Straight Shot ➳ Oliver Queen

02. Home

Karter found it impossible to focus the next day. She sat anxiously biting her nail as she tried to make sense of the words printed on the legal document in front of her, but in her distracted mind, the letters became hieroglyphs and she might as well have been reading Greek. The task she was failing to carry out was translating a document full of legal jargon into a plain-English description of a court case that would be used for the purposes of educating the people that didn't spend all their time hanging around lawyers.

Alan, a junior partner (and subsequently, Karter's boss), tapped on the short wall of Karter's cubicle. Alan was a stout man with grey hair he dyed an obvious black color that looked cheap, especially paired with the $12,000 suits he wore on a daily basis. He always smelled like he had bathed in cologne and his pudgy stomach tested the strength of the thread holding his buttons on his blazer.

"Mitchell." He called to get her attention. She stayed staring blankly at the paper in front of her. Her thoughts were far from the Taylor and Edison Law Office. Her thoughts were in Starling City where she assumed Oliver would be arriving soon. Through some Googling that morning, she learned that Oliver had been stranded on an island called Lian Yu for the last five years. As far as she could discover, he was completely alone. There were no other surviving passengers on the Queen's Gambit. 

"Mitchell!" Alan attempted again, thumping his finger harder on the cubicle wall. Karter stirred, nearly jumping when she saw Alan hovering over her. 

"Sorry! Yeah?" She quickly answered, blinking to bring herself back to reality– or rather, her reality instead of Oliver's. She nervously tucked her red hair behind her ears and tried to shuffle the papers next to her computer keyboard into a somewhat orderly pile to create the illusion of productivity and neatness. 

Alan held up a folder in his other hand, the one he hadn't been banging on her "office". She recognized the name on the folder, which was half an inch thick from a stack of printed papers. Karter had been directly involved in the creation of almost all the papers, serving as the writer, editor, researcher, and more. As a paralegal, Karter's job was essentially to do all the dirty work that her supervising attorneys didn't want to do. Most of the time, Karter spent her long days at the office sifting through paperwork and typing on a keyboard.

"I thought I asked you to write a brief for the Jensen Case." Alan grumbled before dropping the folder harshly on Karter's computer keyboard, paying no mind to the fact that her fingers were still on it. "This is a novel."

"It's not longer than any other briefs I've written." Karter reasoned, furrowing her eyebrows as she withdrew her fingers from under the file. 

"I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the word choice, the phrasing– I even recall there being a simile. I get that you're an English major, but if I go into the courtroom and I read this out loud, the plaintiff is going to think I'm a joke. Do you want me to sound like a joke? Huh, J.K. Rowling?" Alan tested gruffly and Karter resisted the urge to harp on the fact that J.K. Rowling was the first author that came to mind for him. 

"No, sir." Karter refused, shaking her head. 

"This isn't an English class. This is a law firm." Alan spat before strutting off, straightening his tie. Karter gritted her teeth as she watched him trace the path back to his oversized office.

"It was a metaphor. Not a simile." Karter mumbled bitterly to herself as soon as he had disappeared from her sight. The smell of his intolerable cologne still lingered in the air. 

Karter distastefully shoved the folder aside along with the other briefs and papers. Whenever she had the displeasure of interacting with Alan, she questioned what she was doing at Taylor and Edison. She felt trapped there as a first-year paralegal.