Free The Coming of Bright by Sadie King Page B

cooled into hurt.
    She glared but that made no difference. Searching for connection of any kind, she bored her eyes into Jack for making her the go-between. For passing information to Victor without her consent. How else could he know she’d already found the room? For someone who thought so ill of Victor, Jack sure was absorbed in him now.
    “Good morning, pe—”
    Zora thought he would say “peons” but he finished the greeting with “people.”
    “Let’s jump right into the Nozick reading, shall we?”
    That was a reading she’d actually done. Her whirlwind affair with Victor had thrown into disarray her carefully laid plans to make the law journal—through sheer, mindless drudgery. Drudgery was rapidly giving way to poetry of limbs and lips.
    Nozick was token drudgery, he came from a packet of xeroxed readings she’d picked up at the Founders Bookstore, the packet had the ominous title “Theory.”
    The reading was just a few pages from the 70’s “classic” Anarchy, State, and Utopia . Not quite Fear of Flying , her favorite book from her favorite decade, but at least she could fly through it. She thought Nozick a fool, a dangerous fool, for thinking that virtually any injustice—slavery, murder, you name it—could be condoned. The only thing that mattered in his mind was whether everybody started out on a level playing field, and whether everybody “freely” agreed to injustice. If someone ended up on the losing end, ended up a slave, but still agreed to it, then so the fuck what.
    That was the basic argument as she understood it. Let the chips fall where they may, no matter if you end up signing your life away. No wonder Victor liked that reading—it seemed to follow the same kind of twisted logic of economic “freedom” that he and his esteemed ass subscribed to.
    She had a strong and extremely unsettling premonition that Victor would single her out, riddle her with Socratic barbs, and he didn’t disappoint. She’d already devised a feeble attempt to back out, an homage to his love of strained wordplay. It worked like paper steel.
    “Ms. Bright, care to tell us why Nozick is right?”
    What a loaded question. Fuck.
    “No, sick.”
    She feigned her best pneumonic cough.
    Not only did the pun not work, it emboldened his inner asshole.
    “Ms. Bright, if you can talk, you can answer. Let’s hear it.”
    A few more fake coughs, hand to mouth. She had to pretend that she was clearing phlegm from her lungs, and even added the flourish of wiping her hand with disgust on her right pantsuit leg, after recoiling from its drenching of imaginary cough-up.
    “Sorry Judge, what was your question again?”
    “Why is Nozick right?”
    “Um, I don’t think that he is.”
    “Oh, really.”
    He curled and warped his voice, his palate, his face, around the word “really”—as though the very notion of her dissent, of her independent will in a utopian world of male minds, was inconceivable. Absurd.
    “And where did he stray from your path of righteousness, exactly?”
    He was getting ugly. Unconscionable. Cruel. The monster that Jack had warned her of. She needed to hold her own, not allow the turmoil of her emotions, her confusion and consternation at his ugliness, to break her down. Make her break down right there in class.
    “Slavery—I don’t think that anyone can freely be a slave. It’s offensive. There’s always coercion, bigotry, wrong. It’s like saying that Africans sold into slavery freely took the risk—that by going to war with each other, they accepted the risk of being captured, becoming slaves.”
    “Well, didn’t they? And let’s say for the sake of argument that some Africans in the slave trade did freely assume the risk—knew full well if they were captured in internecine wars, they’d become slaves. Why say that’s wrong? Do you not believe in freedom, Ms. Bright?”
    For the sake of argument. What a scumbag lawyer ploy. Everyone knew the slave trade was evil. Christ. She