once in a lifetime
once in a lifetime
Gerard/Lindsey/Jamia, PG-13, ~3,500 words, law school AU
Thanks to octette and arsenicjade for betaing. I tried to run it by someone with a passing understanding of lawschool and combined it with my own (passing) understanding, so all remaining weirdness is my fault.
Posted for 14valentines, [Day 2] Transgender Issues
Lindsey always thought that she was going to be a rock star. She knew that this was something that most people get over when they’re in junior high, high school at the most. Most people stop singing into their hairbrushes then, too, but Lindsey never stopped.
So it was more than a little weird the day that she passed the bar.
After all: who ever heard of a rock star lawyer?
*
Lindsey remembered the day that the recruiter came into her art school and the snickers from people all around the room. Maybe there was some kind of requirement for the school to allow all postgraduate recruiters if they were going to allow any, so if they took the Sorbonne, they had to take NYU Law.
The recruiter was really earnest, though. He was this messy-haired dude with a Jersey accent and he was wearing Converse with dress slacks. He looked like he would fit in better at Pratt than in law school.
Law school, where they make lawyers. Like a factory for douchebags.
Lindsey was intrigued, though, and she didn’t have anything to do from 1-2, so she went to the open meeting and figured that she could at least eat some of the free pizza and roll her eyes in the back of the room.
Except that there was no back of the room, just four other students sitting in a circle with the recruiter dude. Lots of pizza, though.
“Seriously, art school students can do incredibly well in law school,” the guy was saying, leaning forward excitedly and waving his hands around a lot. He looked like he was about to knock over his can of Coke Zero. “It has to do with how we think, the flexibility of our reasoning capabilities.”
Lindsey did not want to be charmed.
“Wait,” Skye said, her perma-sneer managing to look even more sneering than usual. “How we think?”
“Yeah!” The guy grinned, either missing or ignoring Skye’s sneer. “I graduated from SVA a few years ago.”
Lindsey raised her eyebrows, impressed despite herself. At least the school was sending the right dork for the job. She sat down in one of the chairs to the side, still mostly figuring she’d listen.
“Hi,” the guy said, turning to smile at her. “We haven’t met yet. I’m Gerard.”
His smile was ridiculous. It was like he really wanted to know her name, like introducing himself was important. It was impossible to believe that this guy was going to be a lawyer.
“Lindsey,” she responded. She set her bag down and Gerard’s eye followed it and his face brightened.
“Is this the newest Doom Patrol?” He grabbed the corner of the comic sticking out of her bag. “Oh my god, that’s amazing! I’ve been traveling too much lately to get to a comic store. Is John Byrne living up to expectations? I’ve been worried.”
And with that. Well. With that, Lindsey was just fucked.
*
Gerard was convincing, that was the problem. He believed that things should change the world, that it was important to make an impact. And, despite three years of art school, Lindsey had to admit that she thought it was important, too.
She told herself, later, that was why she invited him out for a slice of real Brooklyn pizza, why she ended up sitting in Sal’s with him waving his hands around. She couldn’t think, then, that it could have been because of his smile or his hands or the way he looked at her.
“It was too hard to stay, you know?” Gerard said, shrugging and talking with his mouth full. “I mean, I was working for the Cartoon fucking Network and pretending that I was excited about inking the Powerpuff Girls and dreaming of breakfast monkeys. I just. It wasn’t what I thought it would be, you know?”
Lindsey nodded, even though she didn’t know, she’d never had anyone pay her to make art with the exception of her Uncle Mal who gave her $30 to draw Aunt Millie. She didn’t know about integrity of art and selling out, but she had worried, and she felt like that counted.
“So you just … went to law school?”
“Nah,” Gerard said, shaking his head and stuffing another piece of pizza in his mouth. “First I drank a lot.”
Without meaning to, Lindsey snickered and then threw her hand over her mouth. She flushed slightly.
Gerard smiled and tilted his head. “Nah, it’s okay. I did. It wasn’t cool, but I guess it’s what I needed to do, you know? So I was drinking a shitload, barely managing to stay employed, and wasn’t doing much else. My little brother basically brought home a bunch of catalogs and threw them on my bed and told me to get my shit together.”
Lindsey grinned.
“Yeah,” Gerard said sheepishly. “He doesn’t fuck around. He told me I had to get off my ass and do something, that it didn’t matter but he wasn’t going to clean up my vomit anymore. And then … well, then, September 11th.”
Lindsey nodded, her smile gone. Everyone she knew who lived or worked in the city had lost someone, had some close call, had shit hit closer than they could have expected.
