Chapter Four-
She didn't know how she wound up in the spacious lobby back at the Daniel Webster School of Law. All Meg knew was that her mind was in a sad funk and that walking around robotically was a better alternative to thinking at the moment.
She had gotten used to the place by now, and the lobby was the first thing she saw on her way to class everyday, but today the place was empty and it seemed to offer no comfort.
All around her were the trappings of legal academia. The plaques and awards, the licenses and pennants, the photos of honored pedagogues in golden frames, and the painting.
Meg always noticed it, but now, she felt drawn to it. Its size dominated the walls of the place and lent some of its theme to the ambiance therein. There, for the world to see, was an old, brush-stroked portrait of lawyer Daniel Webster famously defending his client against the Devil, the flaming jury of the damned residing in the background.
She just stared at it mindlessly, letting her subconscious swim in the silent drama of the picture. The heroism was there and it was telling her something deep and profound.
Was her dealing with what happened to her room today preparing her for what she would one day soon face? Was the pain of the injustice the fire that would temper her for the battle to come?
All she could see was the old lawyer in the legal fight of his life, and in some way, she took solace in that. Maybe because he was the underdog, taking on more than he could chew, or perhaps because he just believed in himself that much more than usual, she could feel his spirit, captured in his painted eyes, face, and body language, stirring her own.
He wasn't fighting for himself, he was clearly duking it out with Old Scratch for someone who desperately needed his help.
And with that, Meg was snapped out of her funk. Jennifer needed her, too, and here she was feeling down when she should have been doing what Ol' Daniel was doing. Planning for the battle ahead. Thinking of a way to win. Waging ungodly war on her enemies. Just like a lawyer.
The mind was the greatest tool the lawyer could ever possess. Her professors stressed that fact to her, history demonstrated that fact to her, and today, her vandals forced that fact on her. With a smile, she was grateful for the lesson.
Meg cocked up an eyebrow and decided to act. She already knew who done the deed, and so whatever happened next wouldn't take too long to resolve. Thus, calm cunning started to flow amidst the ice in her veins, while she began to formulate wicked, wicked plans…
Meg finally left the Campus Security office after a lengthy question and answer session, grateful that it wasn't sundown just yet.
She looked up and down the campus, her eyes sifting through unwanted people like a miner's fingers sifting gold from sediment. She was a huntress, prowling while daylight was still given to her, knowing her prey would wander off when dusk came and campus rules gave it shelter.
Small groups were the main tell, she knew. The prey clung together like sheep, like deer, or any other small-minded beast.
Meg was about to move to another part of the quad when her eyes caught the suddenly familiar color of a cardigan draped over broad shoulders some distance away. She mentally licked her chops.
Brad Alan and his cronies casually stood by a statue, chatting and chattering about nothing of any great consequence. As he angled his head indolently to check out a pretty girl walking by, Brad Alan's eyes caught sight of Meg calmly walking slowly, almost like a stalk, towards him.
"What do you want?" Brad Alan sneered contentedly. "You didn't get enough trouble today?"
"You know, that's an interesting question to ask," Meg said coolly. "You might have heard that my room was broken into today. You wouldn't have anything to say on the matter, would you?"
"Yeah, I would, but it's not the sort of thing a lady should hear, which mean, I guess, you better listen up-"
Meg raised her hand to interrupt. "Ah, before you dazzle us with your rapier wit, take a look at this." She held up her cell phone.
Brad Alan looked at it in confusion; at the same time he was wondering what Meg was up to, coming here so boldly. He couldn't figure either out, but he recognized a con when it was presented to him, or at least, that was what he believed.
"What's that?" he joked to his friends. "One of those…feminine products?"
Meg waited until the chuckles subsided enough to be heard. "No, Brad. Hilarious, but no. See, this is a cell phone." She opened the cover so that they could see the number and control pad.
"That's bull," Brad Alan scoffed. "My uncle owns a cell phone dealership. They don't look like that. Get out of here, you nut job."
"Oh, but they do look like this where I come from," Meg maintained unperturbed, speaking to the gang as though they were shameless rubes and she was the Queen of the Carnie Barkers. "In fact, this one is so special, it has its own camera. Ooooh."
She turned the phone around and pointed carefully to a small lens situated just at the top and rear of the device. "Watch."
