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That evening, the sky is filled with those distant, enormous clouds that don’t seem to move at all, that seem more like permanent geographical features than water vapour, huge and dimensional, rising up from the desert horizon. Before them, looser, fluffier clouds drift in a faster wind, already dissolving even as Jimmy watches them.
“‘Scuse me,” someone grunts, brushing past him.
Jimmy looks away from the gap between the UNM buildings, shifting to the edge of the path. The buildings here are boxy, beige things that look like stacked bricks, like the lettered blocks children use when they’re learning how to spell words. The one behind him is newer than the others, outer walls unblemished, with shining handrails that lead up to the front door.
Inside, it had smelled of fresh paint, and the room where he’d sat his LSAT. The brand-new chairs had been stiff and unforgiving, too, and now he presses his hand into the small of his back and stretches, feeling bones crunch.
He’s never been to this part of the UNM campus before, not even in the days of meeting up with Kim at the law school or the law library. Lush green trees line the wide walkways between the square buildings, and, as Jimmy follows the dappled path away from the examination building and toward the bus stop, he passes students sitting on curved benches or the grass, or canvassing under pop-up gazebos in brightly-colored t-shirts with matching flyers in their hands.
Jimmy’s stomach groans. He’s starving even though it’s only five o’clock, so when he passes a burger place he buys a cheeseburger wrapped in brown paper and finds a wooden bench and sits and eats, looking out toward a pond.
The water is still and glassy, colored orange at the edges by the dead leaves of nearby trees that have fallen in and then drifted to shore. This time last year he was…where was he? Some mailroom monotony with no end in sight. He breathes out. The leaves lap at the edges of the lake.
By the time he’s finished eating, the fast moving clouds have completely dispersed, leaving only the great, mountainous ones, glowing golden at the edges as the sun descends toward them.
“So, what’s this supposed to be then?” Jimmy asks, picking up one of Ellis’s woodwork creations from the card table wedged in between stacks of records and textbooks in the kid’s tiny dorm room.
“It’s one of those, uh, decorative birds,” Ellis says distractedly, twisting the spout on a box of wine, filling a cup. “Like, a heron.”
“Oh, right,” Jimmy says, replacing it on the table beside a lopsided abacus. “Of course.”
There’s about half a dozen of the wooden pieces here in the twin room—almost more than the amount of people, though when he was asked to come he’d been told it was a party. Ellis hands him a cup of the wine and Jimmy sips it. It’s cheap and acidic, but he has a few more long slugs as he takes in the rest of the room: some kids he doesn’t recognise, and the other two from the public speaking class, who’re sitting on a bed with their knees touching. Jimmy smiles. The dude who he’s always thought looks like Marlon Brando is wearing a random cowboy hat, and willowy Yvonne is talking at him without catching her breath.
The room is small, the walls made of exposed brick that’s been painted over with white, a glossy paint that doesn’t seem to want anything to stick to it. Ellis’s posters—one of a rollercoaster at Cedar Point, then The Smiths, then a black and white photograph of a bird on a wire—are all curling up at various corners.
Ellis’s roommate has even longer hair than Ellis, pushed back from his forehead with a thick white sweatband. He’s sitting on the floor, cross-legged, wearing basketball shorts even though he looks like he’s never played a game of basketball in his life. Instead, he’s playing a video game on a grey and purple console, controller in his hands and a cup of beer nestled into the hollow on the side of one of his bare knees. On the TV screen, a little airplane weaves between square buildings and fires at the jets in front of it.
Jimmy finishes his wine, and sets his cup down next to the misshapen heron carving. There’s movement at his shoulder, and he turns to see Sam standing there. He nods at her. “Hey, thanks for the invite.”
She glances around the dorm. “Well, I needed someone closer to my own age.”
“Ouch,” Jimmy says, but he grins.
“Hey, Sunday night and here you are. Not studying hard, then?” Sam says.
Jimmy tucks his hands into his jeans pockets. “Sat the big test yesterday, actually.”
She makes a surprised sound, halfway through taking a drink, then lowers her cup. “For real?”
“Yeah,” he says. He shrugs his shoulders, keeping his hands in his pockets. “Just need a good enough score to get in somewhere, right?”
Sam perches on the arm of a rundown-looking sofa, and she gives him a sincere smile. “Yeah, you’ll get there.”
“It was…” Jimmy starts, and then he slowly shakes his head. “Honestly, I dunno what it had to do with being a lawyer, anyway. Figuring out how to like…harvest fields in the right order or whatever.”
Sam chuckles. “What?”
“You know,” Jimmy says, and then he adds: “It was my understanding that there would be no math.”
