Fateful Results

Emily glanced at the analog clock hanging on the wall.  It was time.  She shut the book in front of her and made her way to the front door almost tripping over her roommate’s black cat.  

“Roger, why are you always in the way?”

She grabbed her overloaded keychain hanging on the key hook, her purse and jacket from the chair she had put out the night before.  She could not afford any mistakes this morning.  She headed out the door, locking it behind her before approaching her white Camry parked on the street.  

“You got this.  You got this.  You got this,” she repeated again and again to herself above a whisper.  She has been saying these three little words to herself since the fifth grade state spelling bee. 

In the car she navigated to CarPlay on the small screen and pressed play on the only audio she listened to anymore.  If she did everything right today, it would be the last time she would listen to this audio ever again. 

The drive took a little under an hour as she pulled into the parking lot of the Crowne Plaza near the airport.  She glanced at the digital car clock.  She was fifteen minutes early, just as she had planned.  There was no room for tardiness. 

“You got this.  You got this.  You got this,” she continued as she approached the hotel lobby and towards the conference rooms. 

“Emily Underwood,” she announced herself at the folding table setup outside of the ballroom, where she would soon enter and take the test that would change her life forever.  Today, after over four years of law school and preparation, Emily was taking the bar exam for the first time.  

She sat at the folding table she was assigned and when it was announced she could begin, she opened the booklet and read the first question.  This was going to be harder than she suspected, but she was prepared.  She could do this.

She tapped the tip of her pencil on the page in front of her as she read the second question on the exam.  Again, she was unsure of the answer.  Or she was unsure of which answer was the best answer when she read them.  To Emily, it felt as though this is not what she prepared for and she realized she didn’t have this. 

She made a fifty-fifty guess and moved onto the third question.  She only had six hours for all two hundred questions after all. Emily made her way through the exam.  Some questions she knew.  Some questions she did not know.  And some, she made an educated guess.  

When she walked out of the hotel and sat in her car, she didn’t know where she stood.  Her whole life she knew where she stood, near the top of the pack.  But at that moment, she had no clue.  The next day was the essay portion and there was not enough time to feel more prepared than she did today.  She would need to approach the essays as she did the multiple choice part, with the confidence that she knew enough to pass.

The next day, she repeated to herself, “you got this,” as she drove back to the Crowne Plaza hotel.  When she looked at the test, the same dreadful feeling came over her.  As she made her way through the essay questions, she was unsure of how well she was doing or that she was responding that the judges would swoon over her answers, but she did the best she could.  

When it was over, she drove home in silence, reassuring herself that she had it in the bag.  But it was done and there was nothing she could do about it.

When she got home she didn’t reach for her thick law books, instead, she reached for the remote and turned on the living room television for the first time in six months.  Emily had a mixture of fear and joy and she was not sure which one won out.  She would need to wait at least three months for the results. 

Three months later, Emily got into the ritual of checking the mail daily.  She would go for a four mile run at the park three blocks away, a habit that was strong before it fell by the wayside to prepare for the bar exam, and check the apartment mailbox on her way back.  By then she knew when the mailman was due to show up and timed her runs around that.  

Each day, the mail gods disappointed her.  They left offers from credit card companies but nothing from The National Conference of Bar Examiners. Each night she dreamed of the results appearing and her failing with a score of zero.

Then the envelope came.  Emily placed it against the salt shaker on the kitchen counter so she could stare at it from the kitchen island stool she propped herself up on.  She wiped away the sweat from her run dripping into her eyes.  The last three months of television watching, going on runs, and cooking magnificent dishes from recipes she found on Pinterest was over.  

What this envelope contained would dictate how she would spend the next year or more of her life.  She would either go back to hitting the law books or, as she dreamed, working for a top law firm that demanded she work a hundred or more hours a week.  Either way, her relaxing vacation was over.  

She snatched up the envelope and tore it open, unfolding the pages and turning them around so that the first page faced her.  It was done and she had done it.  She was officially a lawyer in the state of California.  

Dread suddenly came over her.  Now the proper work has begun.  It occurred to her that this race of reaching the next finish line would never be over.  But now it was not about academia, it was about putting her knowledge into the real world, helping real people, and making money to pay off the outrageous student loans.  

“You got this,” she said to herself but the feeling behind the words were lacking.  That was all these were, they were words and they now meant nothing to her.