“How much longer is this going to take?” Fatima quietly groused, giving the contractor’s attorney the evil eye as he questioned the eleventh potential juror of twenty-four. “We’ve only got half a jury! It’s been hours!”
“I wish I knew what to tell you,” I murmured in return, ears pinned back in annoyance. “This can happen when you’ve got multiple defendants. It’s either give each of their attorneys a chance at the jury, or have three separate trials.”
Lunch break had been an hour ago already, and we still only had three of our six jurors finalized. Far more than expected were being stricken for cause, and the property management company’s attorney had even exercised their lone peremptory strike already, sending home a juror that I’d really, really wanted: a Latina single mother whose nine-year-old daughter was permanently injured in a drive-by shooting, and whose son and mother were currently taking care of her daughter. If there were any potential jurors that would’ve been sympathetic to our case, it had been her… and that meant she got the boot. Of course.
Of the jurors we currently had seated, two were white males, and one was an Asian woman. This was due to a rather annoying problem we’d run into — Bailiff Mike had given out the jury numbers on a first-come first-served basis, and historically, middle-class white men were more likely to show up earlier simply due to proximity to the courthouse.
In practice, this meant if I wanted to get past them and to minority jurors that were more likely to see something other than “just another couple of dead black people”, I needed as many of the white boys stricken for cause as possible before needing to exercise my three peremptory strikes. If I had to strike the two men currently slated for seating on our jury, I would, but I would rather not have to until the very end. Otherwise, there was a very real chance I traded a milquetoast accountant for… a right-wing political staffer whose only regular interaction with minorities was probably hanging up on them when they called to complain to their elected-by-gerrymander representative.
Yeah. There was a reason I didn’t want to use a strike just yet.
The current juror being questioned was one of the several remaining that I desperately wanted gone — a white woman who worked in American University’s office of financial aid and who was giving me exceptionally scummy vibes. Something about her smile was rubbing me the wrong way, and even though the answers she gave on the jury questionnaire didn’t raise any red flags… I wasn’t sure. It was a gut feeling, and I’d learned to trust my gut.
“Fatima, I want you questioning her,” I whispered to her.
“… why?” Her voice was heavy with suspicion, and I didn’t need to look to know she was giving me a somewhat-disdainful side-eye.
“I don’t know, just intuition,” I told her, being honest. “Play up how non-white you are. Give a non-English greeting, preferably something recognizably Muslim. Anything you can to dredge up what I think is there beneath the surface.” I turned to look at Fatima, and gave her a severe look. “Julio looks too ‘acceptable’ here, and I may be part fox, but she doesn’t seem to care about that, and I’m not Asian enough to look anything but white. It sucks, I know, I’m sorry, but it has to be you.”
Fatima met my gaze, but didn’t respond. Instead, she just reached across the table and claimed the legal pad I’d been using, the one where I wrote out the questions I wanted us to use on each possible juror during the break.
Thank goodness, I thought, ears relaxing as I quietly sighed in relief. I was worried she’d be difficult, what with the decision over who sat second seat not going her way. And I was still ready for her to be difficult later on. I was just glad she didn’t fight me on this, specifically.
“This juror is acceptable, your Honor,” the contractor’s defense attorney said before heading back to the defense’s table.
“Very well,” Judge Friedman said. “Plaintiff’s counsel, it’s your turn to question the witness.”
Fatima stood from counsel’s table, and walked over in front of the juror.
“Juror 17, good afternoon,” she began, flipping through a piece of printer paper that she held on her legal pad. “According to your jury questionnaire, you work in American University’s office of financial aid. Is that correct?”
I frowned. That… wasn’t the planned question. Nor had she listened to my suggestion. Shit, was I going to have to intervene here?
“Yes I am!” Juror 17 said, cheer in her voice and a smile on her face.
“And what aspect of financial aid is that?” Fatima asked. “Athletic scholarships, student loans, what?”
“Merit scholarships,” the juror said. “I review applicants for exceptional aptitude, and offer them financial awards in the hopes that they bring their skills to our school over any other.”
“I see, I see,” Fatima said, visibly taking notes on the piece of printer paper with her pen. “So I have to ask: what information do you have access to when making your decision?”
“Well, I have our students’ college applications,” Juror 17 began. “Their general application essay, their responses to our application’s specific essay questions, their high school transcripts, resumes if they have them, recommendation letters, and standardized test scores.”
“What about demographic information?” Fatima asked next. “How much of that do you have, if any? And where do you get it from?”
“Oh, that’s all over their materials,” the juror answered. “Even if they select the ‘choose not to disclose’ option, we have their names, zip codes, where they went to high school, and plenty more. You would not believe the number of times an applicant has chosen not to answer those questions, only to have something like the Asian or Latin American student group on their resume!”
