Chapter 18: The Perfect Son

Arjun Patel’s hands trembled as he stared at the Contracts exam bluebook. Question 3: Analyze the enforceability of the following agreement under the doctrine of consideration.

The words blurred together. Harvard Law Library hummed with fluorescent efficiency around him, but underneath that artificial buzz, something else was singing. Something that made his chest tight and his carefully memorized case law scatter like leaves.

Hadley v. Baxendale. The landmark case for consequential damages. He’d drilled it a hundred times, could recite it backwards. Now the facts felt meaningless, just more information crammed into a brain that suddenly felt too small.

His phone lit up with a text from his father: How did Contracts go? Remember, top 10% for BigLaw summer associate positions.

Arjun hadn’t even finished the exam yet. Twenty-four years old and he’d never missed a deadline, never scored below an A-, never disappointed anyone. The perfect son, the family success story, the one who proved their immigrant dreams were worth the sacrifice.

The humming grew stronger. Around him, other students bent over their exams with grim determination, but Arjun could see the cracks forming. The girl two seats over had been crying silently for ten minutes. The guy behind him kept muttering “this is bullshit” under his breath.

Arjun beta, you make us so proud. His mother’s voice echoed in his head, the same words she’d said at his Harvard acceptance, his graduation from Brown, every achievement ceremony since kindergarten.

When had pride stopped feeling good?

He forced himself to write something, anything. The doctrine of consideration requires that each party to a contract receive something of legal value… The pen felt foreign in his hand. His usually pristine handwriting looked shaky, desperate.

The professor called time. Arjun had filled maybe half the bluebook, his worst exam performance ever. Students filed out with the usual post-exam anxiety, but several looked relieved, almost giddy. Like they’d escaped something.

His phone buzzed again. A group text from his study group: Contracts destroyed me but honestly? I feel amazing. Anyone else feel like they just woke up from a weird dream?

Weird dream. Yes. The dream where success mattered more than sleep, where achievements filled the hollow space where a personality should be, where every choice was made by committee—parents, professors, career services, the invisible jury of expectation always watching.

Arjun walked across Harvard Yard in a daze. The humming followed him, grew stronger near the old buildings with their accumulated weight of ambition and anxiety. Other students moved differently now, some panicked and frantic, others loose-limbed and laughing.

He found himself at the law school’s mental health center, though he couldn’t remember deciding to go there. The waiting room was packed—more students in crisis than he’d ever seen.

“First time?” asked a girl with purple hair and tired eyes. She looked familiar—maybe from Torts last semester.

“Yeah.” His voice sounded strange. “You?”

“Third time this week.” She laughed, but not meanly. “I keep coming here trying to figure out what’s wrong with me, but I’m starting to think the problem isn’t me.”

Arjun looked around the room—future lawyers, doctors, consultants, all the “successful” tracks his parents’ generation had sacrificed everything to access. All looking like refugees from their own ambitions.

“What if we’ve been optimizing for the wrong things?” the purple-haired girl continued. “Like, what if getting into Harvard Law was actually the worst thing that could happen to us?”

The thought should have horrified him. Instead, it felt like relief.

His phone rang. Dad.

“Arjun! How was the exam? I was just telling Mrs. Sharma about your law review possibilities—”

“Dad.” The word came out sharper than intended. “I think I failed.”

Silence. Then: “What do you mean failed? You don’t fail, beta. You’re the smart one.”

The smart one. The successful one. The one who justified every sacrifice, every sixty-hour work week his father pulled, every social event his mother missed to save money for his education.

“I couldn’t concentrate. There’s this… sound. And nothing feels real anymore.”

“Sound? Arjun, are you having some kind of breakdown? Do you need me to call the health center?”

“No, I—” He looked around the packed waiting room, at all the other “smart ones” having breakdowns. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Listen to me.” His father’s voice took on the tone he used with difficult patients. “You’re just stressed. This happens to everyone during finals. Take some deep breaths, get some sleep, and retake the exam if you need to. Your mother and I didn’t come to this country so you could give up at the first obstacle.”

Give up. The phrase hit like a physical blow. How many times had he heard it? At track practice when his lungs burned. During SAT prep when his eyes crossed from exhaustion. Through every moment when his body or spirit tried to tell him enough.

“What if I don’t want to be a lawyer?” The words escaped before he could stop them.

Another silence, longer this time. “What did you just say?”

“I said what if I don’t want to be a lawyer. What if I never wanted to be a lawyer. What if I just wanted you to be proud of me and this was the only way I knew how.”

“Arjun, you’re talking nonsense. Of course you want to be a lawyer. You’re brilliant at it. You’re going to make partner at a top firm, make real money, have real security—”

“Whose security?” The question came from someplace deep, someplace that had been quiet for so long he’d forgotten it existed. “Yours or mine?”

The line went dead.

Arjun stared at his phone, at the contact labeled “Dad” with the little heart emoji his mother had added. Twenty-four years of being the perfect son, the living proof that the American dream worked, the justification for every sacrifice his family had made.

And he was about to destroy it all.

The humming pulsed through his chest, through the ancient buildings around him, through the perfectly manicured expectations that had shaped his entire life. For the first time in years, he felt like he could breathe.

The purple-haired girl touched his shoulder. “You okay?”

“No,” he said, and smiled. “I think that’s the point.”