“All right! Controversy!” Lisa said, sitting up straight.

“They get along really well, but we can’t discuss politics in the house.”

“So where do you fall politically?”

“I guess I’m somewhere between moderate and liberal,” Ben said, drawing an imaginary line with his hands. “I’m the product of a bipartisan marriage.”

“Any girlfriends?”

“No, I think my dad’s pretty much narrowed it down to my mom.”

“Funny.”

“I live with my three best friends from high school.”

“You ever been in love?”

“You ever been called intrusive?”

“Just answer the question,” Lisa said.

“Only once, though I’m not sure I can call it love. After law school, I took a two-month trip around the world-Europe and Asia, Bangkok and Bali, Spain and Switzerland, everything I could see.”

“I take it you like to travel.”

“Very much. Anyway, in Spain, I met this woman named Jacqueline Ambrosio.”

“How exotic. Was she a native?”

“Nope. She was a marketing consultant from Rhode Island. She was starting her travels in Spain, and I was at the end of my trip. We met in Salamanca, took a weekend trip to that beautiful little island, Majorca, and parted ways five days after we met.”

“Please, you’re breaking my heart,” Lisa moaned. “And let me guess, you lost her address, could never find her again, and to this day, your heart aches for her.”

“Actually, on my last day there, she told me she was married, and that she’d had a great time revisiting the single life. Apparently, her husband was flying in the next day.”

Lisa paused a moment, then asked, “Is that story bullshit?”

“Not a bit.”

“Wasn’t she wearing a wedding ring?”

“Not when we were together.”

“Well, then, it’s a good story. But it definitely wasn’t love.”

“I never said it was,” Ben said with a smile. “How about you? What’s your story? Just the juicy stuff.”

Lisa swung her feet up onto the red sofa. “I’m from Los Angeles, and I hate it there. I think it’s the toilet of the great Western restroom. I went to Stanford undergrad and Stanford Law only because I enjoy being near my family.”

“Boorrrrrrrring!” Ben sang.

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch. My dad is originally from L.A.; my mom’s from Memphis. They met, and I swear this is true, at an Elvis convention in Las Vegas. They collect Elvis everything-plates, towels, napkin holders, we even have an Elvis Pez dispenser.”

“They have Elvis Pez heads?”

“Some lunatic collector in Alabama put sideburns on a Fred Flintstone Pez, filed down the nose, and painted on sunglasses. My parents went nuts and paid two hundred bucks for it. Don’t ask; they’re total freaks.”

“I don’t suppose your middle name is…”

“You got it. Lisa Marie Schulman.”

“That’s fantastic,” Ben said, impressed. “I’ve always wanted to scar my kids with a really funny name, like Thor or Ira.”

“I highly recommend it. Being taunted throughout childhood is great for your self-esteem.”

“Let me ask you this,” Ben said. “Do you twirl spaghetti?”

Lisa raised one eyebrow, confused.

“I think there are two kinds of people in this world,” Ben explained, “people who twirl spaghetti on their fork to make manageable bites, and those who slurp it up, getting it all over themselves. Which are you?”

“I slurp,” Lisa said with a smile. “And when I was little, I didn’t eat anything white, so my mom had to dye my milk and my eggs with food coloring.”

“What?” Ben asked, laughing.

“I’m serious. I used to hate the color white, so she used to make my milk purple and my eggs red. It was tons of fun.”

“You used to cut the hair off your Barbie dolls, didn’t you?”

“As soon as I pulled them out of the box,” Lisa said proudly. “The little bitches asked for it.”

“Oh, I can see it now,” Ben laughed. “We’re gonna get along great.”

After a ten-minute Metro ride to Dupont Circle, Ben climbed one of Washington ’s many oversized escalators and headed home. A block from the subway, he spotted Tough Guy Joey, the neighborhood’s angriest street person. “Hey, Joey,” Ben said.

“Screw you,” Joey snapped. “Bite me.”

“Here’s some dinner,” Ben said, handing Joey the turkey sandwich he had brought to work. “Lucky me, they feed you on the first day.”

“Thanks, man,” Joey said, grabbing the sandwich. “Drop dead. Eat shit.”

“You got it,” Ben said. Passing the worn but cozy brownstones that lined almost every block of his neighborhood, Ben watched the legion of young professionals rush home to dinner down Dupont Circle ’s tree-lined streets. Almost home, Ben inhaled deeply, indulging in the whiff of home cooking that always flowed from the red-brick house on the corner of his block. Ben’s own house was a narrow, uninspired brownstone with a faded beige awning and a forty-eight-starred American flag. Although it was August, the front door was still covered with Halloween decorations. Ben’s roommate Ober was quite proud of his decorating and had refused to take them down before they got another year’s use out of them. When Ben finally walked through the door, Ober and Nathan were cooking dinner.

“How was it?” Ober asked. “Did you sue anybody?”

“It was great,” Ben said. He dropped his briefcase by the closet and undid his tie. “The justice is away for the next two weeks, so my co-clerk and I just worked through some introductory stuff.”

“Your co-clerk-what’s he like?” Ober asked, adding pasta to his boiling water.

“She’s a woman.”

“What’s she look like? Is she hot?”

“She’s pretty cute,” Ben said. “She’s spunky, very straightforward. There’s no sense of bullshit about her. She’s got nice eyes, pretty short hair…”

“She’s a lesbian,” Ober declared. “No question about it.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Nathan asked as Ben shook his head.

“Short hair and straightforward?” Ober scoffed. “And you think she’s not a lesbo?”

“She did offer to fix my car today,” Ben added.

“See,” Ober said, pointing to Ben. “She just met him and she’s already strapping on the tool belt.”

Ignoring his roommate, Ben opened the refrigerator. “What’re you guys making?”

“Anita Bryant is boiling the pasta, and I’m making my stinking garlic sauce,” Nathan said. His square shoulders didn’t budge as he moved the large pot of spaghetti to the back burner of the stove. Military in his posture, Nathan was still wearing his tie even though he had been home for a half hour. “Throw some more pasta in-there’s only twenty boxes in the cabinet.” Carefully, he moved his sauce pan to the front burner. “So tell us how it was? What’d you do all day?”

“Until the Court officially opens, we spend most of our day writing memos for cert petitions,” Ben explained. Looking to make sure his friends were still interested in the explanation, he continued, “Every day, the Court is flooded with petitions seeking certiorari, or ‘cert.’ When four justices grant cert, it means the Court will hear the case. To save time, we read through the cert petitions, put them into a standard memo format, and recommend whether the justice should grant or deny cert.”

“So depending on how you write your memo, you can really affect whether the Court decides to hear a case,” Nathan reasoned.

“You can say that, but I think that might be overstating our power,” Ben said, dipping his finger into the sauce for a taste. “Every other chamber also gets to see the memo, so you’re kept in check by that. So let’s say an important case comes through that would really limit abortion rights. If I slant the memo and recommend that Justice Hollis deny cert, all the conservative justices would go screaming to Hollis, and I’d look like a fool.”

“But I’m sure on a marginal case, no one will really notice-especially if you’re the only one who reads the original petition,” Nathan said.