Office Hours |h.s|

three

Maude

So far, law school is just how I suspected it would be. I've heard a lot of different things from my different family members, and in the end I just decided to not really base my ideas on what they've told me exactly. I kind of mashed everything together into a general idea, but decided to keep an open mind, and I'm glad I took that approach.

Most of my teachers either heard of my family, or taught Lance. Norwood taught my father and is very fond of the Sterlings, which was a bit annoying to find out since he's definitely the type to be buddy buddy with my dad. Thankfully a lot of my other professors are younger, maybe mid thirties to early forties, but they know Lance.

They also love the Socratic Method of teaching. Like really love it. The only professor that didn't use it was Norwood, just because he likes to sit and lecture about constitutional laws and hear himself talk, but everyone else went nuts with it. The only good thing is they tend to not call on me based on their presumption that I'm well versed in this stuff. Based on how Lance was as a student, an ass kissing overachiever, they just let me slide.

I thought that I would be able to get away with not being compared to my older brother anymore now that I was in law school, but that's clearly not the case. Honestly it was stupid of me to think that, since I basically set myself up to be compared simply by attending Harvard. But being compared to Lance sucks and I hate it.

But besides lectures, I'm pretty much holed up at home doing homework and reading through textbooks. Our study group is meeting later tonight, which is gonna be fun since we're going to recap our first week, edit our notes and discuss what was talked about in class. We're gonna order some food and hang out in the library until it closes just working on this stuff so we could get into a good habit.

My last class for the week is Crim Law with Professor Styles. He sent a blast email last night to the class with the name of a textbook and to read chapter one before class, obviously seeming to have forgotten class was starting or something. It was so fucking hard to get that textbook from the bookstore, but I managed and spent most of my morning reading through the first chapter, only taking a break to go to my class with Professor Alcott. She was really cool and I know I'm gonna enjoy her course.

I have about an hour before his class starts, so after Alcott's I rush over to the Brew House to get some coffee and finish reading the chapter. Benjamin and Violet are in the class with me, so I'm gonna try and get there early to get us a good seat in the lecture hall. Not in the front, but not far in the back. Right in the middle is perfect honestly, but off to the side so it's not in the professor's eyeline.

Criminal law is definitely interesting. It's the one most people gawk at with all the murder trials and just heinous crimes in general. I mean, even I'm guilty of watching a nice true crime documentary, though those can get annoying to watch with a family of lawyers since everyone thinks they're the attorney on the case trying to get their client off.

I'm not a huge fan of the fact that we're known as defense lawyers. It's always rubbed me the wrong way how murders run to my dad for help and will pay so much fucking money to get him to represent them. Granted, a lot of the time we do help people who really are innocent, and I do like hearing about those cases. But sometimes there are just these wicked people who don't have a good bone in their body.

Maybe after this course I'll understand it better, and I'll get the appeal to being a defense lawyer, but I'm still unsure.

As I walk into the Brew House, my eyes immediately scan the room, looking for my favorite stranger. Every room I walk into, he's the first person I look for. We've seen each other one more time since the day at the liquor store, but we found it thrilling to just give each other the first letter of our names. It gives us more of a reason to search for each other in this college town. His name starts with an H.