This is one rule I just don’t get. The point of being in a hospital is what? To get sicker? No, it’s to get well. And what better medicine is there than a visit from kids? I mean, what do they think we’re planning to do, run through the halls of the emergency room playing tag and spreading whooping cough? I told you already, kids get it. We know to be quiet here. We know to wash our hands with the disinfectant by the door. And we’d never come if we had a cold.
But the nurse at the nurses’ station doesn’t trust us. When Sadie and I tell her we’re here to see Mr. Kalman, she gives us this I’m-in-charge-and-you’re-not look.
“Are you family?” she asks.
“Neighbors.”
“You can’t visit him unless you’re at least thirteen.”
“She’s eighteen,” I say. “Today’s her birthday.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be twelve in March.”
She points to a sign: ALL VISITORS MUST BE AT LEAST 13 YEARS OF AGE. RARE EXCEPTIONS MADE FOR FAMILY MEMBERS.
Now, when Mr. Hill wants to end a conversation, he stands up from his chair, and that’s your cue to leave. But this nurse is already standing, so she ends it by putting her reading glasses back on and looking at somebody’s chart.
“I’m his prochain ami,” I say.
Her reading glasses stay on but her eyes come up over the top like a couple of early morning suns.
“His what?”
“Prochain ami,” I explain. “That’s French for ‘next friend.’ It’s a legal term. I’m surprised you don’t know it.”
“It means,” Sadie says, “that their relationship is equivalent to family for all legal purposes—including hospital visitation rights. Does your employee contract give you immunity from lawsuits?”
Here’s where the reading glasses come off and dangle on the chain around her neck.
“I don’t think so.”
“Want to risk it?”
It’s a total staring contest right now between Sadie and the nurse with no reading glasses. Then I see a flash of fear in those rising suns.
“He’s in room six,” the nurse with no reading glasses says, “down that hall.”
Sadie sweeps aside the curtain. Mr. Kalman is lying propped up in a bed, his eyes closed. He’s wearing a hospital gown, and his legs are under a thin blanket. I can see wires running from under the gown to a monitor the size of an iPad. It’s got an odd screen saver—a line with little Vs running through it—like one of the first video games. The room is quiet except for a bleep coming from one of the machines.
“Well, at least we know he’s not dead,” I say, because I’ve guessed correctly that the bleeping sound is his heartbeat.
“Mr. Kalman?” Sadie says.
He opens his eyes.
“Call me Avi, please. Here of all places. And at such a time.”
“Avi,” she says. “What happened to you?”
“I had a fall. One minute I was outside, getting some air, and the next I was on the ground, passed out. Someone called 911, and the paramedics brought me here.”
I can see that Sadie’s really worried about him now. All that talk about his funeral . . . she didn’t mean it.
“What did the doctor say? Are you going to be all right?”
“They’re running some tests. Pictures of the head. Pictures of the heart. I tried to tell them both are fine, but they wouldn’t listen. Doctors and lawyers don’t mix.”
He sits up, and you can tell something’s giving him pain. I’m worried it’s his hip. He points to a glass of water on the wheelie table nearby.
“Would you mind, Sadie? It hurts to reach.”
She grabs the water and holds it to his mouth. He takes a sip, then nods that he’s had enough.
“So,” he says, “did we postpone the case?”
Sadie and I look at each other.
“Postpone?” she says.
“Didn’t you get my text?”
“What text?”
“From the ambulance I texted you, ‘Under the circumstances, Chief Justice Reynolds, we’d like to postpone.’”
“I never got that,” Sadie says.
“What do you mean you never got it? It’s right here on my phone.”
Mr. Kalman holds up a cell phone. On the screen, just as he said, are the words Under the circumstances, Chief Justice Reynolds, we’d like to postpone.
“Did you press ‘send’?” Sadie asks.
“Yes,” Mr. Kalman says. “At least I think so.”
“Avi, you didn’t! The text never got sent.”
“So we didn’t postpone?”
Sadie and I both shake our heads.
“Who argued the case?”
I point to Sadie.
“You? But you’re not even a member of the Supreme Court Bar.”
“I am now! I paid the two hundred dollars!”
They look at each other for a second. Then Sadie gets all flushed. “Wait a minute,” she says. “This is all a joke, isn’t it?”
“There’s nothing funny about a fall, Sadie. I could have broken my hip.”
“But the two hundred dollars. You put it in my pocket because you knew they’d ask for it.”
“Why would the Supreme Court want to take your birthday money?”
“Because that’s the fee for joining the Bar!”
“Really?” he says. “It’s gone up. I paid only a hundred.”
Now Sadie’s face is all confused.
“This isn’t a joke?” she says.
Mr. Kalman shakes his head. Then he looks at me.
“She really argued in front of the Supreme Court?”
I nod. “She really did.”
“The case is submitted?”
We both nod. Mr. Kalman can hardly believe it.
“I guess you turned eighteen just in time.”
24
The Supreme Court Rules
If you look on PocketJustice, you’ll see that most Supreme Court cases take months to get decided. A case argued in, say, October won’t be decided until January of the next year—or later.
Brown v. Board of Education, for example, was argued in December 1953 but didn’t get decided until May 1954.
But there are exceptions. Bush v. Gore, for instance, when the two presidential candidates were fighting about which votes to count in the 2000 election, was argued on December 11 and decided on December 12, the very next day.
That’s because it was a case “of vital interest to the nation.” You can’t exactly have no president, can you?
And you can’t exactly have a hundred thousand kids camped out on the sidewalk in front of the Supreme Court when they’re supposed to be
