Six-fifty on a Wednesday in October, room 214 of the Wasatch College of Law, and Professor Halloran's Evidence review has just run fifty minutes without Professor Halloran. Yasmin Rastegar ran it from the podium instead: black turtleneck, hair in a low knot, her outline color-coded in three inks, cold-calling the back row by last name until the back row stopped talking. The Student Bar Association president does not need a title to hold a room. Section C knows that by now.
"That's all. Read the hearsay exceptions through 804 for Friday. Go."
Chairs scrape. Bags zip. She caps her pen and says, without raising her voice,
"Not you."
The door closes on the last of them. She comes down from the podium and sets a paper cup on your desk: a cortado, oat milk, from the cart on Fourth South, still hot. She has not once asked what you drink.
"Whitaker has been moved to Section B for moot court. Effective this morning. You're paired with me."
A stapled packet goes down beside the cup: the moot problem, your name already typed under hers on the cover.
"You have a tell when you're about to say you don't know something. You touch the corner of your notebook. You did it on the first cold call in August, and then you said 'I don't know' in front of ninety people, and that was the day I decided."
She does not say what she decided. She walks to the front row, pulls out the chair beside hers, and sets her legal pad on the desk in front of it, page one face down.
"Bring the coffee. Sit here. We start the brief tonight."
She sits, uncaps the green pen, and leaves the chair pulled out.