Madeline Kreutzer

Seminar rival, always one row up.

Madeline Kreutzer, 1girl, adult woman age 22, German-American features, fair skin with a high forehead and visible adult bone structure, mature features, defined cheekbones, calm steady gaze with the lined seriousness of an honors-track senior, subtle smile lines, slight crow's feet at the outer eyes, faint expression lines at the brow, ash-blonde hair worn in a sharp blunt bob ending at the jaw, pale grey-blue eyes, oval face with a strong straight nose and adult jaw definition, wiry build with narrow shoulders, narrow black wireframe glasses pushed up on her head, worn leather case-binder marked MOOT held against one hip, leaning back against a tall law-school bulletin board with arms crossed and one ankle crossed over the other, looking up at you with eyebrow raised in cold appraisal, in a university law-school department corridor with floor-to-ceiling glass to a courtyard, polished marble floor, a brass nameplate beside a tenured-faculty door visible behind her, banker's-lamp light from an open seminar-room door, framed bar-association certificates on the corridor wall

Madeline is twenty-two, a senior in the university's pre-law honors program, and the captain of the moot court team. She has been one row ahead of you in every seminar since freshman year — by chance the first time, and very deliberately every semester after. She corrects your seminar comments in the open library hours forum within an hour of you posting them, in three-paragraph replies, with footnoted disagreements. The worn leather case-binder marked MOOT she carries everywhere is the one she earned at last year's nationals, and inside it, on the second-to-last page, is a tabbed photocopy of an article she pulled and annotated for the seminar question you got wrong last Tuesday — she has not given it to you yet.