The Four Ms. Bradwells Read Online Free PDF

Ms. Cicero-Bradwell here promises never to marry? Okay or no?”
    “Indubitably okay,” Ginger said in a tone that left everyone chuckling and me green as the spring grass on the Quad in envy at her ease in front of the class. “Okay with me, anyway. Although not with this Court.”
    “And what if Ms. Porter wants to be a soldier rather than a lawyer? Sergeant Porter-Bradwell.”
    “There’s no more excuse to prevent her becoming a soldier than a lawyer,” Ginger insisted. “Although the Bradwell Court would disagree. And the current Court, too.”
    Jarrett mock-frowned. “Those guns can be mighty heavy.”
    Ginger’s topcoat of cool gave way to something more like an eight-year-old with a bright new bicycle, the sexy mouth disappearing into an overwide grin. “Any gun you choose, and you can have five shots to my one. There’s a shooting range out West 94.”
    Professor Jarrett’s professorial mock-stern softened ever so briefly; he’d just warmed to Ginger as surely as I had. Funny how lovable we become at the first crack in our perfection-seeking façades.
    “Let’s say Sergeant Porter-Bradwell’s choice of weapon leans more toward hand grenades. She looks awfully innocent, I see that.” He nodded to Mia. “But she just has an irresistible urge to hear those little things explode. So she turns to terrorism. She comes to Room 100 here for a secret rendezvous with”—another glance at his chart—“the Drug Lord of Section Four, Ms. Els-bee-et-a Zoo … Zoo-cow-sky? Am I pronouncing that one right?”
    Betts, who is the most improbable of drug lords—she’s no bigger than a minute, with chipmunk cheeks and eight million freckles—popped up from her seat as if spring-released. “Elsbieta Zhu-kov -ski,” she said.
    “Ms. Zoo- kof -ski.”
    “Close enough. I’ll respond to that,” she said, and we all laughed.
    He returned to Mia. “So Ms. Terrorist-Bradwell, here you are buying your cocaine—that’s the drug of choice in the law school these days, right?—from Ms. Zoo … from Ms. Drug-Lord-Bradwell, we’ll call her. You’re planning to resell it to raise funds for more terrorist grenades, but you’re caught red-handed. Would the Bradwell Court here allow the state to treat you differently than a man?”
    Mia cleared her throat. “I guess … Yes! The Bradwell Court, yes. They would say it was okay to treat me differently because I’m a woman.”
    Professor Jarrett tsk-tsked for a minute, the way he would do repeatedlyall year. “They’d probably spare you the Iron Maiden and even the rack, I suppose.”
    The bell rang then, and he called out, “Let’s all thank the four Ms. Bradwells for illustrating ‘the natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex’ the Court talks about here!” Causing the class to laugh yet again, and then to clap.
    He called out over the rumble of gathering books that there would be a handout at the distribution center after noon, and we should read pages eight through thirty-three from the casebook, too. And we all shuffled out of that first class: Ms. Ginger Decisis-Bradwell with her unchanging opinions; Sergeant Mia Terrorist-Bradwell, whom Professor Jarrett brought in whenever he introduced violence to a hypothetical; Ms. Betts Drug-Lord-Bradwell, the improbable Drug Lord of Section Four; and me, Ms. Laney Cicero-Bradwell, tapped for every Latin translation the rest of the class whiffed on all year. The names would stick, too. They’d be the way Ginger worked us into her first law school poems at the end of that summer, silly little things that made all of Section Four laugh. It was the way we appeared on “Aristocracy Bingo” at the end of the year. That first morning, though, as Dartmouth took off before Mia could say how do you do, Ginger parked herself at the door and collected us like a kindergarten teacher herding hopscotchers off the blacktop. I see now she was setting out to make us her friends as surely as