“Ah, hi.” John said, coming out of his office and appearing to have gained twenty pounds since I last saw him. He glanced at what looked like my résumé. “Hi, ah, Sheila? Please come in, have a seat.” It was a bit disconcerting that he clearly had no clue who I was, considering I’d worked closely with him on a bond offering two years earlier. I explained to him how my clerkship was coming to a close and I was deciding between Barnes and the ACLU. While I’d not expected the red carpet treatment (in fact, I’d developed a severe aversion to red carpets over the course of the year), it was nonetheless off-putting that my former colleague didn’t bother to look up as I spoke. Instead, he sat, breathing heavily, frantically thumbing away on his BlackBerry.

“Hmm, I see, yes. Ah, well I do hope you come here,” he muttered, typing. “We have tons of really interesting SEC investigations right now.” Weren’t lawyers supposed to be convincing? Something about the way he mumbled “interesting” gave the impression that he didn’t know what the word meant.

I took a good look around. Deal toys cluttered the bookshelves. “Merrill Lynch 1979” in small red, white, and blue letters on a plastic plane. “Goldman Sachs 1986” on a glass car. I squinted to read the little words on a miniglobe. Thankfully John was still glued to his BlackBerry and didn’t notice my looks of disappointment. The prize was a poster of a huge ship in the middle of a raging sea. It read, “THE PERFECT DEAL,” with “JPMorgan 2002” scrolled at the bottom. A knockoff from the movie poster of The Perfect Storm. That was it—I knew I’d drown at Barnes. I hadn’t nearly died at the hands of Helga Friedman to be a nameless, faceless bitch to the BlackBerry.

“Well then, John, thanks for seeing me. I, um, will let you know what I decide.” He stood, still looking down, and shook my hand.

By the time I returned to the courthouse, everyone but Matthew had left for the day.

“Well?” he asked excitedly, “how did it go?”

“Matthew—you’re so nice to have stuck around for me,” I replied, sitting at the table between our cubicles. “And I have a few things to report. First, I got an offer from the ACLU.”

“Congratulations, Sheila!” He jumped up and bent down to hug me. “That’s fantastic. So you accepted on the spot, I presume?”

“No, I actually didn’t.” Matthew looked confused. “But wait, I’m going to call and accept this week. After my interview there, I bizarrely trekked up to Barnes—I don’t know why. Maybe just to make sure that I wasn’t impetuously jumping into another horrid work situation.”

“And?”