“In that case, are you okay with a little hypothetical?” Fatima asked.
I frowned; okay, I could maybe see a bit of what she was going for here, but… shit, wait, no. My own college application experience was paid for by the GI Bill and fast-tracked by Ambrose. I only had second-hand accounts to go off of here. This was out of my wheelhouse.
I scrawled a note on my legal pad, and passed it over to Julio: Do you trust Fatima’s voir-dire?
His answer was just an immediate single tap on the desk. One for yes, we’d decided at the outset. Two for no.
“Well I don’t see why not,” Juror 17 said, that genial smile of hers finally giving way to a frown.
“Splendid!” Fatima exclaimed, and even though I couldn’t see her face from this angle, I just knew that she had as bright a smile as her voice suggested. “So let’s say you’ve been given a chunk of scholarship funds to distribute.”
Fatima started pacing as she spoke, taking her eyes off of the potential juror and tapping her pen on her chin in clear thought.
“About… two hundred grand? I think that sounds about right?”
“That would be a full ride,” Juror 17 helpfully supplied.
“If it went to just one student, sure,” Fatima allowed. “But let’s say you have two applicants who are functionally identical. Both students have androgynous first names, and both declined to provide any demographic information at all. Both of them had a 3.998 grade point average. Both of them were the captains of their school’s track team in the spring, and both of them also got cast for the lead role in their school musical in the fall. Both of them volunteer every weekend at their religious institution. Their SAT scores were… ah, remind me, is it still out of 2400?”
“No, it’s out of 1600 now.”
“Okay, so… bit of mental math… let’s say they both scored a 1520 on the SAT. All of this taken together, how do you divide the two hundred thousand between them?”
“Well, first, I’d check their FAFSA—”
“You don’t have access to that,” Fatima interrupted. “This is merit money, not need-based. Who gets what, and why?”
“Um…” Juror 17 waffled. “What do their resumes say about their volunteer work?”
“Applicant one worked with the institution’s food bank. Applicant two helped teach weekend classes for underprivileged youth.”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
The juror frowned. That congenial attitude was gone, now, and I could swiftly see it heading towards anger. By this point, we’d all figured out what Fatima was up to. Judge Friedman was giving the juror a look, his hand tightening around his gavel ever so slightly. The corner of Julio’s mouth kept threatening to drift upward, and even Casey had cottoned on to what was happening, if the way he was blowing up my phone with text messages was anything to go by. And honestly, it was kind of brilliant.
Fatima was asking the juror to pick the rope with which she wanted to hang herself.
FAFSA? Need-based financial aid, which has the parents’ demographic and financial information in it. Where the hypothetical volunteers worked at? Well, that would narrow down the type of religious institution. And even if the religion was narrowed down to ‘Christian’, churches that catered to specific demographics often had their own naming conventions.
“Where do the applicants live?” Juror 17 asked.
“And exactly why do you need to know that?” Fatima asked, all the friendliness in her tone gone. “You’re supposed to be judging the applicants on merit. How does ‘where they live’ help you with that?”
“W-well, they both have the same GPA, yes, but unless they were both at the same school district, then, well, those numbers don’t mean the same thing, you know?” The juror’s eyes had shifted from Fatima up to where Judge Friedman stared down at her, and her voice grew shaky as she felt the pressure.
“If you say so,” Fatima said, her tone dismissive. “One of them attended the DC international school. The other went to a public charter.”
“Oh! Okay, let me see!” The juror’s eyes lit up as she latched onto that morsel of information. She brought one hand up; if her gestures were any indication, she was working through a half-remembered map, or maybe running through some mental math with her finger to help direct it. “Alright, the charter student only—”
“The court,” Judge Friedman boomed, interrupting Juror 17 before she could speak, “would like to thank and excuse this juror.” He looked down at Juror 17, whose jaw had slammed shut when he started speaking. “Ma’am, you are excused. Please exit the courtroom.”
I could only blink, ears straight up in shock and surprise. I’d been a trial attorney for most of my seven years as a lawyer. I could count on one hand the times the judge dismissed a juror for cause without any more than an “it’s obvious” sidebar.
Until today, though, I had never seen a judge dismiss a juror before they could even start answering a question.
“I think we could all use a brief recess,” Judge Friedman said after the dismissed juror had exited the courtroom. “Let’s meet back here in fifteen minutes.”
The judge banged his gavel, then stood up and left the courtroom from behind the bench, headed for his chambers. The defense attorneys across the aisle all shuffled to their feet and exited out the back. Mrs. Banks and Julio both got up and followed a short ways after the defense, apparently talking about some recipe Julio had promised to get from his… abuela was ‘grandmother’, right? Yeah, it was.