Meg pressed a button on the phone's face, then turned the phone back around so that the numbers and, more importantly, its small screen could be shown. On the screen was a still image of Brad Alan and his gang.
"Whoa!" exclaimed one crony. "That's amazing. Where did you get that?"
"Yeah," Brad Alan agreed suspiciously. "Where did you get that thing?"
Meg pocketed the phone and looked nonchalant as she gave him a smile. "Oh, I wouldn't worry too much about where I got this. I'd worry more about where you guys'll be going after today."
"What are you talking about?" asked another friend of Brad's.
"Well, truth be told, I secretly filmed your little romp through my room with my camera. Shocking, isn't it?"
Brad Alan laughed dismissively at the comment, but he could also sense the building panic ratcheting up among his constituents. His arrogance finally forced him to speak up, lest his own misgivings cripple him with guilty fear
"That's bull, Griffin. I mean, sure we did it. What did you think you could about it? But how could you have filmed us in your room? You couldn't have known when we'd come in and trash it."
Her smile flowed suddenly into a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin that abruptly terrified him inside with cold clarity.
"You're right," she said simply.
Campus Security forces appeared from all around them like predators in their own right. Crowds and single students slowed their paces and rubbernecked at the spectacle, as officers handcuffed shamed-faced cronies and walked them off to the station.
As one officer placed Brad Alan's hands together for cuffing, he blurted out in shock, "Wha-What did you do?"
"Me?" Meg asked demurely. "Well, I had these nice men put a bug on me so that they could hear everything you said, once I told them that you had something to do with my room. All I had to do was lie about me taking pictures of you in my room so you'd confess. Neat, huh?"
The hubris that struck him felt like a physical blow as Brad Alan was turned around and hauled noisily away. "You're just a Pauper! You don't belong here! My father'll get me out and then I'll have your ass for lunch!
"Ooh, promises, promises," Meg cooed in mock-arousal to the departing bully. She gave him a wave and then looked around cursorily at the students that still remained in the area.
She was about to leave and go back to the girls' dormitory to clean up when some appreciative applause, mostly from the women, and a few respectful whistles, mostly from the men, softly came her way. Apparently young Mister Chatsworth was a perennial thorn in a fair portion of the student body.
As Meg bashfully shrugged off the accolade with a lopsided smile, and the admirers began going their separate ways in the quad, she produced a cigar from a back pocket and chomped on it from one side of her mouth.
"I love it when a plan comes together," she growled satisfactorily.
The next day, Meg was feeling anything but cool and collected outside Professor Kingsfield's classroom. This was it. Test day. The finals. This would be for all the marbles.
It took Meg most of last night to put her room right before cramming over a good portion of her class work later on. The only reason she wasn't sleeping standing up, she knew, was because she was way too wired.
Because other students were milling around outside the classroom, as well, giving pep talks to themselves, Meg didn't feel too self-conscious about talking to Death as he lounged against a nearby wall.
"Not too shabby with Brad and his bunch yesterday," Death congratulated her. "I gotta admit, you can get pretty mean when ya put your mind to it."
"Thanks," she said nervously. "I just hope I can ace this test. The time I spent here will be for nothing if I don't graduate." Meg took a shuddering breath. "Ugh! I wish I could just montage this test and get it over with."
"Yeah," Death commiserated. "But montages only affect time not action. You'd still have to do the test and there'd be no guarantee that you'd pass or flunk…unless you passed or flunked. Anyway, come hell or high water, forgive the pun, we have to motor when this is done."
"Right," she said sullenly.
Death shrugged amicably. "Hey, cheer up. It could be worse. You could have been a competitor in X-treme Spelling Bee…"
Six high school kids stood abreast on what appeared to be the wooden surface of an auditorium's stage, watching one of their number, a girl, walk nervously forward to a mic stand.
A bespectacled moderator, holding a sheet of paper and standing behind a podium below them, glanced up at her and said soothingly, "Now, Susie, the word is ornithorhyncus. Don't be nervous."
Any observer in the audience could now see the reason for Susie's discomfiture. The scene opens up to show that she has walked underneath a gallows, a noose firm around her neck, while nearby, a teacher with a sadistic grin, has her grip eagerly tight around the lever that will drop the girl down the trap door she's standing on.
"Any time," the moderator consoled her…
The school bell rang raucously through the halls and it seemed to Meg as though it were a death knell.
