I was sticking to fag haggery. Frankly, homophobia was totally passé, and while Janet wasn’t the friendliest kid in class, she certainly hadn’t exhibited specific animus toward Laura. As for the staring, Laura had no room to complain. Last count: the judge had stared at me for about eighteen hours, and we had exactly another 2,120 hours to go before the end of the year.

“Yeah, that really sucks, Laura,” I said, patting her on the back. It was enough to send her back to her cubicle and allowed me the opportunity to take my sympathy to Janet. Fat was one thing. But Janet had just been told that the mere sight of her made the judge want to off herself.

“Um, Janet, are you OK?” I asked, carefully approaching her cubicle.

She looked up from a book, seething. Did I say something wrong again? Was “Are you OK” in the same irrational category as “How are you?”

“Why don’t you just go back to your big office and do whatever it is that YOU people do!” Janet practically spit in my face. It was then that I noticed she was simultaneously reading the Bible and clutching a cross pendant around her neck.

Apparently I’d landed in Psych 101. Cycle of violence: father beats child, child grows up and beats his own children, and so on. Unfortunately, the law clerks were pretty close to the bottom of the chain, as interns didn’t start for another week or so. But Roy was definitely at rock bottom, which seemed like a dangerous position. If I were the judge, I wouldn’t want to piss off a man who wore armor and carried a sword on the weekends.

Judge Friedman buzzed me in the late afternoon.

“She-la. That Judge Adams can’t do anything. She can’t do what’s-its-name—whatever that case is you’re working on. So, stop working on it. We’re giving it to another panel.”

Very rarely in one’s life does the unbelievable occur. Sextuplets. Winning the lottery. Dolly the cloned sheep. And now, Judge Adams’s inability to work on the labor case—and my salvation. I wanted to call the producers at Dateline NBC.

Judge Adams was on the panel for Judge Friedman’s next sitting, but she had to recuse herself from my case. Her husband was the venerated mayor of Philadelphia, and his last campaign had accepted large sums of money from one of the unions that was a party to the case. This created an obvious conflict of interest for Judge Adams. Anytime a judge was recused from a case, it was bestowed upon a different panel. This, of course, stank for the parties, as it delayed their appeal. But for me, it was liberation from labor law hell.