Catcher Told Me I Was Rotten

>One:

"Stupid, overpaid, overeducated, inconsiderate, condescending... cunts!"

How Charlotte Weller's parents would have recoiled if they could have heard her then. After all, she was a good girl – she had always been a 'good' girl! A demure little picture of rural perfection. Even in that moment, all professionally wrapped up in a black pencil skirt and little floral blouse, you could still see the country in her; the blush of roses in her cheeks, the slight frizziness to her tawny hair that was impossible to tame, the tiniest cross over of those two front teeth, a betrayal of class. They probably took one look at her as soon as she'd stepped – well, shuffled, really – onto the polished marble floor of Cambridge's Trinity Hall and thought 'God, not another fucking bumpkin.'

The interview had been atrocious; Lottie doubted that she had ever been more ashamed of anything in her short life. She had spent months preparing for the Bentham internship, devoting hours and hours of her days to perfecting each and every sentence that she'd intricately carved from the dense stone of third level textbooks. She had an answer for every question, a counter question for all of her answers. She had her interview skills absolutely immaculate before she'd even received confirmation that she'd been accepted to Cambridge University. And everyone who knew anything about law at Cambridge was aware that this internship, awarded to a set of twelve law students over a period of four months in the summer, could be the absolute making or breaking of you – weeding out the weak from the wilful, the determined from the easily downtrodden. And Lottie, a perfect candidate on paper, had come down with a serious case of lead tongue and completely fucked her chances.

She sunk down onto the Grecian-inspired steps and pushed her head into her hands, drawing a deep breath that was almost akin to a sob. She felt so... humiliated after the job she'd done, the mess that she'd made out of it all. The determination that had been stubbornly coursing through her veins just days before had failed her in the end, and she'd been reduced to a stammering mess underneath the cold gazes of nine middle-aged men. Talk about a gender imbalance – although she couldn't help but feel that any woman would have been equally cruel in her cutting down of Lottie. She'd never really stood a chance. It had been almost like leading a lamb to slaughter, really.

"Lottie! Lottie, don't cry, you'll have me dreadfully upset." The door of the examination hall, where the interviews had been conducted, struck the old stone wall with a resounding bang as another young woman came flying out, breathless and scarlet-cheeked. The pitter-pat of snappy shoes, the kind with an eight-hundred-pound crimson sole, was audible to Lottie. Scent poured off the girl in waves, as though she had to prove that it would cost you even to smell her, but she was presently wearing a sympathetic, if somewhat lipsticky, expression. This negated the stench of luxury slightly. "Come on, it's not the end of the world, for God's sake."

She couldn't reply immediately; it took a moment for her to inhale, and relax all of the muscles in her throat that were poised to scream at her friend. That was easy for Louise to say; her name had been on the list of successful first round applicants that had been pinned to the door at five o'clock that afternoon. She didn't have to deal with the crushing disappointment of failure. And it wasn't fair; the whole... charisma and charm thing seemed to come effortlessly to a girl like Louise. Well, someone who liked to get it on with chaps in public stairwells shouldn't really be getting anywhere off a twenty minute interview, but a good friend was supposed to be happy for her --

Lottie cut herself off in her mind almost shamefully, and sat up a little straighter. "I'm not crying." Her high-necked blouse was starting to become the tiniest bit constrictive in the sticky September heat; that had been her first mistake. Everyone else, including Louse, had turned up looking dressed to impress in suits or tight black skirts and heels, crisp white shirts. How stupid Lottie thought she must have looked... "I'm not crying! Congratulations, Lou. You must be delighted. Really. Well done."