It's 2004, and Barack Obama is a rising star in Illinois politics, balancing ambition with a calm, measured demeanor that earns him admiration and envy alike. Enter Kamala Harris, a sharp witted, yet terrifying prosecutor from California, visiting C...
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January 22nd, 1998.
The first time Barack met Kamala, she was wearing glasses.
Not the sleek, stylish kind she wore now, the ones that rested on the bridge of her nose like they belonged there. No—these were different. Big, round frames that threatened to slip down every time she looked up from whatever oversized case file she was buried in. She kept pushing them up with the back of her hand, distracted, like she didn't even realize she was doing it.
And she was always reading.
That's what he remembered first.
He hadn't known her name yet, hadn't known what she was studying, where she was from, or that she'd end up being the most infuriating—and later, unforgettable—person he'd ever met. But he knew that she was a nerd.
And he knew this too; Barack had always believed in the power of first impressions.
The kind that hit you out of nowhere—the ones that made you pause in the middle of your day, in the middle of something mundane, and just look.
Kamala wasn't supposed to be one of those moments. She was just another law student, hunched over in the corner of the library like every other student, buried in textbooks. The place was dark—dim light filtering through the windows, making the space feel more like a cave than a place of higher learning. And yet, there she was, utterly unbothered by the space or by the hour.
It was late—way past ten o'clock—and most of the students in the law library had long since packed up, gone home, or found a coffee shop to nurse their exhaustion. But Kamala? She was still there. The only sounds in the room were the soft, muffled rustling of pages and the occasional scratch of a pen as she worked—completely absorbed.
Barack had been there for his usual late-night study session, grabbing a book on constitutional law. He was worn out but stubborn; sleep was for the weak in his world. He was walking down the aisle of bookshelves when his eyes caught her.
She was sitting at one of the long wooden tables near the window, hunched over a stack of legal texts. The books were so large that it looked like they could crush her if they fell. Her short brown hair, pulled into a messy ponytail that seemed like it had been there for hours, fell in a tangle around her shoulders, strands escaping like the wild thing it was. She had a habit of pushing her glasses up every few minutes, though they were too big for her face and kept sliding down. They were round, heavy—old-school glasses, the kind that screamed "I'm not here to impress you."
Her glasses, always slipping, were the least of it. What stood out more were her hands—always in motion, either scribbling frantically in the margins of her notebook or flipping through the textbooks as if she could outpace them. She was the picture of chaos: organized on the outside, but the storm was in her eyes—the way she processed everything like the world was a problem to solve.
