She’d made CNN’s “news of the weird” as well as its headlines. So, too, the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune. Even Tim Russert dropped her name on Meet the Press the Sunday after. Puja told me that she’d heard from a friend at Berkeley that some kids were planning on making stickers that read: “Fuck the Police,” with a picture of Friedman, fist in the air lasered behind the words. According to the Onion, the cameraman who caught it all was up for a Pulitzer.

For us, the world changed. Nobody had ever publicly mocked the judge. She didn’t know what to do. For the first few days, the judge exposed an emotion previously unseen: embarrassment. Janet told me that in all her years with the judge, not even when she’d accidentally locked herself in another judge’s bathroom after clogging his toilet had she seen her embarrassed. But losing respect was too much. The judge came and went silently. She didn’t want to be seen, closing her door while in chambers. She even refrained from yelling at anyone—including Roy—at first. This even after Roy came to work stinking of cigarettes. Even more bizarre, the judge asked me what my favorite Indian restaurant was, told Evan he’d written a good memo, acknowledged Kate’s existence with a hello, and joked with Matthew about Boise State’s season. We learned that the judge was an avid sports fan. We were ecstatic. There’d be a happy ending after all.

Then the darnedest thing happened. She suddenly became meaner, nastier, and more maniacal than pre-manhole. It was clearly a ploy to regain what she’d lost. It worked. The mocking stopped. The woman did what Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich, and Marv Albert couldn’t do. Even the great Bill Clinton couldn’t do it. She stopped the presses. It was as if the incident never happened.

I must have been staring blankly for minutes, because I came to as Kevin gently shook me.

“Sheila. Sheila. Are you OK?” OK wasn’t the first word that came to mind. My head felt like an overheated planet spinning off its axis. What would become of us after this news broke? Living with one leg or a half-bitten ear couldn’t be that bad, could it?

“Um. Yeah. It’s just that I’m shocked.” I forced my neck up. “What happened?”