“Yeah, what’s wrong with you! Usually, every five years or so someone quits. I don’t know why you people continue coming here. I just don’t feel sorry for you.” I wanted to tell Janet that we had something in common, namely that I didn’t feel sorry for her, either. I couldn’t feel sorry for anyone at the moment. I was too busy drowning in her breaking news.

The judge had driven half a dozen clerks to quit over the years and it had remained a well-kept, dirty little secret. The files in Columbia Law’s Clerkship Center were filled with pages of adoring testimony from her former clerks, who had “learned so much” from Judge Friedman, “couldn’t have asked for a better experience,” and “loved and respected” the judge.

But maybe the judge deserved the respect she bestowed upon herself. I didn’t know many people who could snap their fingers and make people disappear, and Judge Friedman did just that. After that day, it was as though Laura “the gay” had never existed at all.

Like a scene from a movie that went straight to video, a poodle licked my leg on the way home. It was ninety-five degrees outside. Hot, sweaty, sad, dog saliva drenching hairy leg. I looked up. Owner looked proud. And looked just like her dog. I dragged myself into my apartment, almost tripping on what I figured was a shoe. It was a mouse. At that point, I felt so beaten down, I didn’t even bother cursing. Instead, I just crawled into bed. It was 7 PM on Friday night and I was under the covers, fully dressed. I had clerked for exactly one week. All I wanted to do was stay in bed until Monday morning—or, better yet, until the end of the year—but I couldn’t.

Brian had forwarded me an invitation to “Clerks in the Commonwealth: Let’s Get (Il)Legal!” It was the first organized clerks’ happy hour, and I hadn’t even made the first cut. Apparently the cool clerks who whipped up the plans didn’t consider me to be one of them. Brian had generously sent it along and I’d agreed to go in thirty seconds flat hoping the faster I RSVP’d yes, the faster I could forget I hadn’t really even been invited. So, instead of sleeping for about a hundred hours straight, I had to whoop it up with a pack of law clerks who didn’t even want me there.

The only saving grace was that James had moved into an apartment in my building that very day. James was clerking for a district court judge in Camden. He got to take a week off after the bar exam and before the start of his clerkship, so he’d been in East Hampton with some of our law school friends the past few days before heading to Philly.