“I was on the ferry and I saw it happen, you know?” He was quiet. Not really sad, just quiet, like remembering something important. “And I saw all of these people who couldn’t afford what they needed to do to get their property back, to find their families, to get the life insurance from people who died in the crashes. And so ... public interest.”
Lindsey nodded slowly. “I guess I can get that. Different, but. Yeah.”
“Yeah?” Gerard pushed his plate aside and picked up his water, leaning across the table toward her, as if to pick up something she might say quietly.
Lindsey sat back and took a breath. She never talked about this shit. But he looked trustworthy. Hell, he looked like he cared.
“My dad was an asshole,” she said, figuring she should start at the very beginning. “You know, like, more than the regular asshole. Cheated on my mom from day one, gambling problems, yelled a lot …”
“Hit you?” Gerard asked quietly. His hands didn’t clench into fists and she found herself strangely grateful for that.
“No,” she said. “No, not me. But my mom. More as I got older, or maybe I just saw it then.”
Gerard nodded.
“So he was. He was bad news. She wanted to leave him when I was eight. We tried.” She took a drink of water, her mouth kind of dry. “We tried, but she couldn’t afford a lawyer and he kept coming back to her and threatening to try to get custody of me if she blocked his access to his kid.”
“He can’t do that,” Gerard said, low.
“Yeah, well. The fuck did we know?” Lindsey didn’t know that she was still bitter, but. Apparently so.
Gerard nodded and refilled her water from the pitcher.
He got her number later that night. She thought it was a line, but it was apparently just that he wanted her to make the most of her life and thought that, maybe, he could help. And so, randomly, they kind of became friends. Random phone call friends, text messages about how boring the club Katy had dragged to her was or photos of a weird sign he’d passed in San Antonio.
Friends.
*
It wasn’t not like Lindsey was convinced to go to law school over a pizza by a guy with a big, real smile and little else.
Except it was kind of like that.
Maybe she was always meant to go. Maybe she was just impulsive. One way or another, it was how she got there.
*
Nobody was more surprised than Lindsey when she got a 171 on her LSATs. Nobody was less surprised than Gerard.
“What did I tell you?” he said. She could hear his smug through the phone. “Art school students have good brains.”
“Whatever,” she’d said, laying back on her bed and closing her eyes. She hadn’t thought it would work, really, had figured that the LSATs were a $120 gamble that would at least make Gerard shut up about it and let her stall. Plus, the smile that stretched all the way across her mom’s face when Lindsey told her about maybe going to law school was worth the price of the test alone.
She was just doing it. She didn’t think she’d actually do well. The fact that Gerard had told her multiple times that the LSATs were less a test of knowledge and more a test of how a mind worked didn’t really change shit. She was a fucking artist, maybe she could be a musician. She was not a damn lawyer.
“Seriously, Lynz, that’s fucking awesome,” Gerard said, obviously shifting the phone to his other ear.
She made a non-committal noise, trying to hide that the possibility of law school was much weirder than she’d thought it would be. She probably failed, but Gerard let her get away with it.
“Where are you today?” she asked, her yawn almost covering the question.
“St. Louis,” he said. “Tomorrow, Atlanta. Then home.”
“Home,” she said, smiling.
“Home.”
*
Lindsey got to law school and immediately felt like the weirdest, wrongest person there. It wasn’t the place that she’d thought it would be - almost nobody was there to change shit, nobody looked like her, and she was pretty sure that she heard some assholes in the back of her Contracts class snickering at her tattoos and Docs.
It wasn’t even hell. It was like high school all over again.
“You fucking lied to me,” she hissed into Gerard’s voicemail the first day. “Fuck everything about this place.”
There are good people. Gerard texted back later that night. You just have to find them. Most of yr classmates suck, but there will be good ones. xo
Fuck you.
She turned her phone off and slumped into her bed. At least she hadn’t had to move to go there, at least she hadn’t lost the familiarity of her local coffee shop and the bodega down the street where she could get anything from Newports to tampons at 4 am. At least there was that.
*
Lindsey hated law school. She hated the snotty fucking classmates, she hated how they looked at her when she pulled out a pen and paper instead of a laptop. She hated how, when they formed a study group, nobody tried to get her to join theirs.
She hated that she felt like the odd girl out even in a school full of weirdos.
So fuck them. She studied in the library alone and raised her hand to volunteer answers in classes and was generally totally obtrusive because … because … Fuck. Them. She had been the weirdo girl on the outskirts before and she could do it again. Fuck them.
She was packing her bag, shoving the laptop she’d finally managed to get off of craigslist into her backpack with her books when someone, finally, surprised her.
“Hey.”