Sam doesn’t seem to recognise the quote, but she nods along anyway. “And?” she says.
“And?” Jimmy repeats.
“And, you figure out the right order?”
He does a little seesaw hand gesture. “Guess we’ll see.”
Sam nods. She’s wearing an overlarge denim jacket, and she dips her hand into an inside pocket. Rifles around and pulls out a pack of nicotine gum and unwraps a piece, popping it into her mouth.
Ellis’s roommate mashes buttons on the controller, then the screen flashes red and the plane crashes. He throws his hands up and curses, but he just as quickly gets over it, downing the rest of his beer and then wandering over to join the group. “Hey, no offense, El,” the roommate says, “but your new friend here kinda looks like a narc.”
Sam snorts, covering her mouth.
“What?” Jimmy says.
“He’s not wrong,” Sam says.
Jimmy looks down at his green polo, then back up at the others.
“Yeah, dude, you told us all this shit about what you got up to back in Cicero, and yet…” Ellis says, lifting a skeptical eyebrow.
And Jimmy hears his voice crack a little: “I was cool!”
Sam and Ellis make a face and look at each other.
“What?” he says.
“I dunno if anyone could ever be cool with a name like ‘Slippin’ Jimmy’.”
Ellis nods, adding: “Besides, having to tell us you’re cool…”
Jimmy feels a smile growing on his face despite himself, but he resists it and shakes his head.
“What’d you get arrested for anyway, some white collar thing?”
“Yeah, money laundering?” Sam says, leaning back on the arm of the sofa, her glasses shining.
Jimmy clears his throat. “Hey, they got Capone for tax evasion—”
Ellis’s roommate makes a spluttering noise. “Oh my god, he just compared himself to Al Capone.”
“Sorry, dude,” Ellis says, arms folded, and he raises his eyebrows to accentuate the point. “You gotta tell us what you did now.”
Jimmy clears his throat again, then looks around at the expectant faces. Even Joe and Yvonne have looked over. Joe tips back his cowboy hat with one finger like the star of an old Western. “Uh…” Jimmy says, and then he shrugs. “Vandalism.”
There’s a short silence before anyone speaks.
“Sure,” Sam says, finally. Her tone is dry. “Whatever, Slippin’ Jimmy.”
“God, if you keep saying it like that it doesn’t sound cool,” Jimmy murmurs.
“That’s because it’s not cool,” Sam says mildly, and she claps Jimmy on the shoulder then moves over to the mini fridge that’s sitting on a wooden crate and plugged into the wall with a knotted extension cord.
“Lean into it, dude,” Ellis says, and he rubs his nose. “Lean into the uncool.” He pours himself another cup of wine and plops down in front of the tiny television, picking up one of the grey controllers and piloting the little plane between the geometric buildings of the three-dimensional expanse.
Jimmy chuckles, shaking his head. He wanders over to watch, sinking down into a beanbag, trying to understand what’s going on. Soon, he’s drunk enough of the shitty wine that it’s left a burn at the back of his throat that won’t go away, and he slouches there joking with the others or shouting at the pixellated plane on the television that’s doing a shitty job getting anywhere in one piece.
His chest swells with a warm, buzzing feeling that reminds him for the first time in a very long time of days passed in Marco’s uncle’s basement, long winter afternoons and nights, when they would top up all the household liquor bottles with water and recite along with Repo Man or Lawrence of Arabia, doing the accents and voices together until they could copy their favourite parts without missing a beat.
Jimmy slams back a glass of water and lingers at the kitchenette for a moment, closing his eyes in front of the sink. He rakes his hair back off his forehead with a cool hand, then heads out into the mailroom again. The beeping of the copiers and the bang of the enormous hole-punch under Burt’s palm seems to claw at the inside of his head, long fingered—sharp fingernails running down a chalkboard.
Across the room, Kim and Ernie are sorting through the afternoon delivery. Ernie still needs to pause with most envelopes and think about which floor they should go to, think about who works in which cubicle; but Kim moves efficiently, fluidly. Only one envelope seems to stump her, but she adds it to a box eventually, moving on.
Jimmy’s copier beeps, rattling in his brain like marbles. He presses the pads of his forefinger and thumb into his eyelids and then gets back to work, hitting the color copy button a little slower than usual. As he reaches in for the new copies, he feels the all-too-familiar flash of a papercut, and he lets out a sound halfway between a groan and a sigh. He presses his finger to his mouth and stares around again, at Ernie leaving with one mail cart, then Kim with another.
And throbbing finger aside, and hangover aside, he smiles. He won’t get his results back for a couple weeks yet, but he only needs the test to be done, he only needs one school to take him, any school, and surely some of them are gonna be desperate enough to want his money.
