The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance (58 page)

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.

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 movie
Willard
?”

“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.

Mellon laughed so hard I thought he was going to pass out. “You’re good luck, all right,” he finally said. “But you’re also crazy, Mireya.”

“And you just figured this out? Tsk, tsk, Mr Mellon of the Philadelphia Mellons,” I murmured. “Only a crazy person . . .”

My voice trailed off, and I didn’t finish my thought – only a crazy person would still be at this school after what happened to me. I was crazy enough to insist on staying. But I had lost myself somewhere, and I wasn’t about to give up the fight of getting me back. That meant sticking it out here, now, in this place.

Mellon got quiet. “If you’re crazy, then I don’t want to be sane.”

I kept clutching his hand, and he kept holding mine. And my focus slowly shifted from the swarm of rats to the fact that I was holding the hand of a gorgeous blond boy in springtime, under the light of a New York City moon.

We stood there for a while, Mellon’s hair all silvery in the shadowy night. “We better get out of here before we end up as rat chow.” My voice sounded raspy but coherent.

“Of course. Right as always.” Mellon led the way forwards.

The stars danced over our heads in a swirling foxtrot. “Where are we going, Mellon?” It occurred to me I was drunk or high, but no, my mind was as clear and sharp as the night.

When I looked at him, his eyes sparked silver, like his hair. “I want to show you something. Don’t be frightened.”

Of course a bolt of pure adrenalin shot through me after that, but I swallowed hard and held on to Mellon’s hand. “But should I be? Scared, I mean.”

He smiled then, a lonely and untamed smile, an expression I never imagined could look so at home on Jonathan Mellon’s patrician face. “Yes. You should be scared. But you’re crazy enough to come with me anyway. And, Mireya, no matter what happens, I want you to know that’s a good thing.”

I took a step closer to him, despite the fact his words freaked me out. “Why? If I only . . .”

“If you only nothing.” He pulled me along, under the shifting cotton of the clouds racing by on the wind over our heads. “Just come on.”

Our steps quickened as we broke into a run across the quad. No one else crossed our path, though a dense cloud of little birds wheeled wildly over our heads.

He pulled me up the stairs of Low Library, past the kneeling Rodin statue,
The Thinker,
to the entrance of the St Paul Chapel. Faint music rose from the depths of the crypt in the basement. The crypt housed a famous student-run club, the Postcrypt, which hosted musicians on Saturday nights.

I followed Mellon down the slippery, slightly damp stone stairs. As we got closer to the wooden door barring our way into the club, I was surprised to see him pass by the little room, nodding at the kilted guy half asleep on a barstool by the doorway.

“Where are you going?”

He lifted his fingers to his lips and shushed me in response, then pointed to a stairway I’d never noticed before, heading still deeper underneath the chapel.