You Love Me(You #3)(36)

I pick another card. “November fourth. ‘I would be living in Minneapolis by now if not for Married Kay. I HATE HER. Nomi should be living with ME and UGHGHGHGH.’ Married Kay,” I say. “Clever.”

She looks at me. “You won’t make me think I’m the bad guy, you sicko. You were stalking Nomi. I saw.”

“Huh,” I say. “You know, Melanda, I guess what hurts the most, besides my rib cage…”

She rolls her eyes. An emoji come to life.

“I get it. This isn’t an easy place to be single. Hell, I live next door to a family. You and I… we’re in the minority. You try to do good… I try to do good, but you decided that because I’m single, there must be something wrong with me.”

“And I was right. You’re a pedo.”

“Melanda, I am not a pedophile. But after reading your notepad, I gotta say, I do wonder what you were doing in the woods…”

“Oh you sicko, I was looking out for Nomi.”

“Ah.”

“The Bukowski… the Woody Allen… I knew it then and obviously I really know it now. I see you.”

I pick another flash card. “?‘Feels so freaking good to tell DeAnn and Eileen that I will be the one taking the credit for the incubator. These young girls are SO FUCKING ENTITLED and someone needs to smack them down because they have NO IDEA how hard it is to be a woman in the real world.’?”

She sits up straight as if there’s a book on her head. “What’s your point?”

“You don’t see the hypocrisy? ‘Women supporting women.’ You’re literally erasing the women who support you.”

“I am not the one on trial here.”

“You called me a pedophile. You attacked me but look at you. What about you? You hate your best friend and you’re stealing credit from your fellow sisters.”

She folds her arms, indignant. “Nice try, pervert, but you don’t know the first thing about my life. Eileen and DeAnn are college kids. I’m not ‘erasing’ their work. They don’t have a fucking clue about how hard it is to be a single woman in a school system. Let them try going into a school every day where everyone treats you like a leper slash whore because you’re not married. And they think you should just be able to work every day all day because you don’t have a ‘life,’ like there’s something inherently wrong with you if you’re alone.”

“Christ, Melanda. Just admit it. They’re wrong about you and you were wrong about me.”

“Well, unlock the door and let me go and I’ll know for sure that you’re not a predator.”

“Melanda, I wish I could trust you, I do, but I wasn’t grooming Nomi and you attacked me and this is on you.”

She bangs on the glass, which hurts her hand more than it hurts me. “Let me out. Now.”

Her phone is in my pocket and it buzzes. And it’s you: When do you fly to MN?! So excited for you!

Melanda drops her fists. “Is it MK?” She’s trembling now, shaking, and her sizable vocabulary is boiled down to a single word. “SICKO!”

I write back cuz this is what you gals do. Leaving in a few hours!

Melanda knocks on the glass. Softer now. She’s a teacher again. “Joe, look… I’m sorry. I was paranoid and I did judge you, okay? I really thought you were just latching onto MK to get to Nomi… I mean MK is old.”

You’re not old.

“Joe,” she says. “I mean it. I’m sorry. And if you let me go… Look, you’re right. We both overreacted. And no one has to know about this. Now that we’re talking… well, you’re right. We are on the same side. We can be.”

I wasn’t born an hour ago and I sigh. “There’s a remote on the bed.”

She kicks the wall as if she’s the only one trapped. “Fuck you.”

And I gotta say, Mary Kay. I’m a little offended because I’m the victim here. I have gone out of my way to be Mr. Fucking Good Guy and now because of her my Whisper Room is a cage and Dr. Nicky is right. You can’t control other people. You can only control your own actions. Melanda doesn’t deserve my help, but lucky for her, when I see anyone trapped in a cage, even if it’s their fault, well, what can I say? I’m a good fucking Samaritan.

She screams for help and I nod at the remote on the bed. “Go ahead,” I say. “Pick it up. I have a project for you.”

She is quivering—it could be an act—and she picks up the remote and the screen lights up and there they are, all of the movies in her iTunes account. See, Mary Kay, Melanda obsessively takes inventory of every calorie she puts into her body. But she needs to take that analytical obsession in a different direction. She needs to think about the movies she watches over and over again. I try to explain this to her but she is the same old dog. “Oh God,” she sighs. “You’re not a pervert. You’re a psychopath.”

“You call me a psycho? I’m the ‘pervert.’ Melanda, would you look at the size of your Woody Allen collection? You own more of his movies than I do!”

“It’s different,” she snarls. “I’m a woman. You have to know the enemy.”

“Bullshit,” I say. “You own Anything Else and Melinda and Melinda and those aren’t even in the fucking canon.”