Ever since standing in the sunny evening light of the UNM campus, he’s felt like that new path has finally opened up, and now all he has to do is step along it.
Later, at lunch, he stands with his locker half open, his unwrapped sandwich in his hand—stale bread and peanut butter. He stares at it inside the plastic, at the sad pale bread, then tosses it into his bag again. Heads off to find something warm and maybe deep fried from the cafe outside.
When he pushes into the dim stairwell, he freezes.
Kim is sitting a few steps up the first flight of stairs. She’s staring down at something in her hands. A sheet of paper. Several sheets.
“Kim?” he says softly.
She looks up—a fraction later than normal, like his voice took a while to register. Her face is blank and, for a moment, horribly familiar in its specific blankness; but then it shifts, her brow and eyes softening as she stares at him.
“What’s wrong?”
And she says, flatly, “I passed.”
“What?” Jimmy says, and now it’s her words that are taking longer than usual to register, lost in the neutral tone, and he shakes his head like he’s jostling his brain. “You passed the bar exam?”
She nods.
And he smiles a little, then steps toward her. There’s a long, stretching silence, until he says, “Isn’t that…good?”
She nods again, the exact same stiff movement.
“Kim?” Jimmy prompts, shifting closer again. With her sitting a few steps up, their heads are at the same height.
“Yeah,” she says finally, the word leaving almost explosively. “I’m just…” She breathes out. “Whew. Yeah, Jimmy, of course it’s good.”
“So…” he says, and he waves a hand to her sitting here hidden in the dimly lit stairwell, just a pale blue light up the switchback and the red glow of an exit sign. “Kim, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she says quickly. She swipes at her eyes. “Nothing, I just—”
And he waits after she’s cut herself off, waits for her to say anything else, but she doesn’t. Instead, a look of intense, almost shaky, relief passes over her face.
Not joy, or excitement, just relief. He stands there, at the base of the stairs, watching her, his shadow falling between them, falling over the letter she still holds with both hands.
He tries to read the writing upside down, but it’s hard to make out the word. “How’d you do?” he says.
She nods again, and then, like she’s coming back to herself, she clears her throat. “Yeah, good. I did good.” She stands, bustling to her feet, folding the letter back up into thirds—but as soon as she’s done that, she unfolds it again, staring down at the text, not looking at him. Her face shatters a little.
He makes a soft noise. “Kim?”
“God, Jimmy, I just can’t believe…” she murmurs, and now her gaze cuts down to him. She’s taller now, standing.
And he offers finally, softly: “Can’t believe you finally did it?”
She’s silent. Unreactive.
He climbs up one step then pauses. She’s still taller than him, still a couple of stairs above. He says, “I can.”
Kim inhales sharply. She stares at him with eyes that gleam in the dim stairwell. Descends a step, looking down at him. She opens her arms and before he knows it she’s hugging him, hands on his back. His head is pressing against her chest, cheek in the soft place between her shoulder and her neck.
He hesitates, then slowly reaches up and touches his palms to the sides of her ribcage, holding her there. She’s warm and solid and familiar.
She tilts her head, resting it on his own, mouth against his hair.
“Thank you,” she whispers, and he doesn’t know if she’s thanking him for the hug or his words or something else. Or all of the above. Her chin presses into his head, and he can feel her chest moving beneath his cheek, rising and falling with her breath.
“You’re welcome,” he murmurs, finally.
She shifts but doesn’t let go. Her results letter crunches against his back, a steady pressure.
They end up at a bowling alley that night after work, some place on Lomas that Jimmy’s passed before but never been inside. It’s pretty busy, groups of people filling out most of the lanes down the long building, and a line of black lights in the ceiling above the bowlers makes the white of their clothes glow neon blue as they step up to bowl. It smells like all the other bowling alleys he’s ever visited: shoes and whatever spray they use to clean the shoes.
“You just gotta—believe in yourself, y’know?” Ernie says, slurring a little, leaning toward Jimmy over the small table. He has a can of Pepsi in one hand, but it hasn’t had Pepsi in it for a long time; not since Jimmy first bought it from the vending machine earlier, bought it just to empty out and repeatedly fill with beer from the shared pitcher.
Burt has one, too. He and Ernie have been in a fight for last place all night, each getting worse and worse at knocking down pins the drunker they get. The last few rounds have just been gutter balls.
“We gotta psych him out, we gotta put him off his game,” Ernie says, as Burt steps up to bowl now, currently ahead by a couple of points. “Loser!” Ernie shouts, then he flinches. He looks down toward the other lanes and shrinks in his chair.
