When the Bell Rings

Chapter One Quiet

Mika Bryant had a way of moving through a room like she was apologizing for taking up the space.

Shoulders in, chin low and a stack of casebooks hugged to her chest like armor.

At twenty-five, she was one year from a law degree she’d bled for, and most days she still couldn’t believe Temple University let a girl from the east side of the city, sit in the same lecture hall as the sons and daughters of judges.

She worked the front desk at Prescott & Nash three days a week and took her Property and Evidence classes on Tuesday and Thursday nights, the only two days her schedule allowed. It made for a strange, floating kind of life — half student, half receptionist, all tired.

“You coming out tonight?” Renee asked, propping her elbows on Mika’s desk like she owned it. Renee always smelled like somebody else’s perfume, borrowed and never returned.

“I have reading.”

“You always have reading.” Renee rolled her eyes, drawing out the word always like it was a personality flaw. “Deja’s cousin is doing bottle service at Vale. It’s not gonna cost us nothing.”

Us meaning Mika would be the one who ended up paying for the Uber home when Deja’s card got declined again, the one who held Renee’s hair, the one who woke up with a headache and a used feeling she could never quite name.

“Maybe next week,” Mika said, which both of them understood to be a “no thank you” dressed up nice enough to end the conversation.

Renee huffed off toward the break room, and Mika exhaled the breath she’d been holding since the question started.

She loved Renee and Deja the way you love people you’ve known since middle school — out of habit, out of history, out of the fear that if she let them go, she’d have nobody left at all.

They’d been there for her when her mother wasn’t, however she was also starting to admit to herself that they never once asked her a single question about Law School, the LSAT, her scholarship, the nights she stayed up until 3 a.m outlining Evidence lectures.

They instead asked what she was wearing, who she was texting, who she was seeing but never what she was building.

Deja called twenty minutes later, as if summoned, already mid-complaint about a manager at the boutique where she worked retail, and Mika held the phone to her ear with her shoulder while she filed a stack of intake forms, making the small approving sounds a good listener makes, the way she always did.

It didn’t occur to Deja to ask what Mika was filing, or why, or what any of it had to do with the degree she was three semesters away from finishing.

It rarely occurred to either of them. Mika had stopped noticing the absence of the question so long ago that she’d almost mistaken it for normal — the way you stop noticing a draft in an old apartment until somebody else walks in shivering and asks why it’s so cold.

She hung up, finished her forms, and ate a granola bar at her desk for lunch because she’d forgotten yet again, to pack anything better.

This was the usual for her, work, then class, then a bus ride home in the dark, then a long night at the kitchen table with the reading lamp on waiting for that particular, private satisfaction of understanding a rule of law a little better than she had the night before.

Nobody clapped for any of it but she had stopped expecting anyone to.

She didn’t know yet that in six weeks her life was about to change and for the better, only she wouldn’t think so..

She just knew that tonight, like most nights, she wanted to go home, make herself a bowl of cereal for dinner because payday was Friday, and read three hundred pages of case law until her eyes gave out.

That was enough. It had to be.