“I did something stupid, you guys,” Melanie Joan said finally. “Really, really stupid.”
Three
Melanie Joan was correct. She had done something really, really stupid. After reading Book Babe’s scathing review the previous night, she’d downed a few glasses of wine to numb the hurt. Then she’d tossed back a few more. Then she’d hit the tequila bottle. All told, Melanie Joan—a rather petite woman—had consumed enough alcohol to make Jorgen flunk a Breathalyzer test.
But that wasn’t the stupid part.
Once she’d fortified herself with all that booze, Melanie Joan had returned to her computer. She’d given Book Babe’s review one more perusal. And at that very low point, she’d posted a comment.
“What was the comment?” Spike said.
“Get fucked, you worthless piece of shit.”
Spike’s eyes widened. “Pardon?”
“That was it,” she said. “That was the comment.”
“Oh,” Spike said.
“I also told Book Babe to do the world a favor and drink bleach,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
“And eat a bag of dicks.”
“Oh,” Spike said.
“Anything else you suggested they ingest?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“Well, that’s something.”
Melanie Joan leaned back in Spike’s chair. She took off her sunglasses and rubbed her eyes. She looked different, somehow. Smaller.
When I’d first met her, she told me that she thought of herself as two different people, Melanie Joan the famous scribe and Joanie. Joanie was the name she’d gone by as a young girl, before she published her first blockbuster romance novel,A Girl and Not a God. Joanie was quiet and bookish and a little insecure. As the years had gone by, I’d seen Joanie less and less. It seemed that as a result of all the trauma she’d endured, her survival instincts had kicked in and her true self had been subsumed by the glamorous, thick-skinned celeb. Now, though, it felt as if Joanie was reemerging.
“It was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “And you know, Sunny, I’ve done some really dumb things.”
I moved next to her. I leaned over the computer and scrolled through Book Babe’s many comments.Thanks for warning me offthis one, one commenter said.This doorstop is going into my “never to be read” pile, quipped another.I’ve always thought Melanie Joan Hall was a privileged bitch, said another.Thanks for confirming my suspicions. I was starting to get why Melanie Joan was so upset about this review. But I didn’t see her own comment. I told her so.
“I got rid of it,” she said. “About a minute after I posted.”
“Whew,” I said.
“You guys don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t even understand it. I guess I’d forgotten what happens to my brain chemistry when I mix alcohol with my water pill.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I mean that I remember posting that comment. I remember deleting it. And then, at some point, I fell asleep in front of the computer.”
“Well, thank God you deleted it,” I said.
“That’s right,” said Spike. “No harm, no foul.”
Melanie Joan shook her head. “Plenty of harm,” she said quietly. “And completely foul.”
As quick as she was to delete the comment, she hadn’t been fast enough. When she woke up in her home office the following morning, Melanie Joan discovered that someone had screen-grabbed it, she said, and posted it all over social media.
