Chapter 5: Petition

The phone felt like a live wire in my hand. My mother had printed a list from a legal aid website: Organizations Providing Pro Bono Civil Liberties Representation. The words were small mercies. Pro bono. For the public good. Was I the public good? Or just a public nuisance? I guess that’s what we were about to find out.

My first call was to the state branch of the ACLU. My voice, when I delivered the spiel my mother and I had rehearsed, sounded like it belonged to a stranger. “Hello, my name is Amara Delane. I’m a sixteen-year-old student at Mesa Mirage High. I was publicly assaulted at school, and the administration has suspended me for refusing to wear clothing in the aftermath. I believe my rights are being violated. I’d like to speak to someone about possible representation.”

The woman on the other end was politely detached. “I’m sorry to hear that, miss. We have an intake form on our website. The review process can take six to eight weeks.”

Six to eight weeks. I’d be expired by then. A meme with a timestamp. “Thank you,” I said, my hope deflating like a punctured lung.

The next two calls were variations on the same theme: voicemails, online forms, and impossible wait times. The machinery of justice, it turned out, was rusted and slow. My rebellion was happening in real-time, a raw nerve exposed to the air; the law moved in geological epochs, grinding and patient.

I put the phone down, the hard coal of purpose in my chest threatening to cool into ash. “It’s no use,” I said to my mother, who watched from the kitchen doorway. “They don’t care. Or they’re too busy.”

“They care about cases they can win,” she said, not unkindly. “Cases that set a clean precedent. Your case is ... messy. It’s not a pure free-speech protest. It’s tangled with trauma, with adolescent spectacle. It’s a professional risk.”

“So I’m not a good enough victim for the victim advocates?” Bitterness coated my tongue like residue from a bad pill.

“You’re a complicated case,” she corrected, her voice low. “The law likes simple facts. Black and white. You, my girl, are a world of gray.”

I rested my forehead on the cool table. The research, the walking, the defiant stance, it all felt suddenly childish. A tantrum against an immovable object.

Then, my mother’s phone rang. She looked at the number, frowned, and answered. “Hello?” A pause. Her eyes flicked to me. “Yes, this is her.” Another, longer pause. Her posture changed, straightening from its weary slump into something alert, almost fierce. “I see. Yes, she’s here. May I ask who referred you?”

She listened, her face a mask of concentrated calm. “Tomorrow at ten. Yes. We’ll be there.” She hung up.

“Who was that?”

“A lawyer,” she said, a strange, reluctant light in her eyes. “Janelle Reed. She has a small private practice in civil rights, mostly employment discrimination. She heard about you.”

“How? From where?”

“From a friend of a friend who teaches at the community college. The video, the suspension ... It’s a small town, Amara, even when it feels like a sprawling hellscape. Rumors become stories. Stories become cases. She said she’s interested. She wants to meet.”

Hope, a dangerous and fragile bird, took wing in my chest. “A real lawyer?”

“A real lawyer who wants to meet a naked teenager in her office,” my mother said, managing a thin, wry smile. “Which means she’s either brilliant, desperate, or a little bit of both. We’ll find out tomorrow.”

Janelle Reed’s office was in a modest, slightly shabby professional building downtown, wedged between a tax preparer and a travel agency. The carpet was beige and worn thin in paths to the doors. The air smelled of old coffee and the hot, dusty scent of an overworked photocopier. It was the antithesis of the sleek, donor-funded fortress of Mesa Mirage High. It felt real. Unglamorous. Grounded.

My mother had negotiated a compromise for the meeting: a long, open-backed sundress. “For the sake of the other tenants in the elevator,” she’d said, her tone leaving no room for debate. “You want to talk about the law, not give them an easy excuse to dismiss you as unstable before you open your mouth.” It was a strategy, not a surrender, but the soft cotton felt like a betrayal, a whisper against my skin that said, For now, hide. I’d relented, the fabric a strange, suffocating sheath.

Janelle Reed was not what I expected. In her late forties, she possessed a wild crown of dark curls streaked with silver, and she wore a vibrant, geometric-patterned tunic over black leggings. No power suit. Her eyes were her most striking feature, sharp, intelligent, and holding a disarming warmth that immediately put me on guard. Warmth, I had learned, was often a prelude to a trap.