Just when I’m about to lose all control and go lunging for someone, I see Melissa. Her bright pink dress burns through my fog of red and black like a flame from heaven.
“Tommy! Oh my God, what’s happened?”
I’m not thinking clearly, and I can’t really see her face, but I see Melissa bending down to help me. She picks me up from the ground, and I grab onto her. The moment I do, the buzzing in my brain stops. The noise in my head compelling me to reach out, and maim my tormentors stops. It numbs, and the only thing I feel clearly now is Melissa’s hand in mine. Her fingers on my suit, pulling me out of the mud.
“Here! Let me help you?”
Unsurprisingly, the taunting of me has stopped. But taunting of Melissa has started in its place. Quietly, but I can hear things about her arrogance, her foreignness. I even hear people mocking her accent and the way she talks. They exaggerate the accent in her voice, as well as the stereotypical British woman with the overly proud attitude, though she doesn’t have one.
Melissa starts to hear me growling at them, and she just continues to pull me onto my feet. She holds onto my hand, saying, “Never mind them. Pay no mind to them, Tommy. Come on. Come on. Let’s get you packed up again and out of here.”
I stand still, stunned, and brainless. It’s what happens when I get this angry. I lose all ability to think or move. It’s like my brain isn’t the only thing shorting out. It’s my whole system. I don’t know why, but I’ve been like this ever since I was little.
As Melissa begins to quickly pack what she can of my things back into the brown box, my vision begins to clear. My senses come back to me, though they’re not one hundred percent. I’m still a little warped and floaty, but enough to be free of my bloodlust, my nearly-blind fury.
Finally, after what seems like an hour, Melissa puts my box under her arm and grabs me with her other hand. She pulls me along, even as more people join in and whisper about us. They are making fun of Melissa. Her voice. My size. How the two of us look together, and more nasty insinuations about us. That we must be boning each other.
Melissa pulls me along with her. “Come on, Tommy. Come with me, don’t pay attention to them. Don’t worry about them. They’re going to be gone after I report them.” With these words, she pushes me out of the legal aid’s office, the big cesspool of desks and dividing walls, and tells me to go to the elevator. That she’ll be there soon. But I don’t move that far, just enough to be out of sight.
When I do, I turn around. I watch Melissa as she straightens herself. She fixes her clothes and redresses the room. “I got a good look at you. All of you who participated in what you did with Tommy, and those of you who refused to step in and stop this despicable behavior on one of your own. HR is going to get good and familiar with all of you, and if I have my way, you’ll be out of here and out of a job by the end of the day.”
As I watch her speaking and standing there, she looks regal, heroic. Despite being in a designer dress and fancy, pointed shoes, she looks deadly. Like she is a force to be reckoned with. Someone who midnights as a vigilante, while serving as a secretary by day. My heart, still roiling from my mistreatment, is lifted. It’s shined and polished by her selfless defense of me.
“It’s that kind of behavior that keeps you all in the bowels of this place, never able to reach your potential. Because you waste it doing things like this.” With that, she turns sharply on her heels. As she does, I see the fierce mask she put on for their benefit. She doesn’t look like a harmless secretary now. She looks like an executioner with a fancy, bejeweled guillotine at her beck and call. But the minute she sees me, that mask melts. It’s replaced by her true face and her true feelings, which are of sorrow and rage. For me. For her. For the idiocy and cruelty, we just faced.
As she brings me with her to the elevator, she asks a single, damning question. “What happened to Ms. Vanacore? I thought she was supposed to come to help you with all of this, Tommy.”
My throat clinches at this. My chest spasms, and I feel oddly betrayed or abandoned by Ms. Vanacore and angry at her for changing her mind. “She had more important things to do. Clients to talk to on the phone or something,” I say, trying not to break down right then and there, though my voice is shaking enough. Melissa hears it and wipes at her eyes. There are no tears there yet, but that could be any second. “She couldn’t come help,” I finish, feeling closer to breaking down than ever.