Since forever, Lindsey has wished to be cooler. She would like to have been the girl who raised an eyebrow and looked up slowly, but, frankly, she wasn’t that cool.
“What?” she said, her head snapping up.
The girl blinked at her, her dark hair falling into her face. She was wearing a hoodie and jeans and basically looked like every girl Lindsey had ever known in Jersey. She looked like home and good bagels and girls smoking cigarettes outside of Sunday mass.
Basically? She was hot.
“Hey, I’m Jamia,” she said. She waved a little and grinned under her hair and Lindsey was maybe sold as fast as she had been sold on Gerard. “So, um. Look. Do you have a study group?”
Lindsey looked around them at the deserted classroom with her eyebrow raised. “Does it look like it?”
Jamia shrugged. “Fuck if I know.”
She waited, staring at Lindsey until Lindsey folded.
“What?”
“Look,” Jamia said, finally sounding kind of exasperated and not very found. “You seem smart. You pay attention, you answer shit. I’m tired of stupid social games that we should have gotten over years ago. So. You want to fucking study together or not?”
Lindsey grinned despite herself.
Yeah she did. Fuck yeah she did.
*
And it was like Jamia filled a space for Lindsey. She had Gerard on voicemail, on the phone almost every night, telling her she was amazing and talking about changing the world. She had Jamia every day, mocking their classmates into Lindsey’s ear and challenging her on everything, always echoing “You can do better” in Lindsey’s ear.
She also finally had someone to drink coffee and discuss jurisprudence, someone who asked her not if she wanted to have the coffee cake, but how many pieces she should have.
“My gramma says I’m going to get fat again,” she groaned to Gerard on the phone, pushing a little at the belly that is too full of delicious baked goods. She never really cared about being thin, but her family was fucking obsessed with it. It’s not like she lost weight on purpose, not like she ever saw anything but beauty in bellies and hips and thighs pushing against jeans.
“That sounds awesome,” Gerard said and she could hear his smile through the phone. “I like this Jamia girl. We should keep her.”
Between Jamia and Gerard, proximity and distance, it was kind of the best balance she could imagine and she … she wasn’t not sure what it means, but she knew it means something.
*
It was weird when Gerard and Jamia met, Lindsey’s only two real friends connected with law school. She had lots of other people from before, people that she knew loved her, people who were amazing. She didn’t need more than Gerard and Jamia in law school, so fuck all those other people.
“You’re better than them, anyway,” Jamia said, fierce in her ear.
“They’ll get it later,” Gerard said, quiet in the other.
They were like this complimentary pair in her life, but they’d never met. Lindsey was ridiculously nervous when they were finally in the same place at the same time, as if her mom was meeting someone she was dating for the first time.
The biggest, weirdest problem was that she couldn’t tell who was the parent and who was the person she was fucking.
“Hi,” Gerard said first, reaching his hand out to clasp Jamia’s. Gerard’s voice was unsure and Jamia’s stance was defensive - weird for Lindsey to see, two of the most open people she knew.
Jamia shook Gerard’s hand quickly and sat back, clutching her PBR to her chest like a life raft. Lindsey saw Gerard flinch.
Fuck.
*
It took them a while. Gerard had to work on understanding that his issues weren’t Jamia’s issues. Jamia had to believe that Gerard was actually that earnest (that one took longer). It took all three of them feeling each other out carefully, each of them watching out like something obvious was going to happen.
It didn’t. Not then.
One night, when they’d been drinking some wine in celebration of their Legal Research and Writing grades, Jamia leaned against Lindsey on her ratty and supremely comfortable orange couch and actually asked.
“What are we doing?” she said, her voice slurring but serious.
Lindsey put her arm around Jamia and closed her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I think it’s good, right?”
She felt Jamia nod, almost imperceptibly, before she pulled a blanket over both of them and they both fell asleep, wrapped up in each other.
*
And so it kind of went like that. 1L and 2L sped by in tests and stress and shoving totally new knowledge into their heads. Gerard was around when he could be and he and Jamia eventually learned how to orbit around each other.
The beginning of 3L, both Lindsey and Jamia were serving internships and they finally had a little bit of time to breathe. They didn’t need to study together anymore, but two years had bred habits and instead of books and papers, they met at a bar and had a couple of beers and complained about their clients.
It wasn’t any kind of life that Lindsay could imagine, but it was … well, it was kind of awesome.
*
It was almost the end of their 3L and Gerard was back on a brief sojourn before going back out. They talked all the time while he was gone, but every time he came back, it was like Gerard had to readjust to whatever small changes had happened while he was gone.
“Wow,” he said, fingering Jamia’s bright blonde hair. “This is new.”
