You either passed or you didn’t. No second place, no consolation prize, and in my case, no job unless I passed. I’d been working for two summers as a law clerk at Goldin & Bass, a midsize firm in the city that specialized in divorce and family law. That summer I’d been given six weeks off from my job to prepare for the exam. I enrolled in a bar review course, and attended classes there five days a week, four hours a day. After class, I went straight to the library, and spent another seven to eight hours on class assignments and studying. Training for the exam began to take a toll on my mental and physical health. There were times when I’d be reading a case study and start hallucinating. Words would rise off the page and turn into insects right before my eyes. I lacked sleep, vitamins, food, liquids, exercise, sex, and just about everything else. Tyler ceased to exist, and I hadn’t seen or phoned my mother in weeks. The only thing I could afford to care about was passing that test, and for some cruel reason, three years of law school had done little to prepare me for it.
