“Hi,” Jennifer said warmly, her large brown eyes seeming to betray a certain anxiety below her chunky blond bangs.

“Hey!” Roxanne said with a wave. “I’m so nervous for some reason!” She laughed as she brushed her auburn hair away from her eyes. She was petite and adorable—like the redheaded Cabbage Patch Kids doll that sat on my bed when I was a child.

“Me too!” My shoulders dropped, grateful for her admission. Two men in suits sporting Klasko name tags approached us, laughing with one another, and warm embraces between the other five ensued while I stood off to the side, watching the poised young professionals as they caught up with one another.

“Hey! I’m Kevin,” one of the guys said, turning to me as he extended his hand. I forced myself to maintain eye contact despite his prickly gelled hair. Do men really still spike their hair?

“Alex.” I smiled, but felt envious of the summer they had spent getting to know one another, and getting to know how things worked at Klasko, all the while earning six times what I had at my nonprofit internship.

Even though twelve years had passed since seventh grade, and I now had a healthy social life, a law degree, and reasonably toned arms, I felt the same way I had when I was forced to eat turkey sandwiches on a toilet seat every lunch hour for a week in seventh grade when Sandy Cranswell, our class’s queen bee, had decided she detested me because I had “man shoulders” from all of my swimming, so no one would sit with me in the cafeteria. It hadn’t lasted long, since Zach Schaeffer befriended me on the coed bus to state finals, and his eighth-grade posse had quickly followed suit, putting me back into Sandy’s good graces, but I still remembered the sting.

The six of us crowded into the elevator with a few others, and while the rest of them chatted excitedly, I stood in the back and allowed my eyes to close for a moment, desperately willing the bead of sweat dripping down my spine to evaporate before it bled through my blouse.

As soon as our elevator emptied onto the forty-fifth floor, we saw wide-planked oak floors supporting a modern marble reception desk surrounded by rich brown leather couches and armchairs. I remembered the space only vaguely from my callback interview almost a year before. But I had been too nervous that day to appreciate how beautiful the office space was. Two women and one man, all seemingly in their twenties, sat behind the desk, wearing headsets. They plastered smiles on their faces when they saw us, without pausing their choruses of “How may I direct your call?” and “One moment please.” A sign reading “First-Year Associate Orientation” directed us down a hallway lined with glass-walled conference rooms.

The doors to our meeting room had been propped open to welcome us, and the curtains had been pulled back to expose the south-facing view, which seemed to span all of Manhattan below Fifty-Fifth Street. The MetLife Building, front and center, relished the spotlight; the Freedom Tower stood reflective and resolute in the distance; the Empire State Building seemed to rush with impossible confidence skyward, as if challenging the Chrysler Building to a battle of wills; and off to the left, the Brooklyn Bridge yawned sleepily out over the silver waters of the East River.

A woman in a gray pantsuit stood at the podium, watching us with a small smirk as we took it all in. “Pretty impressive, right?” she announced into the microphone. Some of my fellow first-years took their seats, some chatting, and I realized that none of the others were marveling at the view. They must have become accustomed to it while they interned as summer associ ates. I relaxed slightly, though, as I noted with relief that several of my fifty-two new colleagues were wearing skirts with blouses, too. I surreptitiously slipped away from Carmen, Roxanne, and Jennifer so I wouldn’t stick out as underdressed and took a seat between Kevin and an African American man wearing a navy suit with a red bow tie speckled with little yellow flowers.

The guy in the bow tie leaned over me and pointed to Kevin’s tie, an orange number with little puppies tied in a double Windsor that made his neck appear even skinnier than it actually was. “Ferragamo?”

“I . . . um . . .” Kevin flipped over his tie and looked down at the label. “Yup! I guess I’m wearing the uniform!” He laughed and extended his hand. “I’m Kevin.”

The other man shook it with a wink. “I dig your spikes, man.” I cringed, though he didn’t appear to be making fun of Kevin at all. “I’m Derrick. I summered last year out of the LA office, so I’m the new guy,” Bow Tie explained, leaning back and putting his hand to his heart before extending it to me. He was handsome, with sharp cheekbones and a square jaw, but he also had style, and a broad smile that released the knot that had been forming between my shoulder blades.

“Alex,” I said, taking his hand. “I spent last summer at Sanctuary for Families.” He gave me a short nod, acknowledging our common ground as newcomers.

“Good morning, everybody.” The woman in the gray pantsuit at the front of the room spoke into the microphone, and we all quieted down obediently. “I’m Eileen Kasten. I’m a litigation partner and head of your first-year training program. For your first eight months at the firm, you will have a training each Monday morning on general firm practices. We hope you spend these first months learning as much as you can about as many different practice areas as you can so that you can make an educated decision about what you’d like to work on for the rest of your career. In eight months, you will match into a practice group which will be responsible for training you on the specifics of their practice. You rank them. They rank you. You match. Everybody, all fifty-two of you, ends up happy.”

Derrick snorted and rolled his eyes. “At least half of us will be disappointed,” he whispered to me. “There’s not enough space for everybody in the best practice groups.” I hadn’t realized that any of the practice groups were considered better than others, only that M&A was considered more intense.

She went on. “For today, I want you to take note of one another. Look to your right.” I looked at the shiny, gelled back of Kevin’s head. “That person was in the top fifteen percent of one of the top fifteen law schools in the country. Look to your left.” I turned to see Derrick, his eyes crossed and his tongue stuck out just inches from my nose, and covered my mouth to keep from laughing out loud. “That person was in the top ten percent of one of the top ten law schools in the country.” She gave a dramatic pause. “How do I know that to be true?”

“We’re all in the top ten percent of the top ten law schools,” Derrick shouted up toward the podium.

“What’s your name?” the woman asked.

“Derrick Stockton,” he said with a confidence I envied.

“That’s exactly right, Derrick Stockton. This is not meant to intimidate any of you. Quite the contrary, it’s meant to put you at ease. You belong here. But it is also a warning that you will not be differentiating yourself here on intelligence alone. Not easily, at least.”

I swallowed hard and picked at my cuticle.

“What a load of horseshit. So cliché,” Derrick muttered under his breath. He took a mint out of his pocket and popped it in his mouth. “Want one?”

“Oh god.” I cupped my hand over my lips. “Do I need one?” Derrick stared at me for a moment and then narrowed his eyes playfully.

“You’re a little nuts, huh? I like it,” he whispered. “Your breath is fine. I was just being polite.”

“I’m nervous,” I admitted, taking the mint.

“Who’s not?” He grinned, instantaneously calming me.

“. . . we will be looking for you to demonstrate work ethic. Drive.” The woman at the podium moved her head mechanically from one side of the room to the other. “Tenacity. We’re looking for you to be sponges. You’re here because you’re the best the American law school system has to offer us. The same holds true, by the way, for the local law school systems in the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, and Australia that have educated your international colleagues. By the way, you’ll have the opportunity to meet all of your fellow first-years at First-Year Academy in LA in early February. As you might know, we’re not only the largest, but we’re arguably the best law firm in the world. We are twenty-five hundred lawyers strong in thirty-seven offices across the globe. Our litigation chair was the former director of enforcement of the SEC. We took Facebook public. We are the firm that defended affirmative action for the University of Michigan. We . . .”