Chapter Seventeen One Class Left
Third year came and went in a blur of exhaustion and late-night outlines, Nina’s kitchen table permanently claimed as Mika’s second office, Pop showing up unannounced with soup whenever finals season made her forget to eat.
Amir fought twice that year, won both, and Mika sat ringside both times, no longer flinching at the flashbulbs, no longer scanning the crowd for judgment she used to imagine everywhere.
She still saw the comments sometimes. She’d learned to close the app instead of reading them.
On a Tuesday in May, she sat in her last Evidence class of her law school career, took her last final that Thursday, and walked out of the building into a warm spring evening feeling lighter than she had in three years.
Amir was waiting outside — not supposed to be there, camp had him in Atlantic City until Friday — holding a bouquet of grocery-store flowers that had clearly been bought in a hurry, grinning like a man who’d just watched somebody else win a fight.
“You drove two hours for this?”
“I’d drive twenty,” he said, and swept her up off her feet right there on Bedford Avenue, and she laughed, loud and unguarded, the kind of laugh that used to embarrass her and now just felt like relief.
That night, over dinner at Pop’s sister’s house with the whole crew crammed around a table built for eight and seating twelve anyway, Pop raised a glass and said, “To the lawyer,” and everyone cheered, and Mika cried a little into her plate, and thought about the twelve-year-old girl watching her family’s couch get carried to the curb, and thought: look at us now.
Her Property professor, a stern woman named Dr. Alcott who had spent an entire semester making Mika defend every position twice over, pulled her aside after the last class and said, without much warmth but with unmistakable sincerity, “You argue like someone who’s actually lived the cases instead of just reading them.
Don’t lose that when the money starts coming in from firms that don’t care about tenants.
” It wasn’t the kind of compliment that came wrapped in kindness, but Mika understood, walking out of that classroom for the last time, that it might be the truest one she’d received in her three years of law school.
She called her housing nonprofit supervisor that same week and accepted the fellowship on the spot, before she’d even framed her diploma, because some decisions didn’t need three years of law school reasoning behind them.
Some decisions you just knew.