Page 83 of Open Water
I reached over and turned off the lamp and pulled the blanket up over the both of us, and in the dark the narrow bed held us and everything else just fine.
Chapter 20: Alex
Wexler 102 smelled the same in December as it had in September. Cold air and dark wood, the varnished oak polished by a hundred years of student elbows. The tall arched windows ran the whole river side of the hall, and through them the oaks were down to black branches now, stripped clean. The first week of class I'd watched the very first leaf of the fall turn past that glass. I'd half-counted them down all semester without meaning to. Now they were gone, and so was almost everything I'd walked in here believing in September.
I sat in the third row of a hall built to seat three hundred and currently holding maybe ninety, all of us hunched over blue books in the specific fluorescent purgatory of finals week. Outside, the campus was emptying in pieces — trunks open in the lots, duffels and laundry baskets, the dining hall down to a skeleton menu, that particular December melancholy of an institution draining itself out like water from a hull.
Two hours. Three prompts.
Eleven days since I'd last looked at a page of this, because eleven days ago I'd had a future I understood, and somewherein the middle of it I'd gotten suspended, broken my former best friend's nose, sat through a hearing, then handed my entire future to a scholarship rower named Liam. Who then fucked me for the first time.
So. I hadn't done the reading.
A Harrington prepares.My father's voice, dry, sitting somewhere behind my sternum where it lived.A Harrington is never the least prepared person in the room.
Today I was.
I set my notebook square. Set my pen on top of it. Made the small private arrangements I'd made before every class since I was fourteen.
Up at the front, Dr. Merritt sat at the proctor's desk with a red pen and a stack of something, not watching us, letting the room sweat on its own. Mid-fifties, black blazer, the reading glasses pushed up into her grey-streaked hair. She hadn't softened a single degree since the first day.
I remembered the first day.
September. She'd swept into this same room and dropped her bag on the desk hard enough to echo to the back row, swept the seats with that cutting gaze that landed on three of us for one second each, and said:Welcome to Foundations of Constitutional Reasoning. If you are in this class because someone else wants you to be, you will fail.
My spine had locked. Because I was. I was in this class because my father said pre-law was the track: law school, then his friend's firm, or a Senate run by forty if the winds were right. He'd read it off at dinner the spring of senior year like a memo. I hadn't picked anything since I was twelve.
This course requires you to think for yourself,she'd said.To form positions and defend them. To distinguish what you have inherited from what you actually believe.And then, pacing,hands behind her back:The law is built on identity. On choice. On knowing what you stand for — and what you stand against.
I hadn't been able to do it. Not in September. I'd sat in this exact room with my arranged face and my arranged hands and my locked spine, and when a woman I'd never met asked the room what it stood for, I had come up with nothing at all. Because I was the mask my father's money taught me to wear, and a mask doesn't stand for anything. It just composes itself and waits.
Question one, December:When, if ever, is a court justified in departing from its own precedent? Discuss the doctrine of stare decisis and the circumstances that warrant overruling settled law.
I almost laughed out loud in a silent exam hall. Three months and she was still asking me the same question. She'd just dressed it in doctrine so it would fit in a blue book.
And the strange thing, the thing I'd have to think about later, is that my hand started moving before I told it to. Twenty years of training does not care whether you've slept or studied or had your whole life detonated. It just runs. I wrote a clean opening line and built the argument out the way I take a piece apart on the water, finding the structure, the through-line, refusing to muscle it. Stare decisis:let the decision stand.
The principle that what was settled before binds what comes after. A court doesn't reach the question fresh. The question was already answered, by people who came before, and the answer controls — you build on it whether you'd have chosen it or not. Stability over correctness. The past, deciding the present, forever.
The whole architecture of my life was settled law.
The problem was I'd never once gotten to argue the case.
I sat there a second with my pen off the page, which you are not supposed to do in an exam, and let the thought finish itself,because it had been circling for days and I was tired of swatting it down.Distinguish what you have inherited from what you actually believe.She'd put it to a room of strangers in September like it was a study skill. It had taken me until December to understand she'd handed me the only real question of my life and I'd written down the date instead.
Every question about my future had been ruled on before I could speak. Kingswell — settled; Harringtons go to Kingswell. Pre-law — settled; pre-law leads where the family leads, to a desk in his world, to the firm, to the life drawn for me before I could walk. I'd neverdecideda thing. I'd cited the cases I was handed and mistaken that for having a life. A perfectly trained advocate, arguing flawlessly for a position I had never once chosen.
I thought about James.
My cousin had done it correctly. That was the part nobody in the family said out loud about James — that he hadn't rebelled, hadn't failed, hadn't embarrassed anyone. He'd done everything right. Yale. Pre-law. The whole approved sequence, executed flawlessly, the model son, the model of obedience to settled law. And then he brought a boyfriend home for Thanksgiving and the family closed over him like water over a dropped stone, and all the doing-it-right turned out to have bought him exactly nothing. Which meant the precedent had never really been the law. The obedience was. The law was whatever my father said it was that morning, and you followed it right up until the day you tried to depart from it — and then you learned, fast, that departure was the one thing the doctrine never actually allowed.
I'd already departed once. I'd overruled the one holding that was never his to make and kept Liam. And I'd thought that was the whole case. The relationship. The big one.
Sitting in Wexler 102, I understood it was just the first question.
Because if the life he'd chosen for me wasn't actually binding — if I could overrulethat— then what about the rest of it? The major. The desk. The firm. The whole drawn life I was, at that exact moment, demonstrating my competence at in a blue book. Did I want to be a lawyer? A Harrington in a corner office, billing my one life out in six-minute increments? Or was that just precedent I'd never thought to challenge, because challenging it was the single move I was never trained to make?
I didn't have the answer. That was almost the most disorienting part. For the first time in my life there was a question about my own future and I genuinely did not know it. I'd always known. The answer had been issued to me at birth, the holding handed down before the facts of me were even in.
