3

We can talk later about how courts and judges go all the way back to the Middle Ages, and how all the strange customs of the court—I mean, who wears robes in public, really?—started hundreds of years ago. For now, just know that when you ask a judge for something, you have to write it in very formal, old-timey language that’s even worse than those five-paragraph essays you have to write in school. Dad tried to explain it all to me, but I hate being told how to write. So he left me with a stack of old legal briefs and his laptop, and told me to figure it out myself. 

Comes now Atticus Tutwiler Peale, acting on her own behalf, and moves this Honorable Court to enter an Order . . .

See what I mean? It’s Yoda-speak. After a while you get the hang of it, though. When I showed it to Martinez, he begged me to add him, so then it was: 

Come now the Plaintiffs, Atticus Tutwiler Peale and Cinque Martinez Peale, acting on their own behalf . . .

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. Why does Atty have a boy’s name? Well, long before I was born, Dad decided he wanted to name his first child after Atticus Finch, a lawyer in a famous book by some woman from Monroeville. His first child wasn’t a boy. But Mom and Dad went with Atticus anyway. 

And yes, Tutwiler is the name of a prison. It’s also the name of Julia Tutwiler, a woman who tried to fix Alabama’s prisons back in the 1800s. She also taught slaves to read, set up a college, and wrote Alabama’s official state song. (Trust me, you’ve never heard it.)

I guess they could have named me Attica, the girl version of Atticus, but there’s a prison with that name, too. Naming his daughter after two prisons was too weird even for Dad. 

Hey, it could have been worse. Mom wanted to name me Podkayne. It’s a long story. 

. . . to enter an Order enjoining the Strudwick County Animal Shelter to postpone the destruction of the dog known as ‘Easy,’ currently in their custody. 

“Enjoin” was a word I learned that day, and it’s pretty useful. When a judge enjoins somebody, that basically means she orders them not to do something.

And that’s how you start a legal brief. Then you list all the facts of the case, as you see them, in a numbered list, like this:

1) Easy is the name of a dog being held at the Strudwick County Animal Shelter.

2) Easy wears a tag that shows he has been immunized for rabies. 

3) On June 29, a man showed up at the shelter claiming to be Easy’s owner, and also claiming to have been bitten by the dog Easy.

And so on until you’ve told the whole story. Then you get into your argument. Again, you make your points in numbered paragraphs. And you have to quote big sections of the law and show where they appear in the law books. 

20) According to Code of Alabama 3-7A-9, when a dog is accused of biting a human, ‘if the owner of a dog, cat or ferret agrees in writing, or if ordered by the health officer, the animal shall be humanely destroyed immediately after exposure.’ The man who claimed to own Easy did not agree in writing, nor would he even give his name when asked. 

By the time I finished, I’d written fifteen pages of that stuff. It was dark outside. My fingers hurt from typing. And the strange thing was, it was so much easier than writing some dumb school paper on James K. Polk or the causes of the Civil War. I was writing something that mattered. Mimicking all that Yoda-talk is a small price to pay for saving a fuzzy, happy dog like Easy. 

When I came out of my room Taleesa was in the kitchen, just closing her laptop. 

“I’m hungry,” I said. 

“Me too,” Taleesa said. “And no wonder. We’ve been working all day.”

Working. I liked the sound of that. 

When I’m not working, I play with dollhouses.

Not dolls. I hate dolls. It’s the eyes, I think. Most dolls kind of stare into space like pretty little zombies. I know it’s stupid, but I get the feeling that if I brought these little zombies into my bedroom, they’d stab me with little knives in the middle of the night. Give me a doll for Christmas and I’ll blow it up at New Year’s. That way I can honestly tell you I enjoyed my present. 

Dollhouses are different. Little plastic doors, each of them just like a real door on a real house, with a real shiny silver knob. A tiny perfect dining room table with perfect chairs. A kitchen where there’s always a sticker of a perfect Thanksgiving turkey in the oven. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like dollhouses, really, even though some folks won’t admit it. 

I have a whole neighborhood of them. Well, actually, Nutter McNutters does. He’s a squirrel, a little toy squirrel I’ve had since I was about three years old. He used to be covered in bristly fuzz, most of which has rubbed off, but he still wears a little green vest and black tie that show he’s successful in the squirrel world. He spends his time lounging around in his seven houses of various sizes, enjoying a life of luxury. He doesn’t have adventures often, and I guess his life is kind of dull, if owning seven cars and spending a lot of time in the hot tub is dull. 

McNutters was just settling into the jacuzzi with a martini that Saturday morning when Dad creaked the door open.

“It’s time to revise,” he said. 

“I’m having a martini,” I said in the voice of McNutters, which is high-pitched and stuffy.

“If you’re going to take this brief to a judge, you need to read it again and correct your errors,” he said. “That’s always part of writing.”

I sighed. “I’m having a martini.”

“It’s your case,” he said. “If you want to win, you revise. Or you can leave it as it is and risk losing.”

So of course I left McNutters with his martini and opened the laptop again. And was shocked at what I read:

Comes now Aticus tutwiler Peale and Cinque Martinez Peale, acting their own behalf, and asking this court . . .

I screamed and Taleesa flung the door open. I thrust the laptop at her. 

“Taleesa, somebody got into my computer and put in a bunch of typos! It looks awful. Who would do that?”

Taleesa laughed. “It’s the gremlins. It happens to me, too. Every time I write something, and then let it sit for a while, when I come back to read it the gremlins have messed it up.”

I sighed. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice all those errors yesterday. How can I misspell my own name?”

Taleesa bent down and looked at the screen. “A-T-I-C-U-S. That’s how. And there’s only one cure for the gremlins. Sit down and read it three times, twice from front to back and once from back to front. And fix every error you see.”

And that’s how I spent a second day at the computer. Reading, fixing, rereading, looking stuff up in those musty old law books. By the time I was done, I felt like I knew Code of Alabama Title 3, Chapters 2 and 7, by heart. And I was sick to death of them. And I was hungry. 

“I’m an idiot,” I said at the dinner table. “The only thing I’ve proved is that a kid can’t write a legal brief. I’ve spent my whole weekend at this, and I feel like I know less about law than when I started. It’s hopeless.”

Martinez gasped. “Don’t say that. If you don’t go to court, Easy will die. You’re the opposite of hopeless. You’re the only hope.”

I tell you, sometimes I can’t stand my brother. He’s snide and selfish and immature. But when he said this, looking at me with big honest eyes I hadn’t seen on him since kindergarten, I felt like I was about to burst with—I don’t know, some sort of bursting emotion.

“This brief is actually pretty good,” Dad said, flipping over pages on the table next to his plate. “You’ve got a chance.”

That just made the bursting emotion bigger. Pride, I think it was.

“You should go to bed early tonight,” Dad said. “You’ll need your rest if you’re going before the judge on Monday.”

All through the writing, I’d never thought much about where this would end up—with me, in the courtroom, explaining my case to some grumpy old judge. It would be like going to the principal’s office. 

All of a sudden, my pride turned to fear.