Barbed-wire fencing loomed everywhere. Tilted and flecked with rust, it ran in straight lines and formed squares and bent in circles, giving you the uneasy sense of being simultaneously locked in and locked out. But what I dreaded most from the last time I’d been at Rikers—years before, to interview a witness—was the acrid smell of sewage and the rats. Unlike ordinary nocturnal skittering vermin, the Rikers rats walked around boldly in daylight, aggressively standing their ground. One more reason to be glad for the dark.
Once inside Bantum, the building where Zach was being housed, it took another fifteen minutes of clearing security before I was finally sitting in a little box that smelled of urine and onions and sour breath, staring at a cloudy plexiglass divider as I waited for him to be brought up.
On the drive out, my friendship with Zach had come back to me in fits and starts. It had been ages, but we had spent quite a lot of time together for the better part of first year—studying, meals, movies. My forgetting the extent of our friendship wasn’t necessarily a reflection on Zach either. I had a very selective memory. But I did now remember this so clearly: I’d liked Zach because he’d felt familiar—in good ways, and bad. It had been especially evident the day our beloved contracts professor had spontaneously given us an impassioned “career counseling” lecture in class.
When Zach and I met for dinner later that night at Mahoney’s, the pub on Rittenhouse Square, he was already all worked up.
“Can you believe that bullshit with Professor Schmitt?” Zach had said, squirting ketchup on his burger as a rowdy group of Penn football fans tumbled in.
“You mean the bit about soulless corporate law firms?”
Zach nodded, eyes locked on his burger, probably so he didn’t have to make eye contact with any of the very large, very drunk football fans closing in around us. “It’s too bad. I really liked that guy. But now he can go to hell as far as I’m concerned.”
“So you think corporate firms are soulful?” I teased, turning to watch the giant next to me, who was swaying ominously.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. You’re the biggest gunner I know.” Zach’s leg had started to bounce the way it did whenever he got nervous, which was often. “People around here like to pretend that being ambitious makes you a monster. But I refuse to lose, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.”
He didn’t mean anything by it, but sometimes Zach did sound like the bad part of my dad, the part the customers and employees and neighbors who loved him knew nothing about. To them my dad was all jokes and warm, silly charm. And he was those things. But he was also obsessed with status and achievement for achievement’s sake, to the exclusion of things that mattered, like people. Like my mom and me and what we wanted. He wouldn’t even let my mom teach me Greek like she wanted and he avoided the few Greek friends she’d made. The real him was always unsatisfied with who we were. What my parents had managed to build for themselves—the restaurant, our “cozy” two-bedroom on tree-lined West Twenty-Sixth Street that was always filled with my mother’s homemade diples, her amazing stories about Kefalonia, where she’d grown up, and all her endless affection—was pretty amazing. Idyllic, as far as I was concerned. But it had never been enough for my dad, even before we lost it all.
“Are you suggesting that the students at Penn Law aren’t competitive enough?” I’d laughed. “Isn’t that like saying the problem with a pack of lions is that they’re too into vegetables?”
“But they like to pretend they aren’t competing. It’s hypocritical.” Zach’s eyes flashed up at me pointedly. That was Zach: too much eye contact or not enough. He did not excel at moderation. But then, neither did I. And Zach at least didn’t try to hide behind some jovial persona like my dad. Zach was honest about who he was and I respected that. “My mother was a waitress and a house cleaner and my father worked in a steel plant. Blue-collar and not educated, but, man, did they work their asses off. Look at your parents, as hardworking as mine and defrauded into the grave.” He pointed a finger at me. “Success is an abstraction only to rich people.”
I shrugged. “I’m going the public interest route.”
Zach raised an eyebrow. “Public interest? That’s noble and everything, but people like you and me don’t have those options.”
“Speak for yourself,” I snapped back. “I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to work at the US attorney’s office. And I don’t give a shit about money.”
I also didn’t like being underestimated. I was going to devote my life to protecting people like my parents, hardworking immigrants who’d been convinced by a kindly-seeming regular into borrowing $100,000 against their bustling diner in Chelsea and investing it in a “secret” Hudson Yards project. Really, it was just my dad who’d been convinced. He’d invested without consulting my mother. Then, poof: the money had vanished, and so had the regular. With whiplash speed, the bank foreclosed on the restaurant. Millie, a customer turned family friend and sergeant in the Tenth Precinct, had jumped into action, breathing down the FBI’s neck to find the guy. In the end, Millie’s pressure wasn’t the reason he was found. But found he was—in the worst possible way. It didn’t change anything. Everything my parents worked for had already been destroyed. And so had my family. I was sixteen at the time; they’d both be gone before I turned seventeen.
I stumbled through the rest of high school, shattered, living with my mother’s sister, who was counting the minutes until she could return to Greece. My world had turned so suddenly hostile and incomprehensibly dark. For months I was dangerously depressed. Throwing myself into my studies had eventually brought me partway back to life.
The compulsive studying also earned me a free ride to Cornell and by senior year there, I’d started thinking about law school and an eventual job as a federal fraud prosecutor. The idea of a future career protecting people who’d been taken advantage of like my parents was a lifeline tossed out to me. Not talking about the rest of what had happened? That had given me the strength to pull myself to shore.
“Hey, no offense.” Zach was staring down at his burger as he held up his hands. “You’ll make a great prosecutor. I’m just saying, you work ten times harder and are more driven than anyone else in this damn school, even me. Maybe you should reap the rewards.”
“Don’t worry. I will. They’ll just be the rewards I want.”
“You know, I believe that.” Zach had smiled. “Actually, I have absolutely no doubt.”
But no matter how close Zach and I may have been for a time, nothing he said would change my mind about representing him now. I would listen, make him feel heard, and then—as promised—find him that truly excellent lawyer who was not me. And that was all I was going to do.
There was finally a buzz on the other side of the airhole-dotted plexiglass. When the door opposite opened, there, after all this time: Zach. Or his right eye. Because that was all I saw at first. Swollen closed, it had a deep cut above it. The whole side of his face was a spectacular purple-crimson. It was painful to look at.
“Oh my God, Zach,” I breathed. “Are you okay?”