Note: This serial is fictional.
“You will all fail on January 26.” The words had appeared mysteriously on the white board beside Fenno’s room in Ames dormitory. When Fenno saw it this morning, still groggy from sleep, that terrible knot that had occupied his stomach since the end of finals stirred and tightened. Just as he was about to erase the awful prophecy, Raj walked by, read it aloud, and shrugged. “I think that message is for you, Raj,” Fenno said, jokingly, but a horrible voice in his head whispered in reply, “No, it’s for you, Fenno.”
He tried to brush the thought away, but it stayed with him all day, through the drone of another day of Problem Solving Workshop and through the sloppy group meeting following it. That night, at Cambridge Common, he sat with his section mates and played a game they had been playing every night since finals had ended: Who’s Getting an LP?
“Jessica.” He heard himself say, “She was late to like every class. She never knows what the fuck she’s talking about. And she wasn’t in a study group.”
His friends debated his claim, like they did every night. But even though Fenno thought he had downed enough beer to dull the voice, he heard it again, louder than before. “Fenno. He had a panic attack when he saw the last fact finder in Torts. He was six hundred words under the word limit. And he went to a state school.”
“Fenno” is a fictional serial written by an anonymous law student. The main character is always named Fenno and is always a 1L, but his or her character changes every school year. This installation is part of the series for the 2011 to 2012 School Year entitled “The Uncertain Fenno, 2011 to 2012.”