Jamia shrugged, running her hand through her hair dismissively. Lindsey wasn’t fooled, though - she wanted to know what Gee thought.
Gerard smiled, the soft little smile that he saved for Lindsey and Jamia. “I like it.”
Jamia rolled her eyes, but Lindsey saw the bare beginnings of her own smile around her mouth.
“Anyone want a smoke?” she said, standing up to grab her pack and head out to the fire escape. Lindsey smoked as much as the next person, but she still hated the smell of stale cigarette smoke all over her house.
Jamia had pulled out a bar study guide and she and Gerard both waved their hands toward her, quickly indicating no. Lindsey watched them idly through the window near the fire escape, their heads bent in toward one another over the guide.
Although Gerard had already gotten his JD, he still hadn’t taken the bar and they were both worried about studying for it after Lindsey and Jamia’s 3L since Gerard decided to stop recruiting that year and actually study. For whatever reason, Lindsey wasn’t worried at all.
Not about the bar.
She took the last drag off the cigarette and blew smoke out in a long stream, obstructing her view. Gerard and Jamia were hazy, looking more like one person than two.
Lindsey opened the window and climbed back in.
*
“God, it’s late,” Lindsey whined, leaning back against Gerard and pouting over her shoulder at him. He laughed a little and switched his notes to his other hand, letting her rest on his shoulder but still not stopping reading.
Ugh. Lindsey thought that the studying was supposed to be over after law school. But no, of course not.
Because then there was the fucking bar.
Jamia ran her hand through her hair, a nervous tic she’d picked up from Gerard. She looked over at them, her eyes wide and her hair (black again) sticking up everywhere.
All three of them were tactile people, but it had taken Lindsey a while to get both Jamia and Gerard broken in to her levels of physical affection. It had been weird for both of them at first, she thought, but Jamia’s eyes had stopped looking sad when Lindsey leaned against Gerard and Gee had stopped flinching every time Lindsey looped her arms around Jamia’s waist.
She had even seen them curled up with each other, Gerard’s hand petting absently at Jamia’s hair while they read.
Lindsey felt like that was a pretty big win.
“Lindsey, this is … you have to …” Jamia tripped over her words when she was tired. She took a deep breath, starting again. “It’s late, but this is it. We agreed no more studying after tonight, right?”
Lindsey nodded. They’d talked to some former professors who suggested it, said that freaking out and cramming too close to the test could do more harm than good. So they’d agreed to keep each other from their books right before the test. Mostly, she’d gotten Jamia and Gerard to agree - they were the ones all worked up about the bar.
Of course, Lindsey wanted to pass it. She didn’t go to school for three years just to fail to practice. She just wasn’t worried about it. So it had been her idea to set a timeline on studying, to burn their practice books 24 hours before they took the bar, giving them all no other choice but to sleep and eat and calm the fuck down, Gerard.
“Well,” Lindsey said, yawning, “I think I’m done.” She looked at the clock on the wall, the cheap plastic chipped around the edges. “It’s five am. We agreed to stop at seven. I’m going to sleep.”
She handed her book over to Gerard, who looked scandalized at the very idea of losing the last of the studying time.
Lindsey smiled at him and Jamia sitting next to each other on the floor, at their rumpled clothing and crumpled mountain of coffee cups and nicotine-stained fingernails.
Later, she would blame the exhaustion and the stress, but at that moment, she was really just done with it all - with studying, with wondering, with waiting.
She leaned over and quickly pressed her lips against Jamia’s, flicking her tongue against the seam of Jamia’s mouth to make sure there was no confusion to her intent. She heard Gerard’s breath huff out and, before he could move or freak out or leave, Lindsey turned her head just a little to the left and nipped at his bottom lip.
She leaned back. They both looked … well, pretty much the same, except for their matching, huge eyes.
“What …?” Gerard started.
“Linds …” Jamia trailed off.
Lindsey grinned. She wanted to make it inviting, predatory, but she knew it probably just looked satisfied.
Fuck it, she was satisfied.
“I’m going to bed,” she said, turning toward her bedroom. “You two can study more or you can come with.”
She meant for that to be an invitation for more than sleep. As it turned out, the three of them had no more gotten into her room - Gerard fidgeting, Jamia’s shoulders set, Lindsey smiling - than they all fell promptly to sleep.
They made up for lost time later, though.
*
Lindsey’s life was going to be simple. She’d be an artist or a musician, living in a loft with a boyfriend or a girlfriend, living a life that makes sense.
So it was more than a little weird on the day she passed the bar, when she felt Gerard’s arm around her waist and Jamia’s lips on her neck.
It wasn’t in the plan. But it was good.
Maybe she was better at living than planning, anyway.
