continued from Part I.

Here, I am adequate. I am not on law review, but neither do I get referred for academic counseling. I exist in the swampy middle, where no one bothers to compete. Outlines are passed along freely, because they are all second generation in the first place, in the murky middle where most people read LegalLines instead of cases. We are not the class attenders, we are not, in any real sense, learners. We either never had the desire, or let it get beat out of us quickly. We pass time, gain competency, and realize that our final great contribution to our careers was out LSAT score. We are the secret majority of such an esteemed school. In a world of rankings and numbers, of aggressive faculty raiding, we are unspoken of, told to be enthusiastic in front of the admitted students, and left alone. We are without passion.

The girl sits two rows ahead of me, three seats to the left. I guess that I am watching her. Noticing her habits. She chews on the cap of her pens, she keeps her pens in her purse, not her bag. She takes handwritten notes, but is surrounded by laptops on all sides. She writes rapidly, in big blocks of text for most the class period. . She doesn’t really speak to the people around her, just squeezes past them into her seat. When class ends, she packs up quickly, is one of the people out of the room before someone has thought to prop the door open because an hundred other people will be filing out.

Once a quarter they provide us with these parties. Bus transportation to a popular city club. Ten dollars, open bar, a chance to pretend we are hip and urbane. I don’t know why I go. I don’t even ride the bus. Perhaps because it brings back bad associations, perhaps because it requires too much small talk. I drive myself separately, arriving alone. Everyone drinks too much, and then thinks to be adancer. They bounce in tight groups on the dance floor, pretending that they know what it is to be nasty. Arms upraised, they avow their love of hip-hop. These the same people that are so afraid of inner-city black people they won’t leave the law school alone at nighttime.

I stand on the stairs drinking whiskey sours and watch without being watched. They are becoming friendly, dancing obscenely and badly. I feel the girl before I turn to see her. She is drinking some pinkish drink out of a clear plastic. Instead of looking at her, I stare into the ice cubes, watch the dance floor lights refract through her glass. She has both her drink and her lit cigarette in her right hand, inefficient, while her left hand plays with the tail of her shirt. Unconscious obsession with a loose string hanging from the seam. I know that she is still looking up at me, with wide green eyes.

Here, in her bed, I am not sure what to do. She is lying on her side, head supported on one arm looking at me with expectation. As much expectation that can show through half shut eyes. Our faces are close, and her breath is strong with cheap vodka and fermented fruit punch. There is enough light coming through the windows, from the apartments bright security lighting, to make out large shapes, but not enough for clear details. In this lighting, she could be pretty. Her pants shed somewhere in the living room, as she staggered back to the bedroom, her shirt falls down into the arc of her waist, leaves her legs exposed. I have only had sex a few times before. The first time I was drunk, and cannot remember the logistics. The other times was with a girl that I thought I was going to love, that I thought was going to be significant. There had been dating and intimacy, a place to begin with. Here I am unsure of where or what to touch.

After a moment of unconsciousness, I put my hands on her hips, to roll her off and to the side. She is shivery, so I might have done something right. She puts her hands on my hand, moves my hands off of her, down to the bed. She shakes her hair out of her face, looks down at me, and says without urgency, without anger, without real emphasis: "Fucking hell. We didn’t use a condom." I don’t know how to respond to this, so I try to free up my hands, to do. . . I am not sure what, maybe get that last bit of hair out of her face, but she is still pressing down, leaving my hands pinned to the mattress. Then she says: "I’m going to throw up." And she rolls off to the side and disappears into the bathroom.

Without her on top of me, it becomes chilly fast. I sit on the edge of the bed and try to find my underwear and T-shirt. I finally find them wrapped in the balled up blanket kicked off the edge of the bed. I can hear her retching in the bathroom. I start to look for my socks and pants. I don’t want to turn the light on, so I feel around the floor. I should feel filled with virility. I should feel like I just accomplished something. But all I know is that my mouth is dry, and it is cold, and the retching from the bathroom is making me start to feel ill. I am inadequate.

WHERE CAN I PARK MY CAR IN BROOKLYN?

DIET AD COLLECTION

SHECKY'S DREAM VAULT