Page 33 of Lethal in Pink

Her laptop is open in front of her, the screen casting a soft glow across her face. A single lamp sits between the two chairs, throwing warm light over the table and leaving the shelves behind her in shadow. There's a plastic boba cup beside her keyboard, condensation running down the side and collecting in a small ring on the wood.

She looks up when I approach.

No smile.

No frown.

Just that same expression she always seems to have when she looks at me, like she's already decided I'm going to be mildly inconvenient and is waiting for me to prove her right.

"You're late."

I glance at my watch.

“I’m literally right on time.”

“You were the last one to get here. Thus, you are late.”

I look at her.

She looks back.

There are some people you meet and immediately understand that arguing with them is going to be exhausting.

Amiyah is one of those people.

I pull out the chair across from her and sit.

She turns her laptop toward me. The screen displays a Google Doc, already formatted, already populated with headings and subheadings and bullet points in a color scheme that I can only describe as aggressively coordinated.

“I’ve drafted an outline,” she says. "The assignment requires us to evaluate prosecutorial discretion when exculpatory evidence exists but procedural safeguards have broken down."

She clicks into the next section.

"I've separated the analysis into the legal duty to disclose, the limits of prosecutorial discretion, institutional safeguards, and the ethical consequences of violating those safeguards."

I stare at the document.

It’s…a lot.

The headings are bolded. The subheadings are italicized. The bullet points are indented with a precision that suggests she used a ruler, or possibly a laser level. There are footnotes. There are citations already embedded. There is a works cited page that currently has twelve entries and, based on the blank lines following them, room for at least eight more.

“This is…” I start.

“Thorough,” she supplies, when I don’t finish.

“That’s one word for it.”

“What’s yours?”

I lean back in the chair. The wood creaks. “Intimidating. Also maybe slightly obsessive. But in a good way. The kind of obsessive that gets A’s and also possibly a restraining order.”

She doesn’t laugh, but something in her posture softens by maybe half a degree. Her fingers hover over the keyboard, manicured nails catching the lamp light—pink, of course, because consistency is her brand and her brand is pink and perfection and making the rest of us look like we’re not even trying.

“I like to be prepared,” she says.

“I can see that.”

She blinks. Once. Slowly. Then she turns back to the laptop like she has decided that the fastest way to neutralize an inconvenient observation is to pretend it never happened.