Gerard/Lindsey/Jamia, PG-13, ~3,500 words, law school AU
Thanks to octette and arsenicjade for betaing. I tried to run it by someone with a passing understanding of lawschool and combined it with my own (passing) understanding, so all remaining weirdness is my fault.
Posted for 14valentines, [Day 2] Transgender Issues
Lindsey always thought that she was going to be a rock star. She knew that this was something that most people get over when they’re in junior high, high school at the most. Most people stop singing into their hairbrushes then, too, but Lindsey never stopped.
So it was more than a little weird the day that she passed the bar.
After all: who ever heard of a rock star lawyer?
*
Lindsey remembered the day that the recruiter came into her art school and the snickers from people all around the room. Maybe there was some kind of requirement for the school to allow all postgraduate recruiters if they were going to allow any, so if they took the Sorbonne, they had to take NYU Law.
The recruiter was really earnest, though. He was this messy-haired dude with a Jersey accent and he was wearing Converse with dress slacks. He looked like he would fit in better at Pratt than in law school.
Law school, where they make lawyers. Like a factory for douchebags.
Lindsey was intrigued, though, and she didn’t have anything to do from 1-2, so she went to the open meeting and figured that she could at least eat some of the free pizza and roll her eyes in the back of the room.
Except that there was no back of the room, just four other students sitting in a circle with the recruiter dude. Lots of pizza, though.
“Seriously, art school students can do incredibly well in law school,” the guy was saying, leaning forward excitedly and waving his hands around a lot. He looked like he was about to knock over his can of Coke Zero. “It has to do with how we think, the flexibility of our reasoning capabilities.”
Lindsey did not want to be charmed.
“Wait,” Skye said, her perma-sneer managing to look even more sneering than usual. “How we think?”
“Yeah!” The guy grinned, either missing or ignoring Skye’s sneer. “I graduated from SVA a few years ago.”
Lindsey raised her eyebrows, impressed despite herself. At least the school was sending the right dork for the job. She sat down in one of the chairs to the side, still mostly figuring she’d listen.
“Hi,” the guy said, turning to smile at her. “We haven’t met yet. I’m Gerard.”
His smile was ridiculous. It was like he really wanted to know her name, like introducing himself was important. It was impossible to believe that this guy was going to be a lawyer.
“Lindsey,” she responded. She set her bag down and Gerard’s eye followed it and his face brightened.
“Is this the newest Doom Patrol?” He grabbed the corner of the comic sticking out of her bag. “Oh my god, that’s amazing! I’ve been traveling too much lately to get to a comic store. Is John Byrne living up to expectations? I’ve been worried.”
And with that. Well. With that, Lindsey was just fucked.
*
Gerard was convincing, that was the problem. He believed that things should change the world, that it was important to make an impact. And, despite three years of art school, Lindsey had to admit that she thought it was important, too.
She told herself, later, that was why she invited him out for a slice of real Brooklyn pizza, why she ended up sitting in Sal’s with him waving his hands around. She couldn’t think, then, that it could have been because of his smile or his hands or the way he looked at her.
“It was too hard to stay, you know?” Gerard said, shrugging and talking with his mouth full. “I mean, I was working for the Cartoon fucking Network and pretending that I was excited about inking the Powerpuff Girls and dreaming of breakfast monkeys. I just. It wasn’t what I thought it would be, you know?”
Lindsey nodded, even though she didn’t know, she’d never had anyone pay her to make art with the exception of her Uncle Mal who gave her $30 to draw Aunt Millie. She didn’t know about integrity of art and selling out, but she had worried, and she felt like that counted.
“So you just … went to law school?”
“Nah,” Gerard said, shaking his head and stuffing another piece of pizza in his mouth. “First I drank a lot.”
Without meaning to, Lindsey snickered and then threw her hand over her mouth. She flushed slightly.
Gerard smiled and tilted his head. “Nah, it’s okay. I did. It wasn’t cool, but I guess it’s what I needed to do, you know? So I was drinking a shitload, barely managing to stay employed, and wasn’t doing much else. My little brother basically brought home a bunch of catalogs and threw them on my bed and told me to get my shit together.”
Lindsey grinned.
“Yeah,” Gerard said sheepishly. “He doesn’t fuck around. He told me I had to get off my ass and do something, that it didn’t matter but he wasn’t going to clean up my vomit anymore. And then … well, then, September 11th.”
Lindsey nodded, her smile gone. Everyone she knew who lived or worked in the city had lost someone, had some close call, had shit hit closer than they could have expected.