“Yeah, that’ll do it,” Jimmy says, chuckling.
Burt’s eyeing up the pins, holding the ball to his chest, the white stripes of his button-up glowing under the black light. Televisions above each lane are flicking between promotional clips and music videos, the same top forty songs over and over, and so quiet on the tinny speakers they’re almost inaudible between the clatter of pins and squeak of shoes, anyway.
Kim and Henry are talking at the next table, and Jimmy twists in his chair to listen. “Well, I need to get sworn in…” Kim says to him. “I think Howard’s gonna do it.”
“You couldn’t have done it without him, right?” Henry says. “Real mentor.”
Kim snorts. “I like this side of you, you know,” she says.
Burt returns, despairing, but he’s still a few points ahead of Ernie, and he punches the other kid lightly on the shoulder. Ernie rises from the table and the two drift over to one of the nearby claw machines, just staring inside and shaking it when the mousy girl working the counter isn’t looking.
Kim steps up to bowl next, sorting through the balls in the return then choosing one. Her white blouse peeks over the collar of her blue cardigan, a glowing neon ring under the black lights above the lanes. She faces the pins, paused with the ball aloft. Jimmy feels like he can see the calculating look in her eyes even though her back is to him.
There’s movement next to him, and Jimmy turns to see that Henry has come around to sit beside him at this table.
“Hey,” Jimmy says.
Henry nods over to Kim, then murmurs, “Look a little less lovesick, why don’t you?”
“What?” Jimmy says, swallowing.
Henry just makes a face.
“We’re not—”
“No kidding,” Henry says, waving a dismissive hand. “You kids have been crashing into each other and breaking apart since day one.”
Jimmy snorts.
Kim bowls. The ball soars down the lane, knocking over eight pins. She turns back to them and grins, a bright flash over her face, almost supernaturally bright under the black lights. She waits at the ball return until the exact same blue one comes back. Wedges her fingers into it and carries it over to the lane.
“Guess we’re at a broken part,” Jimmy says, and then he pauses. “Or friends.” He expects the last word to come out bitterly, and it does, but only a little. He thinks of the hug earlier in the stairwell, the memory arriving in his mind with a sudden warm pressure.
Maybe it’s just easier to feel other things today, too. It must be Henry’s words—day one—that have him remembering the diligent, determined Kim he met on his first week, the one who slowly but surely folded him into HHM and Albuquerque and everything else he’s done since he got here, if he’s honest with himself.
Here she is now, neck stiff and controlled as she eyes up the remaining pins. Here she is now, real lawyer. And, even though he’s lived his whole life with Chuck, he feels a little jolt of surprise in his stomach at the idea of having someone like Kim for a friend. The idea of having done enough to earn that friendship and that smile and that tight, stairwell hug—even after everything.
“You know,” he says softly, “I was worried that when she left the mailroom we’d be over.”
Henry gives him another look.
Jimmy chuckles. “Okay, I know that’s not really fair.”
But Henry shakes his head. “You think the main thing you two have in common is…the mailroom?”
Jimmy looks down to the patterned carpet: colorful pins and bowling balls among geometric triangles and zigzags, all blue and purple. He shakes his head. Plucks a nacho from a bowl in the middle of the table. The cheese is cold and congealing.
“You’re up,” Kim says, widening her eyes, and Jimmy looks up at the scoreboard. WEX has edged out JMM with that last spare, and he grins.
“You know it,” Jimmy says, and he stands and hunts for a ball. He’s always been decent at bowling, and he likes the careful weight of the ball in his hands as he swings back then lets it fly. In the end, he manages a spare, too, and when he gets back, Ernie and Burt have descended on Kim, standing around her table.
“So, hey, Kim—you gonna pretend not to know us when you see us in the halls now?” Burt says. “You gonna perfect the Hamlin…” Burt squares his chest and wipes a hand down over his face, leaving his expression blank.
Kim chuckles up at him. “You think I could pull that off, Burt?”
“Hmm. Dunno. Maybe you’d need to be…taller,” Burt says, furrowing his brow. “Hamlin’s pretty tall.”
Ernie’s grinning, his Pepsi in his hand. “Yeah, you’re not as tall,” he slurs.
“They’ve got you there, Kim,” Henry says, as he stands from the other table, moving down to take his turn bowling
Kim shakes her head. “Another dream crushed.” She holds up her beer to them, then takes a long drink.
“Don’t forget the smile,” Jimmy says, and everyone looks to him. He shrugs. “I mean the like, glassy smile, right?” He snaps it onto his face the way he’s seen Howard do a couple of times, like a light switch all-at-once flicked on.
“Oh Jesus,” Kim says, turning away from him but laughing.
