Free Work for Hire by Margo Karasek Page A

less than fifteen minutes to get to class. Julian was the least of my worries.

CHAPTER 5
     
     
     
     
    I STOOD OUTSIDE the door of lecture hall 206 and stared through its windowpane.
    I could see my classmates seated in the long semi-circular rows of tables, busily clicking away on their laptops. Each seat in the lecture hall—like all the others in the law school—was wired for computer use and had Internet access.
    Students took full advantage. Some, I knew, were actually typing class notes. Others surfed the web or played solitaire, only half-heartedly listening to the professor’s discourse. Still others probably furiously instant messaged their neighbors. All looked completely absorbed in their respective activities. Their Constitutional Law books sat sprawled next to the computers.
    From my vantage point behind the door, I couldn’t see the professor, but I imagined he stood on the podium, behind the lectern, preaching the tenets of the United States Constitution to the amphitheater of students beyond. No doubt he was dressed in his usual uniform of khaki slacks and navy blazer, his signature powder-blue shirt, with the white collar and cuffs offset by a gold-striped tie. Professor Johnson rarely deviated from his Palm Beach lawyer look.
    Throughout the lecture the professor would play with his gold cuff links and only occasionally make eye contact with the hundred or so students obliged to attend.
    Or perhaps, if he hadn’t yet settled on the one hapless person forced to answer his brand of the Socratic dialogue, he would be perusing the dreaded class seating chart—issued by the law school to each professor so he could easily keep track of attendance and locate students—scanning it for a name that struck his fancy. If so, the class would collectively abandon all note-taking, games and other activities, and would instead e-mail bets on the winner’s identity to each other.
    I usually enjoyed these classroom antics. But today, right now, the joke would be on me.
    I was fifteen minutes late. I would have to walk into the lecture hall, the first person to be late to Professor Johnson’s class the entire semester. No one had dared commit such a faux pas before me. It just wasn’t done: Professor Johnson might be laughed at behind his back—or on the computer screens directly in front of him—but he was a former Supreme Court clerk with more than thirty years of legal academia experience at some of the finest institutions in the country. And he did have more than twenty books under his belt, not to mention numerous scholarly articles, as he so often reminded us. Then, of course, there was his on-air consulting work for both NBC and CNN. Professor Johnson was a self-proclaimed legal superstar, and no one—and I meant no one —had dared insult him to his face by showing up late and disrupting his lecture.
    I gulped and looked around me. The corridors of the law school stood absolutely empty. All students had long ago made their way inside their respective classrooms. An echo of silence hummed in my ear. Sweat moistened my palm. I wiped it on my pant leg and reached for the doorknob, but paused the motion mere inches from its final destination.
    I couldn’t do it. I snatched my hand away and let it hang limply by my side.
    I couldn’t turn that knob, push the door open and march right in. My late entrance would likely cause quite a stir. What if, when the professor caught sight of me, he denounced me in front of the whole room and then made me scurry to my seat? Or worse, would he insist I leave the class right then, and then coldly make a note of my tardiness for future retribution?
    Nope . I stepped away from the door. I wasn’t going in. No force of nature could make me subject myself to that humiliation. And I couldn’t really fully participate in the lecture anyway; I didn’t have my laptop or my Constitutional Law book. Both were sitting on the desk in my bedroom. I had intended to pick them up