“I was on the ferry and I saw it happen, you know?” He was quiet. Not really sad, just quiet, like remembering something important. “And I saw all of these people who couldn’t afford what they needed to do to get their property back, to find their families, to get the life insurance from people who died in the crashes. And so ... public interest.”
Lindsey nodded slowly. “I guess I can get that. Different, but. Yeah.”
“Yeah?” Gerard pushed his plate aside and picked up his water, leaning across the table toward her, as if to pick up something she might say quietly.
Lindsey sat back and took a breath. She never talked about this shit. But he looked trustworthy. Hell, he looked like he cared.
“My dad was an asshole,” she said, figuring she should start at the very beginning. “You know, like, more than the regular asshole. Cheated on my mom from day one, gambling problems, yelled a lot …”
“Hit you?” Gerard asked quietly. His hands didn’t clench into fists and she found herself strangely grateful for that.
“No,” she said. “No, not me. But my mom. More as I got older, or maybe I just saw it then.”
Gerard nodded.
“So he was. He was bad news. She wanted to leave him when I was eight. We tried.” She took a drink of water, her mouth kind of dry. “We tried, but she couldn’t afford a lawyer and he kept coming back to her and threatening to try to get custody of me if she blocked his access to his kid.”
“He can’t do that,” Gerard said, low.
“Yeah, well. The fuck did we know?” Lindsey didn’t know that she was still bitter, but. Apparently so.
Gerard nodded and refilled her water from the pitcher.
He got her number later that night. She thought it was a line, but it was apparently just that he wanted her to make the most of her life and thought that, maybe, he could help. And so, randomly, they kind of became friends. Random phone call friends, text messages about how boring the club Katy had dragged to her was or photos of a weird sign he’d passed in San Antonio.
Friends.
*
It wasn’t not like Lindsey was convinced to go to law school over a pizza by a guy with a big, real smile and little else.
Except it was kind of like that.
Maybe she was always meant to go. Maybe she was just impulsive. One way or another, it was how she got there.
*
Nobody was more surprised than Lindsey when she got a 171 on her LSATs. Nobody was less surprised than Gerard.
“What did I tell you?” he said. She could hear his smug through the phone. “Art school students have good brains.”
“Whatever,” she’d said, laying back on her bed and closing her eyes. She hadn’t thought it would work, really, had figured that the LSATs were a $120 gamble that would at least make Gerard shut up about it and let her stall. Plus, the smile that stretched all the way across her mom’s face when Lindsey told her about maybe going to law school was worth the price of the test alone.
She was just doing it. She didn’t think she’d actually do well. The fact that Gerard had told her multiple times that the LSATs were less a test of knowledge and more a test of how a mind worked didn’t really change shit. She was a fucking artist, maybe she could be a musician. She was not a damn lawyer.
“Seriously, Lynz, that’s fucking awesome,” Gerard said, obviously shifting the phone to his other ear.
She made a non-committal noise, trying to hide that the possibility of law school was much weirder than she’d thought it would be. She probably failed, but Gerard let her get away with it.
“Where are you today?” she asked, her yawn almost covering the question.
“St. Louis,” he said. “Tomorrow, Atlanta. Then home.”
“Home,” she said, smiling.
“Home.”
*
Lindsey got to law school and immediately felt like the weirdest, wrongest person there. It wasn’t the place that she’d thought it would be - almost nobody was there to change shit, nobody looked like her, and she was pretty sure that she heard some assholes in the back of her Contracts class snickering at her tattoos and Docs.
It wasn’t even hell. It was like high school all over again.
“You fucking lied to me,” she hissed into Gerard’s voicemail the first day. “Fuck everything about this place.”
There are good people. Gerard texted back later that night. You just have to find them. Most of yr classmates suck, but there will be good ones. xo
Fuck you.
She turned her phone off and slumped into her bed. At least she hadn’t had to move to go there, at least she hadn’t lost the familiarity of her local coffee shop and the bodega down the street where she could get anything from Newports to tampons at 4 am. At least there was that.
*
Lindsey hated law school. She hated the snotty fucking classmates, she hated how they looked at her when she pulled out a pen and paper instead of a laptop. She hated how, when they formed a study group, nobody tried to get her to join theirs.
She hated that she felt like the odd girl out even in a school full of weirdos.
So fuck them. She studied in the library alone and raised her hand to volunteer answers in classes and was generally totally obtrusive because … because … Fuck. Them. She had been the weirdo girl on the outskirts before and she could do it again. Fuck them.
She was packing her bag, shoving the laptop she’d finally managed to get off of craigslist into her backpack with her books when someone, finally, surprised her.
“Hey.”
Since forever, Lindsey has wished to be cooler. She would like to have been the girl who raised an eyebrow and looked up slowly, but, frankly, she wasn’t that cool.
