"What constitutes extraordinary circumstances?"

A light of amusement danced in his eyes, heightened in effect by the lights of a passing car, and he looked out the window. "It's not an arbitrary decision. Besides, I find that spending any time in court is regularly a waste."

"I wholly agree with you there. So many lawyers are crooks."

"Oh God yes," he said, shaking his head in disgusted agreement, closing his eyes, and leaning the chair back a bit, "In any case, I don't think I'll be bothered with any of them for a while."

So much for the expert witness theory, she thought, looking sideways at him.

"So the answer to your question is," Alé continued, though she didn't know why she was bothering to answer his question, "I'm headed to Santa Barbara because my client, a sixteen-year-old middle-class white girl with her heart already pledged to a sorority, made friends on the internet with a nineteen-year-old criminal who carries a gun and is way too familiar with soft drugs."

She closed her eyes a moment against the flash of some oncoming car that thoughtlessly had its high-beams on, and continued, "He lived in Oregon, though he was apparently always homeless due to parental abuse, and recently he decided that he is in love with my client, who I have been treating for an eating disorder and drug abuse."

The girl was an unremarkable client, really, and one she'd prefer to not have due to her whiny spoiled nature and general uppityness, except that said girl did come with a PPO, and, while it was a hassle to get authorized, it was better than basketfuls of food in lieu of long-overdue (already reduced) cash payments from the underserved Hispanic community members she also took. But none of this need be explained to her stranger, Alé thought ruefully.

"So this kid...he thinks he's gonna be some macho gangster...has been hitchhiking down the coast for the past two days, calling my girl collect and insisting on meeting her. Wants her to be his girlfriend. Despite the fact that she's dating other boys."

The Brit scoffed, but seemed interested. "So obviously you're going as an intermediary with the hopes of diffusing the situation."

"Pretty much, but if he gets tough with me, it's off to prison for him." She sighed. "I did promise to not call his parole officer unless I had due cause. Not strictly ethical...not legal, either. Though those people don't give a shit one way or another, they're so overloaded and they only care about success stories."

She paused. "Man, I'm not being fair, that's a huge generalization. But it's the truth."

He grunted in acknowledgement.

"But ultimately my client wants him in rehab down here because at least here, she's around and can provide him with moral support of some sort. Not the most thought-out plan, but she means well. I've just told her one too many times about systems theory."

Looking more defeated, Alé continued, "Apparently, this kid is very alone in the world, as are so many of these youth. I just don't want him getting in the gangbanging scene if he does come down here. Which he's highly at risk for, without any support system except this teenage girl. But despite her age, she actually knows more than she should about life, but she can't deal with this shit alone."

"So what are you going to do?"

"I dunno," she replied, breathing deeply. "I'm going to do a person in environment assessment, meet the client where the client's at, never push harder for the client than the client wants to push for himself...all that shit we learn in school is the stuff we use. But theory is never as messy as real life."

"...Frequently, I wish life were as clean-cut as theory," he replied, and his agreement sounded very genuine.

"At the same time," Alé said, "if life was like theory, then there would be nothing for people like us to do, you know? We spend our lives shoving things into boxes, and all the time the boxes are coming apart. And because we want to try and make all the boxes stick together, we run around with rolls of duct tape and whack the problems we see. We just never stop to think about what happens when we arrive at the goal...when all the boxes are taped together."

"Well," the Brit said with a snort, "is it not implicit in our efforts that there are an infinity of boxes and only half the required amount of tape?"

"There's a difference between an infinity of boxes that are all alike and an infinity of boxes that are different colors, shapes, and sizes."

"That is the only thing that separates our work from the work of hamsters running on a wheel," he replied with a heavy nod. "Variegation."

"Yeah," Alé said, noticing suddenly that they were experiencing a strange sense of camaderie, "so while we could wish, wish, wish that life were cleaner, neater, tidier, like science or something, with a hypothesis and a conclusion and stuff, in truth we don't want that."

"Or we can reduce things to a phenomenological standpoint and just wish that the experience of the mess was no longer the experience of mess but instead the experience of order. Then again," he continued wistfully, "order is so boring when one arrives at it, at least a few minutes afterone has arrived."

"The glorious high of the moment when you reach the orderly solution is what you livefor," said Alé with great empathy.

"Yes," he hissed, clenching his hands tightly and pulling them close to his chest in an expression of childlike excitement. "Yes, Miss Melendez, it is."

"Me too," she mused, "though I do take a breath sometimes and enjoy the mess, if that makes sense."

"No. It doesn't make sense," he replied without a pause, "Complexity can and must always be reduced to something more solvable. I had a brilliant maths-tutor," he said at once, his eyes lighting up, "who could reduce a whole quantile regression equation into six simple terms. However, there was a substantial, though subtle, error in the logic. It was a tedious affair, and difficult to watch a man I had once respected – no mere compliment - fall so gracelesslywhen my opinion was confirmed by a voice from Harvard, a resounding voice of reason over the Atlantic."

"In other words, you caught your professor's mistake." While incredulous, Alé was nonetheless admiring to some degree.

"It was then that my suitability for the academic pursuit of higher-level maths came into question," he stated with dignified brevity and ambiguity with a clear double meaning.

"You got kicked out." She was barely able to contain her laughter.

"Wrong! I wanted out. They just provided the motivation. So I turned to chemistry, with a renewed passion for exactitude."