I saved Mellon’s academic life that night, and half a dozen more times after that. His grades climbed steadily, but not fast enough to cause suspicion. I only edited, never rewrote, so the over-choked ideas still knocked down his grades to an extent. But for the first time in his academic career, Mellon was gunning for the Dean’s List.
After he got his first A, we celebrated by going to the West End, a local watering hole with great music and cheap beer – not that I needed to worry because, of course, Mellon insisted on paying. I had written many a paper of my own at the long, unvarnished bar, with a single bottle of Dos Equis to rent the barstool and the background roar to remind me I still existed.
We decided to cap off our beers with dinner. I wolfed down a roast beef sandwich, giving up any ladylike pretences after the first salty, delicious bite. Finally I wasn’t hungry. Finally.
I started on the fries and watched Mellon eat his BLT much more slowly. He took a tiny sip of beer, set his glass a little too carefully on the crinkly paper napkin.
“Hey, Mellon, you OK?” I asked, my voice tentative. I didn’t like poking at him through his thick layer of reserve. I liked the space between us.
He hesitated, and then his brilliant smile wiped out the shadows lurking in his eyes. “I’m fine, better than. Because you, Mireya, have got the magic touch.” He raised his glass to me. “Thank you for that.”
I hadn’t thought of myself as anywhere in the same universe as good luck for an exceedingly long, dreary time. I nodded at his noble, if wrong, sentiment, and took a sip of beer myself. “I’m not good luck. You wrote those papers yourself. All I do is type them.”
His smile broadened, and he leaned back, enjoying our silent complicity. Elvis Costello wailed a sweet, sad song over the crappy sound system, and I finished off the last of the sandwich. Farewell, sandwich. Mellon must have caught my longing for one more bite. He waved for the waitress. “Hello, please favour us with a platter of nachos.”
His odd turns of phrase made me snort with laughter. I loved the way laughing felt.
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “And I amuse you how?”
I sensed his hurt feelings under his politesse, and I hastened to reassure him. “No, Mellon, don’t worry. I just thought of you ordering bar food in Brooklyn like that. The waitresses I know out there would just stare at you like you were a freaking alien.”
We smiled at each other, again complicit in something neither one of us wanted to identify or name. We both knew we would destroy it by speaking of it.
“It is a beautiful night,” Mellon said. “Let’s go for a walk on campus. I assure you, it’s so well lit it looks like day.” He leaned back, and I swear he held his breath, as if he knew how risky a walk in the darkness was to me.
At that moment, I knew he knew about what had happened to me in the park. And for once it didn’t change anything between us. We both knew what had happened, but for the first time I didn’t care.
How I longed to walk again in the moonlight.
The Quad indeed was lit up like a Christmas tree; golden lights strung through the trees glistened like tinsel. A slow, cool breeze wandered along the brick walkways and between the venerable buildings.
We stood together at the wrought-iron gate at Broadway and 116th Street, the entrance to the Columbia Quad. All was Ivy League perfection. But a strange rustle brought us up short. I scanned the flat, manicured walkway until I found the source of the noise. “Jesus,” I muttered, but I stood my ground.
A horde of rats scuttled from under the boxwoods across the way, crossing towards the student centre next to Carman Hall.
“How many?” I croaked. My eyelids felt rusty; I blinked hard to focus my vision and to make sure I was really seeing what my brain insisted was there.
“Oh, about twenty-five or so,” Mellon said, his voice chipper but a little faint.
He moved closer to me, and I swallowed hard, appreciating his presence. “I’ve never seen so many all at once,” I whispered. “And they’re huge.”
“Yep. But they seem pretty mellow for rats.”
“You kidding me? You ever see that movieWillard?”
“What?”
My mind flashed back on a dozen viewings of the horror flick from the 1970s, played on our grainy black-and-white TV at home on countless Sunday afternoons.
My mouth had gone cotton dry by that point. “Never mind.”
I reached out and grabbed his hand. His fingers felt smooth and strong and he never flinched, just squeezed my hand in response. The rat horde stopped, and their little rat eyes focused on us, casually assessing whether they could take us.
They scuttled along the pathway, and we were all in complete agreement – they could totally take us, chew us up and leave our skeletons behind on 116th street.
I held my breath, tensed to run. And the leader, an enormous grey rat with protruding teeth, sneezed and licked his nose. A spell was broken and the swarm turned to the sewer grating near the student centre and they poured themselves between the iron bars like furry rat-water.
“Don’t think I’ll be dining at the student centre any time soon,” I said.