“What?” she said, her head snapping up.
The girl blinked at her, her dark hair falling into her face. She was wearing a hoodie and jeans and basically looked like every girl Lindsey had ever known in Jersey. She looked like home and good bagels and girls smoking cigarettes outside of Sunday mass.
Basically? She was hot.
“Hey, I’m Jamia,” she said. She waved a little and grinned under her hair and Lindsey was maybe sold as fast as she had been sold on Gerard. “So, um. Look. Do you have a study group?”
Lindsey looked around them at the deserted classroom with her eyebrow raised. “Does it look like it?”
Jamia shrugged. “Fuck if I know.”
She waited, staring at Lindsey until Lindsey folded.
“What?”
“Look,” Jamia said, finally sounding kind of exasperated and not very found. “You seem smart. You pay attention, you answer shit. I’m tired of stupid social games that we should have gotten over years ago. So. You want to fucking study together or not?”
Lindsey grinned despite herself.
Yeah she did. Fuck yeah she did.
*
And it was like Jamia filled a space for Lindsey. She had Gerard on voicemail, on the phone almost every night, telling her she was amazing and talking about changing the world. She had Jamia every day, mocking their classmates into Lindsey’s ear and challenging her on everything, always echoing “You can do better” in Lindsey’s ear.
She also finally had someone to drink coffee and discuss jurisprudence, someone who asked her not if she wanted to have the coffee cake, but how many pieces she should have.
“My gramma says I’m going to get fat again,” she groaned to Gerard on the phone, pushing a little at the belly that is too full of delicious baked goods. She never really cared about being thin, but her family was fucking obsessed with it. It’s not like she lost weight on purpose, not like she ever saw anything but beauty in bellies and hips and thighs pushing against jeans.
“That sounds awesome,” Gerard said and she could hear his smile through the phone. “I like this Jamia girl. We should keep her.”
Between Jamia and Gerard, proximity and distance, it was kind of the best balance she could imagine and she … she wasn’t not sure what it means, but she knew it means something.
*
It was weird when Gerard and Jamia met, Lindsey’s only two real friends connected with law school. She had lots of other people from before, people that she knew loved her, people who were amazing. She didn’t need more than Gerard and Jamia in law school, so fuck all those other people.
“You’re better than them, anyway,” Jamia said, fierce in her ear.
“They’ll get it later,” Gerard said, quiet in the other.
They were like this complimentary pair in her life, but they’d never met. Lindsey was ridiculously nervous when they were finally in the same place at the same time, as if her mom was meeting someone she was dating for the first time.
The biggest, weirdest problem was that she couldn’t tell who was the parent and who was the person she was fucking.
“Hi,” Gerard said first, reaching his hand out to clasp Jamia’s. Gerard’s voice was unsure and Jamia’s stance was defensive - weird for Lindsey to see, two of the most open people she knew.
Jamia shook Gerard’s hand quickly and sat back, clutching her PBR to her chest like a life raft. Lindsey saw Gerard flinch.
Fuck.
*
It took them a while. Gerard had to work on understanding that his issues weren’t Jamia’s issues. Jamia had to believe that Gerard was actually that earnest (that one took longer). It took all three of them feeling each other out carefully, each of them watching out like something obvious was going to happen.
It didn’t. Not then.
One night, when they’d been drinking some wine in celebration of their Legal Research and Writing grades, Jamia leaned against Lindsey on her ratty and supremely comfortable orange couch and actually asked.
“What are we doing?” she said, her voice slurring but serious.
Lindsey put her arm around Jamia and closed her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I think it’s good, right?”
She felt Jamia nod, almost imperceptibly, before she pulled a blanket over both of them and they both fell asleep, wrapped up in each other.
*
And so it kind of went like that. 1L and 2L sped by in tests and stress and shoving totally new knowledge into their heads. Gerard was around when he could be and he and Jamia eventually learned how to orbit around each other.
The beginning of 3L, both Lindsey and Jamia were serving internships and they finally had a little bit of time to breathe. They didn’t need to study together anymore, but two years had bred habits and instead of books and papers, they met at a bar and had a couple of beers and complained about their clients.
It wasn’t any kind of life that Lindsay could imagine, but it was … well, it was kind of awesome.
*
It was almost the end of their 3L and Gerard was back on a brief sojourn before going back out. They talked all the time while he was gone, but every time he came back, it was like Gerard had to readjust to whatever small changes had happened while he was gone.
“Wow,” he said, fingering Jamia’s bright blonde hair. “This is new.”
