It was 9:04 PM when James came knocking. Judging from the amount of drool spilling over my pillow, you’d have thought I’d been asleep for weeks. Or that my tongue had been surgically removed. With his tan and new designer jeans, James didn’t look like he’d spent the day unpacking. But the guy was still too skinny for his own good. James and I had been seated next to each other in Torts on day one at Columbia. Aside from one drunken indiscretion after our Property final, we’d maintained a strictly platonic relationship, since we both admitted that said indiscretion felt dangerously close to incest.

“Hey there.” He smiled, shoving a bottle of pinot noir in my face. I grabbed it and led him into my sparse living room. Thanks to my paltry salary, the only furniture I had was the yellow couch and an old IKEA coffee table, which had too many scratches and a few screws loose. This, of course, further separated me from my friends who’d gone straight to law firms where they were getting paid in six digits, had five weeks of vacation, and free gym memberships. It was tough to recall why I’d secretly considered them the unlucky ones.

“Welcome to Philadelphia!” I tried to sound exactly the opposite of how I looked and felt. He didn’t buy it.

“What’s up, Sheila? No offense, but you look terrible.”

“Um. Well, thank you. And if you must know, my coclerk quit and the judge just about ripped my head off today. Oh, and I didn’t tell you this earlier, but I didn’t even make the first-round cut for this bar thing tonight. Brian—you remember, from Fed Courts—had to forward me the invite. So, we’re your basic party crashers.”

“You mean she quit—as in the clerkship? She actually quit the clerkship? I didn’t know people did that.” James’s eyes bulged.

“Well apparently they do do that and one in particular already did do that.”

“Oh my God. I mean—”

“James, it’s done. I don’t really want to talk about it right now. Can you please open that bottle? I’ll make myself look unterrible and we can head to this fantastic place.”

An hour later, the two of us were standing outside of Rouge, Rittenhouse Square’s premier hot spot. A thick red velvet rope separated James and me from the legions of law clerks we could see inside.

“Nope, not on the list,” the bouncer announced gleefully. This wasn’t good. Sure, I’d been turned away from hot New York nightclubs in my day, but this was a restaurant-cum-bar in Pennsylvania. As we were about to split, Brian came stumbling out, fedora clinging on for dear life, half a glass of red wine in one hand, blond coed in the other. The girl couldn’t have been more than twenty-two years old.