"Well, wish me luck," she said. Death said nothing in response but he gave her a skeletal thumbs-up instead.
The doors finally opened and the students slowly filed inside like prisoners on the final mile.
Meg made sure she entered last.
The dorm room looked more or less respectable after Meg's ministrations the previous night. The paperwork and essays were recovered, posters covered graffiti that was too unseemly to be seen, the mattress was flipped over so that the bed was made again, and the school replaced the books that were destroyed by fire.
Death idly picked up one of Meg's dead goldfish that she missed in the clean up and plopped it into the wastepaper basket, for lack of something to do while he waited for her to return after class.
Despite his insouciant nature, he felt as anxious as she had. He wanted her to succeed so she could continue, but if she flunked, she'd have to make do some other way, which would be riskier to say the least.
Death took a seat by Meg's desk and looked around the room.
"Reminds me of my days at Kent State," he mused. Then the door opened.
Meg Griffin schlepped her weary self into the room and then flopped unceremoniously onto the bed.
"How did it go?" Death asked.
"Mmhhmm…" Meg droned into the pillow, not really caring if she expired again, this time of asphyxiation.
"In English, please?"
"Mmhhmhhhh…"
"Much better. Well, I guess we'll find out in a few days when they post the results, huh?" Death said.
Meg turned around on her back, for one, to breathe, and for another, to say sleepily, "I wish we could know now. The suspense is killing me."
"Piece of cake," he said as he lazily tapped the handle of his scythe against the floor. The numbers on the face of the clock nearest the bed flipped in a second from its current time to sometime in early afternoon, its date was now a full week ahead.
"Wha?" Meg moaned as she wiped away at sleep that was forming on her eyes and the now noonday sunshine.
"We're a week from when you just walked in," Death explained. "The test results should be posted by now."
Meg promised herself that she would be suitably impressed by Death's mastery of time after she had gotten some rest.
"Great," Meg said while yawning. "I'm just gonna take a nap. Didn't have much time to cram while I was cleaning up." She curled into a cozy ball and began to relax. "Wake me up in about an hour, okay?" Then she slept.
"Some senior," Death scoffed softly. "In my day, I could tear up two parties, study for a test, and still have energy to pick up half of Europe during the plague. Kids today have no stamina."
Meg's rebuttal was a long drawn out snore.
Students crowded Assembly Hall, jockeying for position to see their grade for the last time.
Meg, newly energized from sleep, and now apprehension, fought for a view from her position in the throng. She also felt as if she should just run away rather than find out if she passed. The suspense was that palatable.
Meg saw an opening and squeezed past two people, and despite her being subsequently jostled, managed to quickly scan up and down the columns of names for her own.
"G's. G's," Meg whispered to herself as she kept looking. "G's. A-ha!"
She put all of her attention on the G list, going down the last names that were alphabetically arranged. G-r's were next.
Another jostle hit her, knocking her glasses askew, but right before she recovered, she glanced up and saw in her shaken point of view, Griffin, Meg, and a block of numbers next to it. Desperate, she pushed back into the wall of humans, trying to force herself through.
With effort, Meg aimed her head towards the rough direction she saw "Griffin" on the list, trying to line up the name with the series of numbers she just saw.
An anxiety-fueled adrenaline rush hit her at the same time an elbow to the side of the head did, but now the numbers seemed clearer for a scant, shaky moment. Her numbers.
That were deficient by a point…
Meg lost her footing in the continuous shoving and fell to the floor, completely numb. The sum history of pain her family put her through couldn't equal the fathomless, gnawing fear she felt just now. The fear of failing Jennifer, of dooming her to eternal damnation because of a flunked test. If the students trampled her now, she knew she'd feel nothing.
She got up slowly, ignoring the wrestling masses around her. She would hate having to tell Death that she failed but that discomfort would be paltry next to telling Jennifer herself.
But, she slowly decided, before she did any of that, she would have to make one last visit to the man she felt she disappointed as much as anyone else. It seemed honor demanded it so.
Professor Kingsfield's classroom was empty but the energy of the previous class still hummed in its walls as Kingsfield sat by his desk, grading papers and sipping his tea.
He almost didn't notice the doors opening and a sullen Meg stepping in, quiet as Death himself. He looked up and sipped another bit of tea as she walked down the aisle towards him.