Jamia shrugged, running her hand through her hair dismissively. Lindsey wasn’t fooled, though - she wanted to know what Gee thought.
Gerard smiled, the soft little smile that he saved for Lindsey and Jamia. “I like it.”
Jamia rolled her eyes, but Lindsey saw the bare beginnings of her own smile around her mouth.
“Anyone want a smoke?” she said, standing up to grab her pack and head out to the fire escape. Lindsey smoked as much as the next person, but she still hated the smell of stale cigarette smoke all over her house.
Jamia had pulled out a bar study guide and she and Gerard both waved their hands toward her, quickly indicating no. Lindsey watched them idly through the window near the fire escape, their heads bent in toward one another over the guide.
Although Gerard had already gotten his JD, he still hadn’t taken the bar and they were both worried about studying for it after Lindsey and Jamia’s 3L since Gerard decided to stop recruiting that year and actually study. For whatever reason, Lindsey wasn’t worried at all.
Not about the bar.
She took the last drag off the cigarette and blew smoke out in a long stream, obstructing her view. Gerard and Jamia were hazy, looking more like one person than two.
Lindsey opened the window and climbed back in.
*
“God, it’s late,” Lindsey whined, leaning back against Gerard and pouting over her shoulder at him. He laughed a little and switched his notes to his other hand, letting her rest on his shoulder but still not stopping reading.
Ugh. Lindsey thought that the studying was supposed to be over after law school. But no, of course not.
Because then there was the fucking bar.
Jamia ran her hand through her hair, a nervous tic she’d picked up from Gerard. She looked over at them, her eyes wide and her hair (black again) sticking up everywhere.
All three of them were tactile people, but it had taken Lindsey a while to get both Jamia and Gerard broken in to her levels of physical affection. It had been weird for both of them at first, she thought, but Jamia’s eyes had stopped looking sad when Lindsey leaned against Gerard and Gee had stopped flinching every time Lindsey looped her arms around Jamia’s waist.
She had even seen them curled up with each other, Gerard’s hand petting absently at Jamia’s hair while they read.
Lindsey felt like that was a pretty big win.
“Lindsey, this is … you have to …” Jamia tripped over her words when she was tired. She took a deep breath, starting again. “It’s late, but this is it. We agreed no more studying after tonight, right?”
Lindsey nodded. They’d talked to some former professors who suggested it, said that freaking out and cramming too close to the test could do more harm than good. So they’d agreed to keep each other from their books right before the test. Mostly, she’d gotten Jamia and Gerard to agree - they were the ones all worked up about the bar.
Of course, Lindsey wanted to pass it. She didn’t go to school for three years just to fail to practice. She just wasn’t worried about it. So it had been her idea to set a timeline on studying, to burn their practice books 24 hours before they took the bar, giving them all no other choice but to sleep and eat and calm the fuck down, Gerard.
“Well,” Lindsey said, yawning, “I think I’m done.” She looked at the clock on the wall, the cheap plastic chipped around the edges. “It’s five am. We agreed to stop at seven. I’m going to sleep.”
She handed her book over to Gerard, who looked scandalized at the very idea of losing the last of the studying time.
Lindsey smiled at him and Jamia sitting next to each other on the floor, at their rumpled clothing and crumpled mountain of coffee cups and nicotine-stained fingernails.
Later, she would blame the exhaustion and the stress, but at that moment, she was really just done with it all - with studying, with wondering, with waiting.
She leaned over and quickly pressed her lips against Jamia’s, flicking her tongue against the seam of Jamia’s mouth to make sure there was no confusion to her intent. She heard Gerard’s breath huff out and, before he could move or freak out or leave, Lindsey turned her head just a little to the left and nipped at his bottom lip.
She leaned back. They both looked … well, pretty much the same, except for their matching, huge eyes.
“What …?” Gerard started.
“Linds …” Jamia trailed off.
Lindsey grinned. She wanted to make it inviting, predatory, but she knew it probably just looked satisfied.
Fuck it, she was satisfied.
“I’m going to bed,” she said, turning toward her bedroom. “You two can study more or you can come with.”
She meant for that to be an invitation for more than sleep. As it turned out, the three of them had no more gotten into her room - Gerard fidgeting, Jamia’s shoulders set, Lindsey smiling - than they all fell promptly to sleep.
They made up for lost time later, though.
*
Lindsey’s life was going to be simple. She’d be an artist or a musician, living in a loft with a boyfriend or a girlfriend, living a life that makes sense.
So it was more than a little weird on the day she passed the bar, when she felt Gerard’s arm around her waist and Jamia’s lips on her neck.
It wasn’t in the plan. But it was good.
Maybe she was better at living than planning, anyway.