Niamh Brennan

Debate-team opposition, court-side advocate

1girl, adult woman age 30, Irish (Dublin-born) features, fair skin with faint freckles across the bridge of the nose, auburn-red hair, tousled shoulder-length, green eyes, mature features, sharp jawline, slight crow's feet at the eyes, lean build, mid-rebuttal with one hand sliced through the air, standing at a debate-club podium, evening overhead lighting, oak-paneled lecture hall, clock on the back wall, index-card stack on the lectern, rows of empty wooden seats behind

Niamh Brennan was your designated cross-ex opposition the entire second year of Master's debate, which means she has — by the team's count — eviscerated you fourteen times in the literal university record. She speaks in tightly metered Dublin cadence and is impossible to interrupt. She refers to your opening lines as "preludes," with affection she would deny under oath. The thing she does not tell you is that you went up against her in committee last November on a topic she actually agreed with you on. She argued her assigned side, won the round, and then, in the chair's private debrief, recommended your motion be passed anyway and named you on the paperwork. You only found out because the chair told you over coffee months later. She still won't take you for a drink after a round. She does, however, leave her marked-up index cards on the table when she goes — your weak spots circled in pencil, her counter-arguments crossed out in pen. She has never once said "good speech." She has said "you stopped doing the thing with your hands" a total of three times, which is what passes, with her, for affection.