“If I don’t get my homework done, you’re just gonna be pissed off.”
“If you...” She wanted to say, If you don’t waste your time on Instagram or whatever, but she caught herself in time. Don’t be Judge Judy. “You’ll get your homework done,” she said.
“It’s tedious.”
“What is?”
“This pointless SAT prep class. It’s a waste of my time.”
“And we know how valuable your time is,” she said. She changed lanes, and so did the black Suburban. Anxiety sent ants crawling up the back of her neck. What the hell? If they were trying to intimidate her, it was working.
“Dad says this whole ridiculous system is just designed to turn us all into sheep. Excellent sheep.”
She sighed. Duncan had a well-thumbed copy of a book called Excellent Sheep on his bedside table.
He went on, “Bionic hamsters. The whole thing is a factory that turns out conformists who get perfect grades and are good at taking tests. Dad says it’s all bullshit.”
She didn’t want to argue about this either. The grim fact was that Jake’s grades had been dropping, and he didn’t seem to care. His father’s attitude had infected him, she was fairly sure. She wasn’t a tiger mom, but she knew how the world worked, and she wanted Jake to have every opportunity.
“My brother, Calvin—”
“Not Calvin again!” Jake protested.
Her younger brother, Calvin, had been a loser whose life had been a series of failures, until the day he died in a collision with a tractor-trailer that probably wasn’t an accident. He was a Bukowski-reading romantic who prided himself on being edgy and interesting. He’d dropped out of college after his freshman year.
He smoked a lot of dope — another reason she wanted Jake to stop. The friends he made were the kind who encouraged him in the worst way, brought out the worst in him. One of them turned him onto something stronger. He started a garage band that wasn’t very good. Once she’d even helped him get a booking at a local club in Allston, and then his band showed up totally stoned and barely able to play.
Calvin’s life, and death, haunted her. Her parents never recovered. Calvin was like an object lesson to her: what could happen, how your life could be derailed, when you made reckless choices.
She hated using Calvin as a parable, a metaphor for bad judgment, but she did it anyway and always felt guilty when she did.
“You need to have a plan, that’s all. When people don’t plan, life makes plans for them.”
“Dad says, ‘Man plans, God laughs.’”
She smiled. “But you can’t just coast, honey. Look, I see the real world. I have people coming into my courtroom who come from good families and end up in trouble, make bad decisions. I see it all the time.”
“Oh, God.”
“You’re at a really crucial point in your life, Jake. It’s not the time to slack off.”
They had arrived at the modern red-brick office building where the prep course was held. She pulled up to the curb, and Jake opened the door and hopped out.
As he entered the building, she glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the black Suburban again, idling at the curb, and something in her finally snapped. She was more angry than scared. How dare they follow her. How dare they intrude on her family. She shut off the car and got out. She felt a tightening in her chest. They would never do anything to her here, not out in the open, not with people around.
She strode up to the Suburban, feeling hot, prickly with anticipation.
She rapped her knuckles on the tinted driver-side window, her heart pounding in her ears.
The window powered down, and an Asian woman in a business suit was looking at her, puzzlement in her eyes. “Juliana? Everything okay?”
The mother of Soo Jung Kim, a kid in Jake’s class.
“I’m sorry, Chae-won,” she said. “Wrong car.”
21
Jake would be in class for the next two hours, which meant that Juliana had a choice: she could find a Starbucks nearby and work while she waited for him, or she could drive home and then come back to pick him up.
She decided to drive back to the courthouse and pick up a stack of documents to read at home. As she drove, she replayed her conversation with Jake and regretted how she’d somehow gotten sucked into an argument. He didn’t like talking about school or schoolwork anymore. She remembered when he would chatter excitedly about his day when she picked him up, about his teachers and what he was learning and what happened in recess. But that was long ago; he must have been no older than ten. Now, everything was grist for a potential fight. He didn’t argue nearly as much with his father. Jake was hyperarticulate, unusually so for a kid his age, and scary smart.
Unfortunately, he’d started coasting, it seemed, at just the wrong time. He just stopped caring. Was it weed? Was it something else? His grades had dropped this year. He was screwing things up for himself. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was doing a Calvin. How could you motivate someone like that? He was so different from Ashley.
Jake was also so different from the way she’d been when she was his age. She’d been the real grown-up in the house, not her alcoholic mother or her recessive father. She made sure Calvin got to bed on time and did his homework.
And Calvin, of course, came to resent it.
Everyone always thought she was so together, so on top of everything, so in control. When the truth was, she always feared she was one stumble away from becoming Calvin. Or Rosalind. She knew it was a lot easier to judge them than to acknowledge how easily she could have been them.
How baffled poor Chae-won Kim had looked when Juliana had stormed up to her. And she still couldn’t stop looking in the rearview mirror from time to time to check whether she was being followed. Even if she were being followed — what would they find? That she went from home to courthouse and back, with occasional jaunts to Jake’s school. That was about it.
She lucked into a space on Cambridge Street and entered the courthouse.
“Judge, isn’t it kind of late for you?” said one of the security guards, waving her through.
“No rest for the wicked,” she said, an old line they batted back and forth. If you only knew.
“I hear you.”
She took the elevator to the ninth floor and walked to her office. The hallway, normally bustling with people going to court, was empty and still.
She unlocked the door, and before she switched on the light, she noticed light seeping in from the adjoining courtroom. Strange, she thought. Who could be in the courtroom at this time of day? She switched on her office light and then strode across to the courtroom door, which she opened.
A janitor was vacuuming the floor of the courtroom. A light-skinned black man with a shaved head, wearing steel-framed glasses. She knew the maintenance and custodial staff, always greeted them by name. But this one she’d never seen before.
Her nerves were really frayed, her suspicions out of control. The janitor looked up at her; she nodded, and he went back to vacuuming. She closed her office door.
She located the place in the pile of printouts where she’d stopped reading — she’d marked it with a sticky note — and grabbed about an inch-thick pile of documents, looking around for a file folder.
She heard a key turn in the door lock and, surprised, looked up. The janitor was opening the door.
She smiled. “I’ll be out of your way in five or ten minutes,” she said.
He entered her office anyway, holding a broom.
“Excuse me,” she said a little louder. “I should be out of here in five or ten minutes.”