“You are a trained fighter.” Judge Abram barely meets my eyes. Rather, she studies her notes with a lifted brow that says she ain’t impressed. “You come from a fighting gym, your father trained world title holders, you were trained by him, and by the title holders. You won your first sanctioned fight when you were…” She flicks over a page and reads aloud, “five years old.”
“I was four,” I whisper to Jess. “I won that ribbon when I was four!”
“Shut. Up.” She smiles for the judge, but pinches my thigh under the table.
“You have a striking lineup of wins, Mr. Hart.” Finally, Abram’s shrewd eyes come to me. “But they do not excite me. When your fans see you, they see your magnanimous smile, your wins, your arrogance. But when I look at you, I see that you believe yourself to be above the law. You consider yourself untouchable, and when you’re fighting, you’re a danger to society.”
“Wait.” She’s not smiling. She’s not impressed at all. “I don’t fight anyone who didn’t ask for it first.”
“Luke!” Jess growls. “Shut up.”
“No, hold up.” I stand, because I guess I wanna be thrown into jail for contempt of court or some shit. “I don’t pick on anyone, ma’am.”
“Ma’am?” The judge’s eyes are like laser beams, cutting my head off. “You will call me ‘Your Honor’,” she declares with venom. “I did not work my entire life to be called ‘ma’am,’ when I am the most powerful person in this room, Mr. Hart. Do you understand?”
“I-I’m sorry,” I stutter out when images of a toilet in the middle of a crowded room flash through my mind. “Your Honor. I didn’t mean to disrespect you or your courtroom. All I’m trying to say is that I don’t pick on people, I’m not a bully. I don’t hurt anyone weaker than me.”
I look across the room to Kora’s boyfriend and his two buddies – all three have neck braces and various ‘broken’ bones. They’re all lying. I beat their asses, I won, but all three of them made their own casts in the science lab at the college.
“I stand up for myself. I don’t let people beat on me. I don’t let people beat on others, either. But I also don’t kick when they’re down. I was trained to end a fight, Your Honor, not to start them. I was trained to neutralize a threat, stop the war, then walk away.”
“Inspiring.” She’s not inspired at all. “Do you want to know what I think, Mr. Hart?”
No. I really don’t think I do.
“I will tell you,” she pushes on. “I think you have anger control issues. I think you consider yourself an exception to the rule, someone who does not have to follow the law.”
I open my mouth to speak. To argue my defense. But the judge lifts a brow and silences me with ease.
“I think that if you took even a moment before today to learn the customs of a courtroom, you’d know it is not your place to address me, but your counsel’s. You’d know not to call me ‘ma’am’. And you’d know that it’s probably best if you wore a tie.”
I look down at my shirt, my jeans. Then I look back to her.
“I think you consider yourself a little bit special, Mr. Hart, and before we release you into society as a full-fledged adult, it is my job to knock you down a peg or two, lest you do real damage.”
She snaps her file closed and folds her hands over the top. “I am ordering twelve one-hour sessions with a therapist who specializes in your brand of arrogance. You are to complete all twelve sessions without missing a single one, and if, at the end, your court-appointed therapist deems you safe for society, then I will waive this six-month sentence in a medium-security facility that currently has your name on it.
“If, however,” she continues when my heart jumps, “you fail to attend a single session, or the court-appointed therapist is concerned that you need more rehabilitation than she’s able to provide, then you will be taking a state-funded vacation far away from this town to give you a chance to cool off and rethink your direction in life.”
She looks deep into my eyes and glares. “Do you understand me?”
I swallow. Nod. Pray I don’t lose my lunch. “Yes, ma– Um… Yes, Your Honor.”
“Additionally,” she adds. “I am ordering community service. I’m aware the lake in the center of town needs a little love, now that summer is nearing its end. Weeds have grown, the dock is rotting. I know your family enjoys that lake over the summer, so now you can take a little time to show your appreciation for what those who came before you built. I want you to tear out that entire dock, and replace it so that it stands up under engineering approval. I’m certain,” she grins a little cruelly, “you can find the funds for such a project somewhere in your trust fund.”
A movement behind me catches my eye. My mom raising her hand like she’s in elementary school. I’m sure she’s piping up to inform the judge I have no trust fund, but Dad grabs her hand and brings it back down to silence her.
When Mom is sitting still again, the judge’s eyes come back to me. “You have until your twelve sessions are complete. One session a week gives you twelve weeks to get yourself under control, and to finish the dock rebuild. If, at the end of that three months, you’ve missed a session, or the dock is not complete, then we’ll end up right back here, but next time, I will not be as forgiving.”
The judge looks to Jess. Then to the guys sitting at the table to my right. She looks past me, possibly to my mom and her cleavage. Then, finally, she looks to me once more and lifts a single brow. “Do we have an understanding?”
I lower my chin. “Yes, Your Honor.”
I twitch when she brings her hammer down onto the desk.
“We will adjourn for three months. See you in the winter, Mr. Hart. Perhaps then, you will wear a tie.”
Ally
Work Experience
“It’s like I’m in the Wild West out here, Mom.” I walk the main street of this town that houses something like fifteen thousand people, despite the smalltown cliché, bullet-riddled ‘welcome to town’ sign quoting a different number. “I’m just waiting for the horses and wagons to roll on down the road.”
“You are being exceptionally dramatic, Allyson.”
I never knew a person could hear an eyeroll until I grew up and moved out of home. Back when I was a kid, my mother’s parenting style could be best described as ‘chaos’. She was a free spirit, a wild card, while I was the one enforcing rules and talking her down from spontaneity and craziness.
Now I’m a woman, and we seem to have switched roles… sort of. She’d still be a pot-smoking hippie who enjoys unsafe sex if I allowed it. But she also has a better handle on dramatics than I do, and best of all, not once in all these years have we not been friends.
It’s nice, of course. I love being my mom’s friend, even after my teen years – the years when her wild spirit warred with her motherly duties of keeping me from becoming a statistic like she was. ‘Teen mom’ are curse words in our home. Despite the trauma of being forced to slide condoms onto phallic-shaped fruit every single time I loitered in the kitchen, once I cleared those teen years, things went back to normal for us. I became the serious one, and she, the eternally immature one.