Fatima, meanwhile, just strolled over to counsel’s table with a strut in her step and a smug little smile on her face.
“I have to play up the Muslim bit, hm?”
“That…” I paused, collected my thoughts, and wet my lips before continuing. “How did you know that would work?”
“Oh, she reminded me of my career counselor,” Fatima huffed. “He was all, ‘just take your headscarf off for a bit, you can always put it back on after you get a good job’.” She pitched her voice comically low as she said this, affecting the classic ‘frat bro’ accent. “A hijab isn’t as ‘respectable’ to these people as showing my hair.”
“You do know Lady Liberty doesn’t wear a hijab, right?” I asked, knowing I was possibly stepping on a landmine… and that I was lying. The heroine did wear a hijab. It was how she was still able to go out without being identified. She’d been a household name for the last twenty years, but even with her face plastered across countless posters on innumerable walls, all she needed to disappear into a crowd was a simple piece of cloth.
God, I wished I could do the same.
“No shit,” Fatima spat, venom in her voice. “Why do you think he told me to take mine off?”
She took off up the aisle and out of the courtroom before I’d marshaled my thoughts towards a response. I stood up from my chair and watched the door close in her wake, my ears drooping as I heaved a sigh.
Shit. I’d… probably transferred some of my distaste for Lady Liberty onto Fatima, all for the crime of having a role model.
“Everything okay?” I looked up at the voice to see Casey approaching from the back of the courtroom, worry turning his lips down ever so slightly. The 3L was swimming in the black cashmere sweater he had on, the tips of his fingers barely emerging from its sleeves. Not the most professional, but he was still just a student; he got a pass. Plus, it looked much more comfortable than my own blazer.
“Nothing you need to worry about,” I told him. “Just some personal disagreements spilling over into professional matters a bit more than they should.”
“Alright,” he said. “Hey, um… that stuff you do with your, uh, ears?”
“What about it?” I asked, unconsciously lowering one ear in question before I noticed I was doing it.
“L-like that,” he said. “Is that, uh… are you doing that on purpose, or does it just, um, happen?”
“Just happens,” I said with a shrug of my shoulders and my ears. “If I focus on it, I can make it stop, or do something specific instead.”
“Could you try that for the next two?” Casey blurted out. “And have Fatima question them? S-sorry, it’s just — the next two jurors? I found their Twitters, and they both have these big dogs, and I don’t know if they’ll look at you like a dog or a person? Um, sorry if that’s, uh. I’ll shut up now.”
“Casey, hun.” His attention snapped back to me when I called him ‘hun’, something blooming in his eyes that was almost… I wasn’t sure. Familiar, maybe? “No apologies. That was a great call, honestly I should’ve thought to check that myself. Keep up the good work, okay?”
“S-sure?” The student’s voice was hesitant, even as his face and eyes positively lit up. “I, um… I’ll be right back!”
And then he was off, disappearing out the back of the courtroom. I chuckled, then counted five seconds before leaving the courtroom for the restroom myself. May as well use the break while I had it.
Plus, I… well, I had an apology to make, and some crow to eat.
(The kind that Gorou didn’t find tasty, that is; that fox got up to way too much trouble over in Rock Creek Park for his own good, sometimes…)
I made my way over to the women’s restroom, pushed open the door into a small foyer, then through another door into the restroom proper. Fatima stood in front of one of the sinks, a tube of lip gloss in her hand and a stick of mascara resting on the side of the sink. She looked away from the mirror when the door opened, and when her eyes fell on me, her curiosity fled her face as her expression closed off.
“What.”
It wasn’t even a question. More of a demand from her, really.
“I’ll admit. That was a damn fine voir-dire,” I said, leading off with something less serious to try and peel away the defensiveness. “What gave you the idea for that line of questioning?”
Fatima gave me a brief look before rolling her eyes, and turned back towards the mirror. She finished touching up her lip color, and answered as she put it away.
“That’s what college applications were like for me,” she said. “I had to rewrite all my personal essays to read like I was some lily-white Disney movie teenybopper.” She unscrewed the mascara from the tube, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye before leaning in closer to the mirror. “Let me guess, you had it easy. Conventionally attractive, plus minority points while looking white?”
“Initially, yeah,” I admitted. “Legacy admission to Stanford. You probably had better grades and test scores than I did.”
“How much money did they throw at you?” Fatima asked.
“Oh, I didn’t get to go. They revoked my admission.”
Fatima paused. She hadn’t even finished her lashes when she turned to face me, a question writ large on her face.
“Got my powers during a gap year,” I told her. “And since the new appendages came free, it wasn’t like I could hide it, so I got conscripted. Then there was the wrongful death case, after which Stanford didn’t want me anywhere near campus, so I had to go elsewhere. Plus, by the time I finally got to start undergrad, I was already older than most everyone finishing it.”
