I’ve talked to my mother since, usually only briefly, catching up on each other’s lives. She hasn’t brought up the internship once since that first conversation.
“Yes, but ifIremember correctly,” my mom says—and, uh-oh, that’s her litigation take-no-bullshit tone—“I asked you to sleep on it and give me an answer by the end of the week.”
“Right, but we didn’t talk again that week.”
“That is correct,” she says, her voice clipped.
“And we never discussed it after that.”
“We did not.”
“So, you, what, assumed that my silence meant I had decided to do the exactoppositeof what I said I wanted?”
“Don’t raise your voice to me, young lady.”
“Carmen, please—” my dad starts.
“Javier, don’t you ‘Carmen, please’ me. She needs to learn to stick to her commitments.”
But I’m not a kid anymore, and while I might still be scared—plentyscared—of my mother, I refuse to be steamrolled. There is no way in hell I’m doing that internship.
“Sure, but this isn’tmycommitment, it’syours, one you made on my behalf without consulting me first and then didn’t cancel when I asked you to. If Judge Wright is disappointed, it’s because you set her up for it.”
“I don’t like this tone. Where did you learn to speak to me in that tone? Is that what they’re teaching in college nowadays?”
I start to roll my eyes but stop myself just in time—I gained a backbone, not a death wish.
I keep my voice level as I speak to her in what I perfected in law school asmylitigation tone. Not quite as assured as hers—litigation was never my strong suit—but enough to get by.
“I appreciate you setting up this internship. I know you had my best interests at heart.” I really wanted to wait until closer to the end of my stay to drop this bomb, but I realize this is the organic moment for it to come out, so I continue. “But it makes no sense for me to do the internship because I’ve decided I won’t be going to law school.”
Silence. My mom appears to be parsing if I actually just said what she thinks I said.
I shoot a glance at Sierra, who’s staring at me wide-eyed, like she can’t quite believe what I just did. She almost looks… angry? Yes, that’s definitely anger that I’m seeing. What the hell does she have to be angryabout? I’ve just cemented her status as the golden child, probably for the rest of our lives.
I glance at my dad, but he’s not looking at me. He just watches my mom, awaiting her reaction. Smart man.
My mother’s words are a slow, carefully calculated response: “I know that freshman year can be tough, but you shouldn’t make such a big decision about your future only a few months in. If your grades aren’t where you want them to be, that’s something you can work on.”
“My classes aren’t hard.” Never mind that I switched classes so I’m no longer taking the ones she thinks I’m taking. That can stay my secret. “I just don’t want to be a lawyer.”
“How can you know that if you don’t give it a shot?” she asks.
Her response startles a laugh out of me. “I gave it a shot, Mom. It’s not happening.”
“I would hardly call a single semester ashot,“ she counters. “At least try the internship.”
“Where do you draw the line? A semester of classes I hate, then an internship I hate—”
“You don’t know that you’ll hate it.”
Idoknow, but she’ll never believe me.
“Before I know it, I’ll have so many credits that switching majors will be more of a headache than it’s worth. You’ll talk me into giving law school a try. One year in, I’ll already be so massively in debt, I might as well finish. And then, well, I’ll have a law degree, so it just makes sense to get a job. The farther I go down this path, the harder it will be to pivot. So, no. I’m not going to give it a shot. This is me putting my foot down.”
“You’re being—”
I’ll never know what she was going to say—dramatic, maybe, orirrational, or possiblychildish—because my father cuts in sharply,“Carmen.”