"What can I do for you, Miss Griffin?"
The light in her eyes was as dim as her spirit as she approached his desk, her head hung low. "You wouldn't happen to know where I could find some hemlock, would you?" she asked with gallows humor.
"Thinking of keeping Socrates company, hmm?" he joked dryly.
"I don't think Socrates had my kind of day, Professor."
"Well, he was forced to drink his cup. Why would you want yours, my dear?"
Meg felt like she was tortured into speaking, and the speaking, itself, was torture. "Because…Because, I failed the test, sir. I failed you. I said that I would learn from you, but I didn't keep my end of the bargain. I wasted my time here, and yours, and now someone I really care about is going to…suffer for it. I'm so sorry, sir." Her stomach felt like stone.
Perplexed, Kingsfield put aside his pen and students' papers to focus his attention on her. "What on Earth do you mean, child?"
Meg, even more perplexed, couldn't understand why this was so hard to understand. Didn't she already feel lower than the soles on Pol Pot's loafers? Did he need for her to spell it out further? The wasted work and the compressed, yet wasted years?
She sighed with a shudder, close to tears, and tried again.
"Sir, I didn't pass your test. I saw the results posted in Assembly Hall. I-I didn't make it."
Kingsfield looked at her for a long moment, as if weighing whether or not to do anything for fear of another emotional outburst. He sighed in slight exasperation of the situation and opened a drawer in the desk. He pulled out a thin stack of papers that were held together with paper clips.
He turned some of the papers over, adjusted his glasses, cleared his throat, and read aloud. Meg felt like she could have died, yet again.
She passed by one point.
Meg simply did not believe it. Based on her past experiences with hardly ever getting an even break, she didn't know if she wanted to believe it. She shook her head slowly, to clear the obvious foolishness from her mind. This was a trick, a joke. It had no choice but to be.
And yet she didn't want to jinx it if it were true. Part of her felt shame for doubting all of this, but she couldn't help it. She was just having such a hard time believing it.
"No way," she whispered, more to herself than to him.
Kingsfield held the paper, a copy of the test results for his classes, up so that she could see her name clearly. The moment was dreamlike.
The scream that blasted from her came from a long way, deep inside her, and scared the professor so badly, he jumped and some of the papers came apart in his hands.
Meg giggled like a madwoman as she gave the professor the biggest hug possible and then stooped down to quickly help Kingsfield gather the wayward pages.
"I'm sorry, Professor Kingsfield. I-I can't believe it. I passed! I passed! I'm a lawyer!" Then the reality of that statement hit her with hard sobriety. "I'm a lawyer."
"That's right, Miss Griffin," Kingsfield said as he composed himself at his chair. "You are a lawyer. You are now a part of a noble and treasured heritage that spans centuries. People will look to you to help them in their time of greatest need, and with the power of attorney, you will uphold that obligation."
Meg stood still, her heart thundering in her chest, but her demeanor was calm now, thoughtful and poised. The empty classroom took on the quality of a church, and it felt with his words, as though she were draped in a mantle of office. That she was being ordained.
"Yes, sir." Then a thought came back to her. "But, if I did pass, then who did I see with the failing grade named Griffin?"
Kingsfield peered at the paper once again and then said, "Ah! Here was your problem. You must not have seen your results on the list clearly. You somehow must have saw the results below yours and thought it was yours."
"Oh," Meg said, slightly taken aback. "Then whose results did I see?"
The professor was about to answer that when the doors opened again and an elderly man with silvery hair, in a crisp, dark suit, stuck his head inside and yelled angrily.
"You know, I've had it with this fly-by-night school of yours. Do you know how many television deals I could have made just by being my own lawyer? Fuck you!"
The man then left in a huff as Meg finally got her answer. "Merv Griffin's," Professor Kingsfield said.
It was a beautiful day for graduation, thanks to time being bent to Death's will once again. Meg walked alongside a publicly invisible Death, wearing an anxious smile along with her mortarboard and gown, and feeling like the belle of the ball.
They made it to the graduates' seating area fashionably late, and sat in the last two chairs there, listening to the speaker up front on stage calling out names.
"You know," Meg asked while rooting around in her pocket for something. "I always wanted to know what this day was like. I haven't graduated from James Woods yet, but I always pictured something like this."