“... hm.” Fatima turned back to the mirror and her mascara. “That sucks.”
“A little,” I agreed. “Hey, um, I… I’m sorry, by the way.”
“For what?” she scoffed. “Being a massive twat?”
“For treating you like shit,” I told her. “Just because there’s bad blood between Mariem and me, that doesn’t in any way justify how I was treating you for being a fan of hers. That wasn’t fair to you, and I’m… I’ll try to make sure I’m not letting that color my judgments in the future. But if you think I am, say something immediately.”
“Between you and Mariem? Who’s — wait,” she said, pausing halfway through putting her mascara away. “Wait, wait, are you talking about Lady Liberty?”
“Who else would—” I froze, ears going low in shock as my brain finally caught up to my mouth. “Shit, um, uh, I… wasn’t supposed to say that.”
“Uh-huh.” Fatima gave me a distinctly unimpressed look. “You weren’t supposed to leak the civilian name of the most famous superhero in the country. The one whose name is somehow still not public knowledge. No shit you weren’t supposed to say that, Naomi!”
“I know, I know, I… damn it!” I brought my tail around to my front and buried my fingers in my fur, for lack of anything more productive to do with my hands, then rounded on Fatima. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”
“That you use your own tail as a stress ball, or what the superhero’s civvie name is?” Fatima asked, a distinctly smug look on her face.
“Both!”
“I want to voir-dire more jurors,” she said.
“Bitch, I was gonna make you do more anyway,” I told her. “And after that bit in the courtroom, I need you cross-examining some of these rich old farts the defense wants to call!”
“And objections plus sidebars during their directs,” Fatima pressed.
“... you drive a hard bargain,” I said, extending a hand. “I reserve the right to make last-minute changes if something comes up, but aside from that? Deal.”
“Good enough. Deal.”
Fatima took my hand, and with a quick shake, our pact was sealed.
“And now that we have a deal,” she said, still holding my hand, “I guess you should know that her first name is pretty useless to me.” Fatima had a smug little smirk on her face, like the cat that caught the canary.
“... elaborate?”
“Mariem is a very common Muslim girl’s name,” she said, releasing my hand and placing hers on a cocked hip. “It’s like Jane, or Anna.”
“Huh,” I hummed, ears low in thought. Single adversary, no audience to judge, a clear offensive… the circumstances of that little negotiation played directly to Fatima’s strengths, and I’d let her lead me right into it because, as usual, I wanted to avoid interpersonal conflict. “Well played, Fatima. Well played.”
“No reneging on the deal,” she warned.
“Wouldn’t dream of it; I’m a fox of my word.” I wiggled my ears to punctuate that, which got Fatima giggling. Aha, victory! “Anyways, I need to actually use the facilities.” I walked past her and into a stall. “If I’m a bit late, ask the judge to wait a moment.”
“You have eight minutes,” Fatima stressed, checking a timer on her phone. “How could it possibly take that long?”
“It takes longer because I have a tail,” I exclaimed. “And I’d like to see you try sitting comfortably on these toilets when there’s a mess of pipes at your back and you have almost four feet of extra limb sticking out of your spine!”
“Most toilets have stuff at your back! The one you have at home does too!”
“Fatima?” I said sweetly. “Four words: imported, Japanese, tankless, toilet.”
Fatima blinked at me in surprise.
“With a seat warmer, and a bidet!”
With that, I closed the stall, and got about my business carefully, so as not to get my tail wet.
Very, very carefully.
faster than I expected. How can this be possible, you ask? Well...
six chapters of Book 2 as there are in the first twelve chapters of book 1. And one of those six chapters is almost twice as long as any single chapter in all of book 1.
finish Book 2 before Book 1 is posted in its entirety, and so now I have to consider what to do in the meantime so that y'all aren't stuck waiting 3-4 months for me to finish applying the coat of polish I like to have before sharing anything.
2) Are there any POVs other than Naomi's that you'd want to spend a couple thousand words seeing the world from? (in third person; 1st person is reserved for Naomi)
3) A couple of Patrons had the silly, silly idea of having me do a Let's Play of an Ace Attorney game (translation: actually ace attorney malds at Ace Attorney) to help fill the time between books 1 and 2. This would be something that goes up on my Patreon as available to all, if time gated so the patrons get their due. Would there be any interest in that kind of thing?
4) There is still the Shitty First Draft ? which I'm reworking into a novella, but that's only another 20-25k words or so...
Anyways. If y'all have any ideas for stuff you'd want to see, and that would tide people over so I have time to finish Book 2 and bring it up to my standards before publishing, feel free to drop a comment or a PM! Or, of course, hop in the Discord server, where I'm relatively available.
