“Jonathan Mellon, of the Philadelphia Mellons.” He extended a well-tended, manicured hand, and after a moment I took it and shook it. He was all business, and I took refuge in that.
I leaned back on the steps and smiled. “You already know me from class and by my sign. Mireya Rodriguez, of the Brooklyn Rodriguezes.” For the first time in I didn’t know how long, I started to laugh at this awkward, lovely white boy, slender and earnest as a greyhound. “Our numbers are legion, Mr Mellon.”
“Well, ours aren’t.” His smile widened and, after a moment’s hesitation, he sat down next to me, a careful distance away. “I hope you can type fast.”
And so began our nefarious partnership.
I didn’t mean to re-engineer his papers, not at first. I got out my trusty IBM Selectric, Mami’s high school graduation present to me, checked the ribbon to make sure it was nice and fresh. The spring morning thrummed with life, and I propped up my only window with a wooden coat hanger to let in the semi-fresh air from the enclosed courtyard. A single huge gingko tree grew there, and a family of cardinals had made it their improbable refuge. That courtyard was loud – an opera singer lived in the building across from me, and an oboe player liked to practise until midnight during the week. But I loved that courtyard. For two years now, it had kept me connected to the living world.
On that morning in April, I took a first look at the art history paper due the next day. Mellon’s handwriting was terrible. Awful. But his writing was even worse. Plenty of ideas, sure, but they choked each other like too many baby birds crushed together in a too-small nest.
“You got five separate papers here,mi corazon,” I whispered under my breath as I reread his work. “Hm . . . leave this for next time. Switch these paragraphs, fix the spelling over here . . .”
I started typing, slowly at first, but then my fingers took flight with his words. The paper was his, I swear it. All I did was a little judicious tidying.
Mellon was running a D average in art history, but he got a B–on that paper, with an encouraging note from Miss Zee scribbled on the bottom. And he insisted on paying me what he called the “expedited” rate – three dollars a page, instead of my usual one.And he insisted on paying me for the title page. Plus a “good luck” bonus, whatever that was.
Once, I would have been too proud to take the extra money. I would have thrown back my shoulders, told him I didn’t accept bribes, and walked away. But that Mireya was gone forever. And also, I liked eating and the payment from this one paper fed me for almost a week.
But more than that, I enjoyed travelling the labyrinths of his mind, wandering the tangled byways of his thrown-together thoughts until I found the worthy truth hidden at the centre. All I did was cut away some of the strangling undergrowth when he set those thoughts to a particular subject on paper. That was all.
At least that was what I told myself.
The nightmares started up again a week after that. I had thought the creep who’d dragged me into the bushes in Riverside Park two years before was some kind of bogeyman, some phantom of night, nobody who intersected with my daily life.
But I was wrong. About a week after Mellon hired me to type everything he did for school, I found a wadded-up note shoved under my door. The note was from my attacker, and he knew all about me. It contained too many details, things I had left to die in the mud at the bottom of the embankment.
It was folded neatly, the handwriting so prim and proper, pathologically perfect like a machine had formed the letters on the page.
I can guess what you must be thinking. The coincidence is too great – Mellon must have been the attacker. But, no. Even aside from the perfect handwriting, I knew it wasn’t Mellon. Mellon smelled clean and sharp, citrus and mint. The bastard who had tried to kill me smelled of blood and meat.
And now my attacker knew where I lived.
The next week I pretty much kept to myself, as I had when I had first returned from the hospital over two years before. My current RA knew all about the new note, but he was worse than useless – he’d looked a little too prurient when he first found out who I was, and now his face lit up with a creepy delight when I showed him the paper and demanded he call the similarly useless campus police.
So I told the creepy RA to warn Ali, and I stayed to myself. The only person who checked in on me was Colleen, my steadfast friend from the old neighbourhood, and she tried to tease me out of my cave. “You’re turning into Pariah Carey,” she said, laughing maniacally at her horrible pun.
“Well, you’re lamer than Duran Duran,” I replied, trying my best to sound like my old, pun-impaired self. I knew I wasn’t fooling Colleen or anybody else.
“You need to get outside,” Colleen said, trying hard to keep up the facade of chummy amusement, like she could chuckle me out of my bunker. But she picked at her cuticles, the way she always did when she worried about me. “You are going to starve to death in here.”
Just then the phone rang, shrieked from under the bed, and I leaped to my feet, a sob strangled in my throat. I rearranged the paisley scarf I kept wrapped around my neck, and Colleen’s mask slipped to reveal the horrible reality: my oldest friend pitied me. Me. Pity.
I shot her a hurt look as I reached under the bed for the phone. Part of me hid under there, knowing it was going to be my attacker’s voice on the phone.
I cleared my throat and answered the phone. “Hello?” I said, my voice rough and hoarse. I held my breath and waited.
It wasn’t. It was Mellon. “I need your help, Mireya,” he said, his bland, confident voice a little tremulous. “I got hit with a surprise twenty-four-hour paper. Ten pages. I’m dead.”
“Don’t say that, don’t joke like that.” I ran a shaky hand through my hair, and Colleen’s pity shimmered into curiosity. Good, let her wonder.
“No, I’m not joking.” Mellon’s voice sounded tinny on my ancient, beat-up Bakelite rotary. “If I fail this class, my father is going to disown me.”
My smile was genuine, and it reached past Colleen’s worry to the realization that I could help somebody else. I had the goods, and that knowledge felt really wonderful. “You won’t fail. I won’t let you, Mellon. Come on over.”
Colleen slipped away before Mellon arrived, and she was smart enough not to say anything about him. But she leaned against my rickety door, looked me up and down as she got ready to go.
“Watch yourself,” was all she said, but her eyes were full of a fear too big to express in words.
