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FENNO WAS incensed. Just who did his editors at the Record (or the Wrecker, as they obnoxiously insisted on calling it this week) think they were, calling him back from his Caymans holiday so early? Sure, he had missed a few days of classes on either side of Spring Break, but Fenno had always considered those discretionary for 2Ls in the same way that 3Ls could pick and choose whether to ever go to class at all.

It was a disgustingly early 3:30 in the afternoon, but Fenno was uncommonly excited to haul himself from bed and into the skin-splintering cold of a rejuvenated New England winter. He had only one class that day - the Law and Anthropology Workshop - and it was the one time slot on Fenno's schedule he had never fudged neither the beginning or the end of.

FENNO WAS TAKING a ten minute break from his hectic, first week schedule. Between claiming, in one class, that he couldn't have known the assignment yet and asserting, in another, that the textbook had been sold out, it had been a stressful shopping week. Rushing back from the Hark with enough candy to fuel him through his next course preview - the whole week was like the movies! - Fenno sighed with relief when he remembered that, signing onto his courses late, he could, at the very least, conveniently "forget" to place his old 1L mugshot on the seating chart. Only one thing was really bothering Fenno that afternoon: 1Ls.

ONE COULD FORGIVE Fenno for feeling rather good during the first week of 2009. Between travel, holiday shopping, and family obligations, he'd managed to fit in a healthy 2.5 days of relaxation between exams and the first day of winter term - a term of infinite promises.

"They've removed the Halloween decorations...for Christmas ones. Didn't there used to be some holiday in between? And didn't it even have some serious, pseudo-patriotic, quasi-religious significance?"

What, pray Palin, was this? Faint whispers about 2012? Reports about where the Obamas were eating dinner last night? This was no way to keep Fenno looking as if he were attentively trying to keep his notes in tune with the professor's comments. Dammit, Fenno thought, this wasn't necessarily the Change I've Been Waiting For.

FENNO WAS TWELVE deep in the thirty-six person long café line when a lingering 3L sent him over the edge. "A triple soy, nonfat, double-shot latte," the be-sweatshirted senior ordered, nonchalantly. Not only did he have nowhere important to go that day, Fenno thought: as he witnessed the sangfroid specimen hand over an obscene tip, it was clear that the kid had his firm job in the bag, and class was no longer on his calendar.

Fenno's browser history was full of URLs ending in .co.uk, and he felt properly boned up on London's legal landscape. The firms he should be aiming for, he learned, were part of the so-called "Magic Circle," which sounded appropriately mysterious for the country that inspired the Lord of the Rings and harbored Stonehenge.

"Oh, fuck it. Fuck them. Not this week. It's not happening."

The air was crispening: autumn had arrived, and OCI was in full swing. These were the times, Fenno thought, that tried men's souls. He'd been in top form striding into class, smartly clad in his new suit and crest-covered cravat. This above all was the day he'd been waiting for: the interview with the firm of his dreams. Rising that morning, Fenno's mind had swirled with the imagined spoils of victory: the corner office high above Midtown, where groveling Wall Street clients would lay their last (but still vast) riches at his feet, begging in fealty for his carefully-crafted legal acumen, desperate to save their dwindling fortunes from the regulators' wrathful clutch.

"So is this, like, a newspaper or something?" the girl asked, picking up a frayed old copy of the Record. Fenno wasn't quite sure what he was supposed to do - sell her on the thing? He'd agreed to give his old Record friends a hand by manning their table at the activities fair - but only because he thought it'd involve more flirtation than finesse. Unfortunately, this one wanted some kind of pitch. Suddenly, Fenno was actually nostalgic for that case note on quantum meruit he'd been pretending to read for the last three hours.

Fenno glanced around in abject horror. It was true: the room was as devoid of LCD screens as 1972. The situation was unthinkable. How would he pass the time without his painstakingly bookmarked gossip blogs? How would he be able to answer any question at all without someone to IM him a clue? Indeed, how could he even survive without be able to scour News@Law for events with free food?

As he shut the phone on his former boss, Fenno had an epiphany. Maybe life wasn't about being smugly satisfied with one's righteous - yet strictly nine-to-five - work on behalf of the less fortunate. Maybe, life had more to do with that dreaded list of estates in property, the order of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, or even, god help him, Bluebooking.

Fenno gasped and exclaimed, "No, he didn't. Hamsters?!" He had, at some point during the previous year, realized it couldn't hurt to cultivate friendly relationships with some of the faculty's secretaries. In fact, it had been an excellent idea; not only had he managed to slip several of his late seminar response papers into already collated piles, the project had also led to the most enlightening gossip sessions over a cozy cup of coffee.

Fenno woke up to screaming. This, unfortunately, was not an infrequent occurrence. He really needed to move out of Gropius one of these days. And like so many of the times that he was forced to scrabble his way out of a sound sleep due to the howling of his dorm mates, the banging of the nearby construction, or his own dry cleaning vapor induced choking, Fenno realized he had bloodshot eyes, a splitting headache, and no idea what time of the day or night it might be.