“D’you think he sleeps at night? Or do you think he just powers down?” Burt says, eyes bright and giddy.
“He’s like a Stepford Wife,” Jimmy says, nodding along, sitting down at Kim’s table. “A lawyery Stepford Wife. Just built to lawyer.”
“Or one of the things in Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Kim says.
Jimmy clicks his fingers and points. “Yes!”
“Hey, does he eat?” Burt says, and his face grows ashen. “Guys, I’ve never seen him eat.”
There’s a clatter of pins as Henry knocks over a couple with his second ball, and then he wanders back to them. “Your turn, Ernie,” he says, as he lowers himself into a chair.
Ernie pushes himself to his feet, heads down to pick a bowling ball, then stops. He turns to them all. He’s in a green checkered button-up today, and his loosened tie has tropical parrots on it. The white bits of the parrots are glowing. “This,” he says, “is how Howard Hamlin bowls.”
He walks up to the lane robotically, then rocks his arm back—and as he jerks it stiffly forward, he launches the bowl down toward the pins. They all clatter over.
Strike.
Ernie turns back to them, his mouth open and eyes wide.
“No…” Burt whispers, as ERN finally overtakes him on the scoreboard.
“Well, shit,” Jimmy says. “This game just got interesting.”
Later, the four of them stand in the almost empty parking lot out the back of the bowling alley. Henry had headed home an hour or two earlier. As the rest of them finally left, Jimmy had asked the woman behind the counter inside to call him a cab. She’d obliged, casting a quick look at Ernie and Burt sloppily arguing over a broken pinball machine, but she was young and bored and didn’t seem to care enough to actually say anything.
Out in the parking lot, there’s a chill in the air, and Jimmy tucks his hands into his windbreaker. There must be a pizza place nearby, because he can smell it, meat and smoke, and he stares off at the nearby rooftops, looking for a chimney. The lights of a plane blink by, high above. Ernie and Burt cackle with vibrant laughter.
“I’ll get ‘em home,” he says to Kim.
She nods. “Kinda your fault, right?”
He grins, thinking of how many Pepsi cans of beer the two of them had downed. “Yeah, well. They deserved to have some fun.”
“I think they did,” Kim says, watching Burt and Ernie play some strange game of chicken with each other near the curb, making to slap each other, and then flinching, and then bursting into laughter. “Do you know where either of them live?”
Jimmy lifts a shoulder. “I’ll get it out of them.”
“Juan Tabo!” Burt shouts, holding his hands up in front of him defensively.
“Burt lives on Juan Tabo,” Jimmy says mildly, pointing to the kid with his thumb.
“All right,” Kim says, chuckling.
“What’re you gonna do?” Jimmy asks. “Head back, hang out with Ellen, maybe gossip a bit, do each other’s hair?”
Kim snorts. “I think she’s moments away from painting a line down the middle of the apartment,” she says. “Or hanging a sheet, y’know, like, uh…”
“It Happened One Night,” Jimmy says, smiling.
“Yeah, exactly,” Kim says. “Then we won’t even have to see each other.” She rifles through her purse and pulls out her car keys, then looks over to the other two again and smiles. There’s a big moon out, and it hazes through a layer of clouds, making them glow blue in that one bright spot.
“Unless you wanna go get a real drink or something?” Jimmy asks.
She looks to him, threads of hair blowing across her face with the wind. He can almost see the gears in her head turning, just like they’re turning in his, and he can see the point when she, too, thinks that it’s probably too early to test this fragile peace. Peace, friendship, whatever.
So Jimmy smiles, and he shrugs. “I just felt like I should ask.”
“Thank you,” Kim says sincerely, “but you’re getting the kids home.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “I’m getting the kids home.”
“Juan Tabo!” Burt shouts again.
“We all live on Juan Tabo,” he says again, in the same mild tone as earlier.
Kim laughs brightly. She flips her car keys around in her hand, and they jangle, landing solidly in her palm. “Night, then,” she says, and she starts to walk off toward her car.
“Night,” Jimmy says back. He stands there in the cool air, swaying slightly on his feet as he watches her leave. When she gets to her car, he calls, “Hey, drive safe!” He raises his eyebrows and holds them up until Kim looks back, then he lowers them slowly and smiles.
Kim rests her hands on the roof of her car, staring at him over it. “I always do,” she says, stressing the first word.
“I know,” Jimmy says. He grins, pressing his hands deeper into is windbreaker pockets, then he shrugs. “See you tomorrow?”
Kim tucks a loose hair behind her ear and studies him. Her lips are flat, and her voice is quiet beneath the hum of traffic, but she says, “Bet on it.”
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