside her keyboard, condensation running down the side and collecting in a small ring on the wood.
She looks up when I approach.
No smile.
No frown.
Just that same expression she always seems to have when she looks at me, like she's already decided I'm going to be mildly inconvenient and is waiting for me to prove her right.
"You're late."
I glance at my watch.
“I’m literally right on time.”
“You were the last one to get here. Thus, you are late.”
I look at her.
She looks back.
There are some people you meet and immediately understand that arguing with them is going to be exhausting.
Amiyah is one of those people.
I pull out the chair across from her and sit.
She turns her laptop toward me. The screen displays a Google Doc, already formatted, already populated with headings and subheadings and bullet points in a color scheme that I can only describe as aggressively coordinated.
“I’ve drafted an outline,” she says. "The assignment requires us to evaluate prosecutorial discretion when exculpatory evidence exists but procedural safeguards have broken down."
She clicks into the next section.
"I've separated the analysis into the legal duty to disclose, the limits of prosecutorial discretion, institutional safeguards, and the ethical consequences of violating those safeguards."
I stare at the document.
It’s…a lot.
The headings are bolded. The subheadings are italicized.
The bullet points are indented with a precision that suggests she used a ruler, or possibly a laser level.
There are footnotes. There are citations already embedded.
There is a works cited page that currently has twelve entries and, based on the blank lines following them, room for at least eight more.
“This is…” I start.
“Thorough,” she supplies, when I don’t finish.
“That’s one word for it.”
“What’s yours?”
I lean back in the chair. The wood creaks. “Intimidating. Also maybe slightly obsessive. But in a good way. The kind of obsessive that gets A’s and also possibly a restraining order.”
She doesn’t laugh, but something in her posture softens by maybe half a degree.
Her fingers hover over the keyboard, manicured nails catching the lamp light—pink, of course, because consistency is her brand and her brand is pink and perfection and making the rest of us look like we’re not even trying.
“I like to be prepared,” she says.
“I can see that.”
She blinks. Once. Slowly. Then she turns back to the laptop like she has decided that the fastest way to neutralize an inconvenient observation is to pretend it never happened.
I lean forward, elbows on the narrow table. The wood is cool under my forearms. I can smell her perfume and it wraps around my senses, something sweet and floral that makes my chest tighten. I read over the
“Can I say something?” I ask.
“Will it be useful?”
“Probably.”
“Then say it, I guess, if you truly must.”
I point at the screen. At two specific places in her outline where the argument framework makes a leap that the citations don’t fully support.
“Here,” I say, tapping the bullet under ‘Framework Construction.’ “You’re arguing that procedural integrity functions as a necessary constraint on prosecutorial power, which is correct, but the leap to ‘and therefore any deviation constitutes structural corruption’ doesn’t track with the Porter holding.
Porter establishes that deviations can be justified if they’re transparent and subject to review.
You’re treating deviation and corruption as synonyms. They’re not. ”
She’s quiet. Her eyes track from my finger to the text, back to my finger, to the text again. The highlighter in her hand, twirls once between her fingers before she uncaps it and draws a single, clean line through the phrase I’ve indicated.
“Also,” I continue, scrolling down to the practical application section, “your mitigation framework assumes the existence of functional oversight mechanisms in every jurisdiction. That’s…
optimistic. Some of these places, the oversight is the prosecutor’s golf buddy.
You need a contingency for systems where the checks are theoretical at best.”
Another pause. Longer this time. Her jaw does that thing—the tightness, the small muscle movement along the hinge that she tries to hide and fails at. Then the highlighter moves again. One stroke. Precise. Surgical.
She doesn’t thank me. She doesn’t acknowledge that I’m right. She just…incorporates the feedback, the way a skilled editor incorporates a line edit—without ceremony, without ego, with the pure, focused efficiency of someone whose only priority is making the thing better.
It’s the most attractive thing I’ve seen all week, and I am not proud of that fact.
“Section three is where I think we actually disagree,” she says. “The framing of the central argument. You said in class that defending procedural integrity in a corrupt system is defending the architecture of injustice. I think that’s reductive.”
“Because it is.”
“Because it’s not that simple.”
“Nothing is that simple, hotshot. That’s my entire point.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Make me.”
The words leave my mouth before my brain has fully approved the export paperwork.
They hang in the air between us, warm from the lamp, charged with something that has nothing to do with ethics frameworks and everything to do with the fact that we are sitting close enough that I can see the exact point where her lip gloss catches the light.
She holds my gaze for a moment. Then she looks down at the outline.
“My point is,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper, “that you can’t just tear down the system because it’s flawed. You have to fix it from within. Otherwise, you’re just creating chaos.”
“Chaos gets results when the system is built to protect the bad guys,” I counter, leaning in half an inch.
Her gaze flickers, something dark and unreadable passing across her eyes before she locks it back down.
We go back and forth—challenging precedents, tearing down assumptions, rebuilding the framework line by line—until an alarm begins to screech on her phone, signaling that our ninety-minute commitment is up.
The outline has become something neither of us could have built alone. It has her rigor and my angles. It has cases she found and observations I made. It has a structure that holds both our voices without collapsing into contradiction.
But it still needs a little more work.
“Thursday,” she says, zipping her tote. “After classes. Same place.”
“Thursday,” I agree. “I’ll bring my A-game. Or at least my B-plus game.”
She stands and the lamp light catches the curve of her cheek, the soft wave of her dark hair, the particular set of her mouth that suggests she is fighting a smile and losing, slowly.
“You do that.” she says.
I stand too. My coffee cup is empty. I should throw it away.
I will, in a minute. Right now, I’m watching her gather the last of her things—a pen that rolled to the edge of the table, a hair tie she’d been wearing on her wrist, the particular way she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear that I have now seen approximately seven times and am somehow not tired of.
“See you Thursday, hotshot,” I say.
She shoots me a look of disdain, but she also doesn’t correct me.
Progress.
She just turns, adjusts her bag on her shoulder, and walks toward the stairwell, her ballet flats making almost no sound against the old hardwood, and I stand there in the alcove with the warm lamp and the empty coffee cup and the distinct, unsettling sensation that something has shifted—something small, something quiet, something I am absolutely not going to examine too closely because examining it would require admitting that I care, and caring is complicated, and complicated is the one thing I came here to escape.