I kept to myself, and kept silent, long after the physical harm to my throat had healed for the most part. I slept in my clothes, and I kept the light on for a solid year. My best friend Colleen made meeat, and until I could go back to swallowing pizza and home-made chilli, she cooked me split pea soup. Two years passed, years in which I excelled in my studies but lost myself.
I was OK in the daytime, in the dullness of my routine. But at night, all alone . . .
If it weren’t for a man named Jonathan Mellon, my would-be murderer would have won. But Mellon refused to leave me for dead. When it really counted, he stood his ground. And he did it to set me free.
I first encountered Jonathan Mellon at the scene of a different crime, two years after I almost paid for daydreaming in the park with my life. The Columbia campus centres on a quad of buildings, libraries, lecture halls and dorms. But most of the students live in housing off-campus, sprinkled around the iffy neighbourhood of Morningside Heights.
I lived in River Hall, around the corner from the place in Riverside Park where I had almost met my end. The morning I found Mellon at the entrance to River Hall, his antique Mercedes was parked in front – what was left of it, anyway. Some evil bastard had taken a baseball bat to the doors, smashed in the lights and all of the windows, and slashed all four tyres.
I had just returned from my first class of the day, and the street was relatively deserted. Curiosity got the better of me, and I walked around the car to survey the damage. A polite note in the rear window proclaimed: “No Radio, Don’t Bother”. Spray-painted along the destroyed side of the champagne-coloured car in response: “JUST CHECKING”.
I caught the anguish of the young guy, who was about my age, and I winced for him and his murdered car. “That’s pretty cold,” I muttered, not expecting him to reply or even notice me – by now I had perfected the art of invisibility.
“It certainly is,” the man replied, his focus staying steady on the car, the expression on his face pained. He had a faint accent that I couldn’t place. “This is my bitchy little sister’s car, too. Oh, bother.”
His genteel misery troubled me somehow. Guys like him – tall, preppy, golden blond – were not supposed to have problems. They were supposed to live off-campus in their own daddy-purchasedapartments, go to the Village to party with The Cars and the Talking Heads, and show up for class just often enough to pass.
“Maybe you should call the cops,” I said, my voice husky with disuse. This was the longest conversation I’d voluntarily had with a man in months. “You should report it. I know it’s a pain, but at least they’ll put your complaint on file.”
He turned to face me for the first time. His eyes burned with cold, blue fire, and I could see he was angry as well as in mourning. But his lips remained fixed in a small, careful smile. “This is the third car I’ve had smashed up like this in this neighbourhood. The police just shrugged and did the paperwork last time. A man’s got to choose his battles.”
We looked at each other for a long moment, and I suddenly had the strangest feeling that I had met this man before.
The stranger broke the silence with a smile and a nod. “I know you,” he said. “You’re in my miserable art history survey course, aren’t you?”
I felt the jolt all the way down to my shoes. Did he know me for the notorious reasons most people did? I’d heard the whispers trailing after me in the cafeteria, on the quad. Maybe this preppy blueblood moved so far outside my customary circles that he just didn’t know about me. The thought gave me hope.
I swallowed hard, turned my attention back to the remains of his car. The intrepid radio hunters had smashed up every car on the block the same way. “Art history,” I finally, lamely said. “It’s miserable? I like the teacher.”
“Oh, her,” he said, and laughed uncomfortably. “She’s ready to toss me out altogether.”
“Really?” Amanda Zee was one of my favourite teachers, just out of graduate school, and passionate about teaching as well as publishing her scholarship. “She doesn’t seem like such a hard-ass.”
“She’s not. I deserve to fail.”
I swung back to face him, and for a moment all of the upper west side of New York held its breath. My heart decided not to stop but instead to gallop, and the ragged edges of a familiar panic began to prickle on my arms like phantom brambles, poking into my skin, pulling me down.
There was something uncanny about him, about the desertedstreet and the smashed-up cars. He was a rip in my grey, mundane reality, a flash of gold on the cement sidewalk.
I forced myself to smile, though the effort probably looked pretty ghastly. “Sorry about your car,” I whispered, and I slipped away into River Hall, my student ID at the ready. The security guard, an ageless mummified Egyptian named Ali, sat silent behind his desk as I streaked by.
But I swear this time I saw Ali smile as I fled from the golden stranger still standing in the street.
He reappeared the next day, like the sun over the horizon. I saw him from far away from my perch at the top of the Low Library steps. A slip of paper he held between his long, aristocratic fingers fluttered in the breeze.
He climbed the steps, his long legs conquering them with no apparent effort. “This is you, isn’t it?” he said without preamble, as if he was used to addressing the commoners of the world and commanding them at his will.
I shrugged and went back to studying the textbook open on my lap, hiding the jolt of fear as best I could. A listless breeze crawled up the Low Library stairs and swirled around my ankles – it was a hot spring that year. “Yeah, I was me, last time I checked.”
“No. I mean this.” And he waved the paper at me.
I flinched. Had he found the newspaper articles about me, what had happened to me? I raised my head, ready to blow him off with a quick, efficient snarl – and saw just in time that’s not what the guy had in mind, not at all. He didn’t have a newspaper clipping, but my own hand-lettered sign. One that I hadn’t even thought of for a year or more.
“You type papers,” he said, his voice rising with excitement. “I need help. I’m failing out of school because my typing skills don’t exist. Can you type fast?”
My heart started racing again, at the man’s close proximity, but also at the prospect of cash. The paper-typing idea was born of desperation in my sophomore year, and before now it had never borne fruit. If anything, I needed money even more than the year before.
“What’s your name?” I said. I didn’t mean to act rude, but my voice came out husky and rough, like I’d been crying.
