Testing Kate Read Online Free PDF

sleeping right under the dance floor,” Nick said. “Or, I should say, I wasn’t sleeping. I went up and knocked on his back door.”
    “What did he say?”
    “He didn’t. He didn’t even answer the door. He just turned off all of his lights and got really quiet.”
    “What a freak.”
    “No kidding. And I think he has about a dozen cats in there too.”
    “Great,” I said gloomily. “A sadistic Criminal Law professor and a next-door neighbor who’s a tap-dancing cat freak. It should make for an interesting year.”

Chapter Three
    I t was early in the semester, but there was already a distinct competition brewing between my classmates over who was studying the most. It wasn’t enough to simply read the class assignment; we highlighted important passages in our casebooks, outlined the key holdings, and supplemented the class reading with Nutshells, which were like Cliffs Notes for law school. There were law students lined up at the doors every morning when the library opened at eight a.m., and the staffers always had to shoo us out at closing time, at which point we’d stagger out, bleary-eyed and hyped up on coffee. As we scattered into the night, weighed down by knapsacks full of textbooks, my classmates bragged incessantly about how many hours they’d just put in.
    And even though I knew it was mostly bullshit and bravado and just part of the bizarre law-school culture, I couldn’t help but feel the flutterings of panic. What if people really were studying as much as they claimed? Was it even possible? When did they eat?
    The one saving grace was that my fellow One-Ls had finally—
finally
—stopped pointing and whispering when they saw me. The story of my humiliation in Hoffman’s class was losing its legs as people turned their attention to their studies.
    One night, about a week after classes began, I was in the main reading room at the library, trying to plow through a Civil Procedure case. It was a large room, with approximately thirty long tables and a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows on one side that looked out over the Tulane campus, now dark and studded with lights gleaming out from dorm-room windows and lampposts. Every sound echoed off the high ceiling and wood-paneled walls. A few days earlier, I’d witnessed a tightly wound One-L woman, whom I vaguely recognized from class, shriek at a guy humming softly along to the music on his iPod. Talking was strictly forbidden in the reading room, theoretically punishable by death.
    I’d been up late the night before, studying, and the night before that, and I was exhausted. It was like the weariness was clinging to me, pulling me down. The words on the page I was trying to read began to blur, and my head felt unbearably heavy. Maybe if I just rest my eyes for a minute, I thought. Just one minute…
    The next thing I knew, someone was jostling my shoulder.
    “Five more minutes,” I mumbled, swatting at the hand.
    The peaceful darkness of sleep was too seductive to resist, and I could feel myself slipping back under when the hand on my shoulder gave me another violent shake, causing my forehead to bump uncomfortably against the table.
    My eyes snapped open, and I became aware of several things at once: the bright, buzzing lights. The inky smell of new books. Whispers. Muffled laughter.
    Shit, I thought, sitting up suddenly. I looked around wildly. Jen was standing there—she’d been the one shaking my shoulder—grinning down at me. And she wasn’t the only one…. As I glanced around, I realized that nearly every person in the reading room was staring at me. Some were laughing; others looked annoyed. I blinked in confusion.
    And then a thought occurred to me, one that caused my face to flame with embarrassment.
    “Please tell me I wasn’t snoring,” I whispered to Jen.
    She reached out and peeled a square yellow Post-it note off my cheek, a gesture that increased the hilarity among my rapt audience.
    “I could tell you that. But I’d be