Chapter 7: Lawyer Up (Part I)

Julie Ang, a Sophomore, walked tiredly to her next class, dragging out a conversation on the cellphone. With student elections on the way a number of billboards and placards had been positioned everywhere around campus.

Their presence colored nearly every conversation.

“I don’t think that I like either candidate this year.”

“Aren’t there three?”

“Huh. I don’t know. I just remember a girl and a guy… Anyway. My brother tells me that the one guy, hm. The dark hair and British accent is the better choice. Maybe I’ll vote that way. I forget his name.” She craned her neck to pick his name out from the flock of signs in front of her, clustered around the edge of the Hayden stacks.

There, one particular sign made her double-take. The billboard didn’t look very different than any of the others. Similar height, similar width, brand-boring design with big striking letters and a picture of the candidate: Emily Early. Her bust portrait dominated the thing, a wicked-grinning Aphrodite.

It wasn’t the sign that tugged at her—it was the eyes. Wide, vacant things. Like a pair of deep vision pools staring back through the portrait. Then the picture moved: a subtle shift of the barest turning of the neck, a motion in the jowls, and a puckering of lips. It could have been a gesture of the wind, rustling the material of the sign. Except—

Except then the eyes snapped onto hers.

The tinny speaker of the phone boomed loud in her ear. “Julie? Are you still there?”

“Heh, uh, yeah,” she said. “What were we talking about again?”

“Student elections.”

“Yeah. I’m thinking of voting Early.”

Statistics class was putting Elaine to sleep again.

Not that she hadn’t stayed up until 3am beguiling dragons out of their gold, traversing great expanses of dungeon filled with dangerous monsters, and healing her teammates—ordinarily she’d be fully awake by now, even without a can of Coke. Statistics was just extremely boring.

Up for study: Poisson distributions.

Instead of paying attention, she let her thoughts wander. Back to the picture of the Marriott ballroom. All of those young people, college students just like her, probably didn’t have to worry about their grants and scholarships. From the expense of their dress, they had it made already. The children of luxury. Including Emily and Tom. She spared a glance around the room—it seemed to run half-and-half between rapt attention on Professor Patterson and also falling asleep—and she could tell that nobody else in the class had chosen to wear Prada. While she understood the sample probably missed out on obvious things (like why wear a three-thousand dollar outfit to a class on statistics) she figured it was an apt thought that nobody out of a class of thirty had as expensive taste as the people in that photo.

Five thousand dollars on offer and Emily didn’t even blink an eye.

Elaine should have requested more. She might have gotten it. Except… Except she already felt like she was fleecing the desperate. Emily had come to her in terror and uncertainty and entrusted in her a mission which she would have done for free. If she didn’t have grave need for the money.

Also, now there was the matter of another politico, Mr. Tom Barrett, being tied up in all of this. From the stoop of that phantom, she doubted its good intentions. Every case did tend to unravel a lot like this. One link at a time. Clues were for wusses who read silly children’s detective stories—evidence formed links in a chain, sometimes straight and something branched, but always leading somewhere.

The lecture droned on, the clock ticked on, and she even checked her cellphone for the time—twice in the same minute. The whiteboard had become a sea of blue and green words and mathematical symbols as the professor switched the color of the marker back and forth to highlight points.

After a few minutes more, a silent, but palpable, signal passed through the class. The rustle of feet became louder, books closed and slid across desks, zippers unzipped. Time to go.

“That’s it for today,” said Professor Patterson. “This material will not be on the quarter-term test Friday, but you’d best study it anyway.”

Elaine trotted out of JWS and made her way directly across the street to the Computing Commons. Her hand already on the warming metal of the handle to the front door before it struck her. She’d been on autopilot. She’d gotten so used to going up to her lab on Wednesdays between Statistics and Database Theory—her only two classes that day. Except now something was different.

No lab.

Sullenly, she removed her hand from the door and shrugged her backpack higher up onto her shoulder. It only had one book in it, but it still felt like it weighed a ton. She could still go in and say hello to her friends who worked IT in the Commons. Although, by now they’d probably have heard of her humiliation and shame at the loss of her lab. There’d be awkward questions…

She did an about face and stalked away towards the MU.

When in doubt: play arcade games.

The MU had been a location of solace for her ever since she’d started at ASU only two years earlier. With the lounge and its strange fireplace and the restaurants of the ground level she could always skip in and catch a bite to eat. But really what drew her attention some days happened in the basement. Certainly, there were more restaurants down there, and a small movie theater, but it was the arcade that she loved.

Pool tables, a bowling alley (that she never saw used and wondered why it was there anyway—probably frequented when she didn’t visit anyway), and a nice stash of aging arcade consoles scattered to the side.

Almost like well-oiled clockwork, she found some of her friends from the ASU Dungeons, Heroism, and Tabletop club standing around the D&D Golden Age arcade game. Hollering and hooting, they cheered as they hammered their way through scores of enemies—mostly tiny, green goblins—as they chatted about their day. During her first year she’d met most of them doing exactly this over lunch break.

Lucky for her, only three were present, opening a single player slot for her to join in.