Amelie had been dreaming of being a barrister since she was four years old. When other children were cutting out paper stars and learning to color inside the lines, she was begging for toilet paper rolls to make the traditional wig. Her favorite color was black. For Amelie’s fifth birthday, she asked for a barrister’s robe. Her mother finally found one at Party City near Halloween and breathed a sigh of relief. She looked like a tiny crow with old man hair.

Amelie felt she conducted her barrister responsibilities best when she was in full assemblage, ready to preside. The meat mallet in her mother’s kitchen drawer became her gavel.

She grew up on Judge Judy and, really, on any injustice she saw. The postman not properly putting the flag down when he dropped off the mail. Her mother trying to escape jury duty, biasing the lawyers during jury selection by pretending she was an intolerant human. Mrs. Persimmon’s zinnias encroaching too far over the property line sent her into a teeny-tiny, judge-sized rage. Her mother once found her pounding the meat mallet against the dividing fence, screaming how Mrs. Persimmon was out of order; the offending zinnia clutched in her palm, its neck drooping with guilt. Poor Mrs. Persimmon was so upset she had to sit a spell.

Her favorite phrase became “objection,” and then quickly, “sustained.” She said it in the bathtub, hair slicked into two bubbled pigtails pointing to the ceiling, pouting because she had to take off the toilet paper roll wig. She said “objection” when her mother gave her toast with not quite enough jam on it. She objected to bedtimes, and to the family dog receiving a set-down for begging at dinner time. She objected so vigorously, in fact, she cracked the glass dining table.

By twelve years old, she was solving problems—hierarchies, little cliques. Anyone who had a grievance went directly to Amelie, knowing that she had been living on air and Law & Order. The swings seemed like the most reasonable place to hold court; after all, they did resemble the scales of justice. She packed her meat mallet every day to preside over the court of other nine- to thirteen-year-olds. She changed in her chambers, a dirty orange cubicle in the girls’ bathroom, arranging her face into a solemn, yet fair expression.

These disputes became quickly solved. Authority, it seems, is held with the ability to speak a dead language: Latin. She often quoted Martin Luther King but also excerpts of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn fence-painting scene. She slid a bit of Tolstoy in there as well and of course Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Everyone was confused and impressed, despite the amount of head-scratching that followed the rulings. Perhaps this is why Amelie began to think that she was the only one with the proper moral compass to navigate preteens.

At first it was small enough to mistake for disobedience. Words arrived blurred at the edges. Instructions came late or wrong, or not at all. She asked people to repeat themselves, and they laughed, so she stopped asking.

In the kitchen, she was told to put the butter back in the fridge. She heard put and fridge but not back, not now. She left it on the counter, a pale block softening into afternoon sun. Later, her mother scolded her for it and slid when she reached for a dish towel, arms pinwheeling for balance.

Vowels slipped. Consonants softened. The family dog learned quickly that her protests no longer earned treats. She still opened her mouth to object, but the timing was off, the rhythm broken, and the dog was already forgiven for begging before she could make a sentence.

The meat mallet stopped tapping the counter in neat, declarative knocks and began to strike harder than she meant it to, missing the mark entirely. A crack appeared in the drywall above the baseboard. Another followed. Without the sound of her own voice anchoring her, she couldn’t tell when a thing had gone too far. Right and wrong no longer arrived clearly. They happened elsewhere, while she stood in the kitchen holding a tool meant for order, staring at the damage.

She thought about what hearing loss meant. She wondered if the inside of her head heard, still. If she spoke Latin, would that be garbled too?

One evening, in a rage, she tore apart her barrister’s wig. She cried as she did it, with wet words and snot bubbling, unintelligible to the room. She found her mother’s sharpest shears, only meant to cut fabric, in the sewing basket. She clipped and clipped. She clipped so hard that she cut her finger. Without ears, she could no longer wear a barrister’s robe. She watched the blood drip onto her Judge Judy bedspread and swiped it to the floor.

About the Author