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I bundled my papers into the backpack at my feet and wrapped a plaid shirt around my waist to hide the presence of any unfortunate sweat patches.

"I wanted to ask you, last night, about our professor—Crane," I said, trying to sound casual. "What's he like?"

Joshua was glancing behind him at the group playing cornhole on the grass, a game involving tossing beanbags through a hole cut in a wooden board. I recognized a few of them as fellow international students from my master's course.

Turning back to me, he smiled. "Crane's cool." I could tell that Joshua was trying to downplay his enthusiasm. But he spoke with something of the same exhilaration I was accustomed to hearing in Audrey's voice when she talked about Crane. "I haven't had a class with him before, so I'm excited to see him in action."

"I heard he's a bit of a character though, right?" I lifted my backpack onto my shoulder and walked with Joshua across the red-bricked path.

The law school was built around this central courtyard, classrooms, a library, and faculty offices all contained within the complex. A few streets over from the main campus, it was its own little world.

The door toward which we were headed looked as if it had been carved into the thick ivy covering the wall, and it was opening and closing continually as people cut through the courtyard to get to the classrooms on the other side. We reached it just as someone successfully punted a beanbag through the cornhole behind us, a cheer sounding from the grass.

Joshua held the door open for me and I slipped inside, the cold, filtered air immediately soothing my hot skin. "Yeah, like, he's known as this, like, radical law professor with big political ideas." He gesticulated while he spoke, his hands sweeping the air. "When he published his book, he said we should rip up the Constitution and start again, and that got picked up by Fox, and then made into this whole, you know, thing..." I had seen some of that controversy when I first researched Crane online. A polarizing figure, by all accounts.

"I'm looking forward to meeting him," I said, pulling on the sleeves of the plaid shirt and tightening it around my waist. "There's a lot of hype."

"Yeah, I guess there is. I'm a little nervous, honestly. I think Crane keeps the class small so there's nowhere to hide from him." Joshua laughed. "All that effort to get into the class and now I'm scared to actually go..."

To be chosen for the class, we had to write a short discussion paper on a topic of particular interest to us. I'm sure the other students had worked hard on theirs, but not like me. Arriving in Franklin, it was my top priority. I had flung myself into the writing of that essay as if my life depended on it. I bedded down in the library, absorbing every piece of academic research Crane had written in the previous decade. It was not always the focus of his work, but in almost everything Crane wrote, there was a deep skepticism of the legal system as the formal arbiter for justice. And it seemed as if he was angry about it, angry at the law's own mythologizing, angry at the self-serving story it told itself. From his journalistic work, I had noticed an interest in the classics; the foundational Greek texts; the myths and rhetoric; the dramas and tragedies. Drawing this all together, I wrote an essay designed specifically to appeal to him, a piece about the tragedy of Antigone and the nature of justice. Personal conscience clashing with legal obligation, duties owed to the state versus those owed to higher principles, such as the gods, or even family.

But, to me, Antigone also spoke to something else, the story of the love between two sisters, and a loyalty that persisted, despite a gulf of miscomprehension between them.

For four days, I worked on that essay. The first at the library door in the morning, the last to leave at night, sustaining myself on processed snacks and strong coffee. The other students were propelled by ambition, by competitive zeal, maybe even by the enormity of their student loans, but I had something more powerful behind me. White-hot anger.

On the corridor, feet moved briskly around me, heading toward classrooms and lecture halls, the floors of the law school shining with fresh polish. To my right, light poured into the corridor from the floor-to-ceiling windows facing the courtyard, through which I could see the game of cornhole coming to an end. Beanbags scattered across the grass, lying crumpled where they had landed. I turned my eyes away and followed Joshua toward the library, at the back of which was Crane's classroom, room 1.04B.

"What did you write about?" he asked me. "To get into the class, I mean."

"Justice," I said, after a long pause. "How we make it for ourselves. Rough justice, I guess."

Joshua laughed. "Is that what you're into, Jessie?!"

"Maybe."