“Mr. Kalman,” she says, “what for?”
“Today’s your birthday, isn’t it? December eleventh?”
Oh no. We totally forgot Sadie’s birthday!
“Who told you?”
“Sean did. He came to wish me luck this morning. Said the day was bound to be lucky because it’s the day you were born.”
Sadie smiles. “But you didn’t have to get me anything.”
“It’s not every day a girl turns eighteen.”
Win or lose today, I think to myself, we’d better take her out to celebrate.
Mr. Kalman starts to head off, but Sadie calls after him.
“Mr. Kalman, wait!”
He turns back.
“What’s it like? Arguing in front of the Supreme Court?”
He thinks about it for a second. “Ever play baseball, Sadie?”
“I did two years of Little League when I was younger.”
“Well, imagine standing at home plate, only you’re not facing one pitcher, but nine of them, from all sides. Instead of baseballs, they’re throwing questions that you probably haven’t thought about, and just as you start to answer one, another one comes from the right. You turn to answer that and a new one flies in from the left, and then from the center, two more. You’re at bat for only thirty minutes, but the questions keep sailing in from every side, and you can’t let a single one go by because the justices of the Supreme Court, well, they only throw strikes.”
“Wow. You must be nervous.”
“I am a little. But as long as I start out with the right words, everything will be fine. ‘Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court . . .’ That’s how you always begin. Once those words are spoken, the rest will follow.”
He turns and walks away.
“Good luck today,” she calls after him. “We’ll be there watching.”
He puts up his hand to wave but doesn’t look back.
After breakfast we all go up to change. My dad helps Jaesang with his tie, and Mom helps Catalina brush her hair—she wants to wear it down today like Justice Suerte wore hers in an old yearbook picture Catalina found. Alistair is looking mighty slick, I have to say, in his Hollywood Suit Outlet suit and thin black tie. His hair is all spiky because he borrowed too much gel from Sean, so while we’re in the elevator I swipe some off his head and give my hair a lift too.
When we step out of the hotel, we find Sadie pacing back and forth like it’s 9:55 instead of 9:25.
“Come on,” she says, “we don’t want to be late.”
Dad motions to a cab driver at the front of a line, but the hotel doorman gives us some advice. “If you’re heading up to the Supreme Court today, you’re better off on the metro. Your homework case is drawing a huge crowd.” He tells us to take the Orange Line from Foggy Bottom to Capitol South. We’ll be there in thirteen minutes.
We speed walk to the metro station and head downstairs to the trains. As we’re passing through the turnstile, I see a pair of transit cops walking their beat. Alistair sees them too. He throws up his empty hands and shouts:
“No french fries!”
A breeze from the tracks lifts Catalina’s hair. Soon we’re on our train.
When we showed up in Lafayette Park for the march, there were a lot of people, and it brought a flock of hummingbirds to my stomach. But this crowd, the one in front of the Supreme Court, makes that crowd look like Playmobil people and those birds feel like origami cranes. What I see in front of me now are two armies facing each other from behind barricades, and what I feel is a murder (perfect word, by the way) of crows pecking my guts out.
A kid holding up one end of a NO HOMEWORK banner recognizes me from YouTube.
“Hey, there he is! There’s Sam Warren!”
A boys’ soccer team calls out, “Give ’em hell, Sam!” and a whole Girl Scout troop screams, “We love you, Sam!”
What’s a boy to do but blush and wave? And then I see a familiar face in the crowd. A face I can hardly believe is here because it’s so far from home.
“Mr. Trotter? What are you doing here?”
“Pulling for you, Sam. Imagine what the school orchestra could do if the kids had more practice time.”
I reach across the line of Washington, DC, police officers, and I fist bump my music teacher.
In case you’ve never been inside the US Supreme Court—and not a lot of people have—let me try to tell you what it’s like. You know how when you visit a cathedral, a concert hall, or a really old forest, no grownup has to tell you to settle down? The place itself lets you know that it would appreciate a little silence. And you naturally respect that. Maybe, because so much has already gone on there before you showed up, you just want to be still. You want to take it all in.
That’s the feeling I get when we walk into the Supreme Court. All the noise from the demonstrators outside gets swallowed up by the bronze doors, and we hear the clink of coins and keys and the thud of cell phones being dropped into security trays as we pass through the metal detectors; then there’s the squeak of shoes on the polished marble floor and the hushed conversation. But even those sounds fade away as we go from the lobby into the courtroom itself, where I get that cathedral feeling, and for some reason it makes me feel small.
But also big with the possibility that we’ll win.
Small and big at the same time.
Maybe the justices were right to keep things quiet on the plaza. From the marble steps to the bronze doors and beyond, there’s something sacred about this place.
I look up and see twin American flags, one in the left corner and one in the right, and I think of the two statues seated outside, Contemplation of Justice and Authority of Law. Between the flags are four marble columns with a red velvet curtain behind them.
