XXIII

• Author: Lindsay Cameron
• Profession: Corporate attorney
• Pages: 209-225

209

23

I    my seat, checking my watch for the h

time in ve minutes. Why was I so anxious? It was just Alex. We’d

met for drinks countless times in the past, just the two of us. But

tonight felt dierent somehow. It had been almost a week since I’d

walked in on Jason and Sarah and I hadn’t seen Alex in that time. He

was still stuck in purgatory so I shouldn’t have taken it personally,

but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was avoiding me. Not that

I’d had much time for chatting anyway. e past week had passed

in a robotic haze. I arrived at work every morning at 7 .. and

worked all day, eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner in my oce or

the war room. At 2 .. I took a Town Car home, had the driver

wait outside while I went upstairs to sleep for four hours, shower,

and get dressed, then took the waiting car back to work. And the

whole routine started again. No need to waste a minute of my time

hailing a cab.

It’s amazing how much money you can save when you don’t pay

for any food, transportation, or entertainment. I even expensed my

dry cleaning. Lawyers did that all the time when they didn’t have

time to go home and change. ere was a one hour dry cleaner in the

basement of the building specically for that purpose. Technically

speaking, I wasn’t sleeping in the oce, but I still felt I deserved to

have the client foot the bill for cleaning my clothes. ey were the

ones making me sweat. In my new Biglaw reality I was simply utiliz-

ing the resources available to me.

Big_Law2nds20150501.indd 2095/1/15 2:31 PM

BIGLAW

210

My schedule allowed me to hide from pretty much everyone but

Patrick, Gavin, and Sheldon. ey were the only co-workers I had

to face because we were still living like one big dysfunctional family

in the war room. We had the occasional re drill, but I hadn’t had to

pull out the compressed air canister. ankfully.

In the light of day I did feel a little guilty about the whole incident.

I mean, if you’d told me a year ago I would use an air canister as a

motivation tool, I would have thought you were crazy. But it’s like

those people whose airplane crashed in the Arctic and they ended

up eating each other to stay alive. I bet if you’d asked them a year

before that, they’d swear that they’d never resort to cannibalism. But

they did, and so had I. Gavin never mentioned it. It was just one of

those things that happen in the heat of the moment that you don’t

dare share with outsiders. Like the travelers on that doomed ight,

we knew outsiders wouldn’t understand. I remember the time Pat-

rick angrily knocked his computer o the table in the war room,

sending it tumbling to the ground. He told us all to go fuck our-

selves and stormed out before returning calmly thirty minutes later

like nothing had happened. Our collective story to IT: the computer

fell. Nobody ever talked about the outburst aer that. What happens

among the deal team stays among the deal team. It was like some

code of silence that we all understood. And lucky for me, the air

canister incident fell under that umbrella, too.

I knew they’d heard about Jason. How could they not have, with

the rumors that were ying around? But they didn’t address it, at

least not verbally. One night Patrick added a piece of cheesecake

to the regular dinner order and solemnly slid it across the table to

me. We locked eyes and I nodded a thank you for the conciliatory

gesture. And that was that.

Just as I was analyzing how best to handle the whole Jason topic

with Alex, I noticed him entering the bar. Spotting me, he smiled

and made his way over. I subconsciously smoothed my hair and

swiped under my eyes, ensuring they had not morphed into rac-

coon eyes. “Well, look who’s been sprung from purgatory,” I joked,

standing up to greet him.

“Brought back to life!” He held his hands up triumphantly. “If only

for an hour.” He hailed the waitress and ordered an Old Fashioned.

Big_Law2nds20150501.indd 2105/1/15 2:31 PM