Death slouched in his wooden chair, taking in the scenery with a measured turn of his hooded head. "Yeah, it's not too bad. Been to a million of 'em. 'Course it's at the after-graduation parties that things really pick up. I think I get invited to more of those things than I should, you know what I mean?"
"Yeah," Meg nodded in understanding, and then told him, "Well, I still want to thank you for everything you did. I'd have never even made it this far without your help."
Death waved it off with a bony hand. "Ah, don't sweat it, Meg. As long as you put those smarts to use when the time come, it's all copasetic." Then he noticed something in her hand. "What's that?"
"Oh, this? It's just something to keep me from getting nervous, that's all." she said as she maneuvered her fingers and expanded her hands amidst the twine web of the cat's cradle.
Death nodded towards a small group of women teachers a few yards away. "I really like what they done to the place. They got a way better curriculum than I thought."
Meg followed his gaze at them. "Aren't you a little too old for them?" she teased.
"No way!" he defended. "Don't let these looks fool ya. It's just stress. This job can really beat ya up. In fact, I'll betcha that I'll get one of their phone numbers before the day's out."
"Alright," Meg said. "Loser buys pizza."
"Deal." Then Death cocked his head toward the stage. "I think they're callin' out the G's now."
"Yeah, I heard them call out "Grey" just now. Wait…Whoa! They said my name! I'm up! Okay, I'll be back in a minute!"
Meg pocketed her cat's cradle, stood quickly, and then crab-walked past other seated students, pardoning her self every step of the way.
She finally emerged from the row of chairs and hurried up the path to the stage, holding her cap clumsily to her head to keep it from falling.
Meg was slightly winded from the pseudo-dignified trot she took upon reaching the stage. With a nervous giggle she stood more or less poised to receive her diploma.
Too nervous to think of using her sweaty, free hand, she took her other hand out of her pocket to hold the sheepskin, but her fingers were tangled in the knotted string of her wayward cat's cradle.
Meg engaged both hands to the task of freeing the one and unconsciously turned to face the podium while she was occupied.
The string had bound her hand into a loose fist and as she managed, with her other hand, to begin working her fingers out of the net of twine, her middle finger suddenly shot out of the mesh while constricting the other fingers back into an even tighter fist.
The area went into a shocked silence as they watched what appeared to many to be Meg Griffin giving everybody the finger. Meg was the first to not understand the sudden quiet and the last to notice the inadvertent gesture she was displaying.
When she finally looked down at the offending appendage and then out at the sea of pissed-off people, her brain shut down in fear, and she, despite herself, instinctively channeled her father's moronically nervous giggle, snatched her diploma, and ran like hell.
The seating area was emptied in a heartbeat. The angry grads ran together in a jeering hunting pack after Meg, who valiantly kept her lead while screaming for help.
Death, who had taken the time to chat with the teachers he had his eyeball-less sights on earlier, didn't hear Meg at all.
Meg turned this way and that across the quad, hoping to lose them, but apparently some were athletics in their own right and gaining on her was quickly becoming an eventuality.
Meg spotted a low-sloped knoll up the distance and made a break for it, hoping the sudden change in terrain would slow them down. It did. For her.
So marked was her deceleration and the dew that coated the grass that she slipped and tumbled to the base of the little hill on her back.
Exhausted, she propped herself up on her elbows to see the mob carefully descending the slope and surrounding her on all sides.
Diplomatically, Meg sputtered, "Wait! Wait! It's not my fault. Look, it was my cat cradle! It got all tangled up. See?"
She raised her hands and tried to once again disentangle herself from the fiendish string, but this time she had gotten all of her fingers worked into the snare.
She pulled her hands apart to show them the familiar latticework of the cat's cradle, but the tangles and knotting created a new work that would have made "Charlotte", of Charlotte's Web fame, proud, if she wrote naughty words and phrases over Zuckerman's barn.
The jeering grew louder and the pack closed the space around Meg more tightly as they all read the spindly words, "Eat Shit" in the center of the cradle.
Meg saw it and quickly brought her hands down, giggling to placate and failing. With the ironic knowledge that Death might just as soon pick her up as rescue her, and with a look of fearful defeat in her eyes, Meg said unto the crowd, "Uh, my hands have Tourette's Syndrome?"
The masses fell upon her and all went black.