“We are such assholes. You are such an asshole—you actually asked a cop if people were selling drugs.” He shook his head. “How lame.”

“Oh come on, James. Look around. It’s a bunch of middle-aged men in silver Land Cruisers. How on earth could we have known that they were getting blow jobs on their way back to Little League.”

While it was true that these Main Line fathers were not the most obvious felons, it was also true that we probably should have caught on—the bumper-to-bumper traffic every night at six, not a single female driver, and I should have probably figured out that the pockmarked guy in overalls was not at all homeless but instead was selling his body for sex to suburban professionals.

“Whatever, Sheila.” James shrugged his shoulders. “Honestly, I don’t even care. Sort of makes this whole clerkship thing that much more interesting. Edgy, almost.”

Chapter Eight

A Toronto judge fell asleep in the middle of a criminal trial but woke up when a defense lawyer dropped a 2,136-page copy of the Criminal Code on the desk in front of him, a court was told yesterday. “We decided that I would drop a copy of Tremeear’s Criminal Code . . . in order to wake His Honour.”

I woke up with that weird stomach feeling. The kind where you know something dreadful is in store for you but your memory hasn’t quite gotten up to speed. Five seconds later, I remembered that in a few short hours, I’d be experiencing my first sitting. I was too scared to even gasp or groan. Maybe I’d paralyzed myself in my sleep? Unfortunately, paralysis probably fit into the “you’re not allowed to get sick” category and wouldn’t fly as an excuse for a no-show.

B-Day—the day I’d undoubtedly pick my entire scalp bald—had arrived. To think that I had to do this with Evan, and nobody else, made it that much worse. While I’d not heard a peep from Matthew since his dramatic exit, I still prayed for his sister-in-law nightly and had my mother light a few candles for her at the Infant Jesus of Prague Church. Well, maybe not the church. This one had vinyl siding and was in suburban Virginia rather than the Czech Republic, but it was the pious thought that counted.

While I was at it, I should have prayed for myself and my more immediate problem. Suits appeared to be the appropriate sitting attire. The judge’s exact words were, “Don’t come in here in one of those—those—things for the sitting.” And then she just pointed at me. I’d deduced she either meant that we should shed our skin or refrain from the hideous category of clothing we’d all taken to—the dreaded “business casual.”

Considering the judge’s affection for polyester pantsuits, I found her disdain to be a bit hypocritical. Unlike the judges, we couldn’t mask fashion atrocities with a big black robe. Had I ever even worn a suit? I quietly made my zillionth empty promise to the Person upstairs and threw open the closet doors.