Melissa Schemmenti has been dealing with the alarm bells in her head for most of her life. It takes a tough day on the blacktop and a quiet moment in a supply closet for her to finally say it out loud.
A/N: wrote this incredibly self indulgent piece as a coping mechanism for my own OCD today. there's something incredibly healing about taking a character like melissa, who is so put-together and fierce, and exploring what it looks like when she's battling her own brain. huge shoutout to barbara howard for being the ultimate safe space. take care of yourselves today, guys! not proofread.
Melissa got to Abbott before the hallway lights even finished stuttering on. First thing she did once she had the room to herself, she tapped three fingers on the doorframe. Quick. Then the light switch, off, on, off, on, holding it on the last flip till the fluorescents caught and buzzed over her head.
Nobody had ever caught her doing that. She made sure of it.
"Do I have a system?" She didn't look up from wiping down the whiteboard. The custodian already did it, but she did it again anyway, talking to the documentary crew like they asked her something dumb. "Sure I got a system. Every teacher's got a system. Mine is mine. I don't gotta explain it to nobody, especially not you people."
She dropped her bag on the desk and squared the chairs under the tables so they all matched perfectly. Half her kids would have them sideways again by nine fifteen. She liked things a certain way. Been saying that for twenty plus years.
There was a folded piece of paper in the side pocket of her bag. A doctor's name on it she hadn't looked up yet. A phone number she hadn't called. Had it four days now.
She only went in about her blood pressure, which was the honest truth of it. Her regular doctor still called her Mrs. Schemmenti even though there hadn't been a Mr. attached to her in years. There was one of those clipboard forms in the waiting room, little boxes to check. One asked about intrusive or unwanted thoughts, do you have them, how often. Many years running she checked the box that said no. The alternative was somebody asking her to say it out loud, and that wasn't happening. Not to a stranger with a clipboard. Not to anybody.
Last Thursday she checked the other box. Couldn't tell you why. Maybe she was tired. The doctor asked a few questions, gentle, not making a whole production out of it, and once Melissa started answering she couldn't stop. At the end the doctor didn't look at her like she was crazy. Looked at her like it made sense. Wrote down a name and a number and said this sounds like it could be OCD.
Obsessive compulsive disorder.
Melissa knew what the movies said it was. People washing their hands till they bled or throwing a fit because a picture frame hung crooked. She never cared about a little dirt. But the doctor started talking about error messages in the brain, alarm systems that get stuck, thoughts that terrorize you until you do some stupid physical action to make them shut up.
It sounded exactly like the inside of her own head.
"Good morning Melissa!" Janine practically vibrated in the doorway, holding a massive stack of laminated construction paper. "I was just researching some new pedagogical strategies for morning transitions. Since we both value structured learning environments, I figured we could synergize our routines..."
"Aspetta. Stop right there." Melissa pointed a dry erase marker at her. "It's seven thirty in the morning. I ain't had my coffee. I don't care about your little pedagogical whatever it is. Go laminate something in your own room."
Janine deflated a little but kept smiling, rocking back on her heels. "Okay. I respect your boundaries. I'm gonna transition myself right down the hall to Jacob. He loves synergy."
"Yeah well, he's a sfigato. Go bother him."
Melissa rolled her eyes and went back to the board. She folded the doctor's slip in half twice, put it back in her bag, and went about her day like normal. That was what she did with things. She buried them.
"You're quiet," Barbara said. She filled the doorway with her travel mug and the look she got when she already clocked something and was deciding if it was worth the fight yet.
"I just don't talk to people who ain't got anythin' worth hearing."
"Mm." Barbara took a slow sip of her coffee and let it sit. "Attendance sheet's upside down."
Melissa looked. It was. She flipped it right side up like it hadn't cost her anything. Didn't mention how many times she already counted the kids in her head that morning. Twice before the bell rang and once more after, just to make sure the number stayed at twenty two.
"Rough night," she said, which wasn't a lie exactly.
Barbara nodded like she believed it, or like she decided to let Melissa think she believed it, and headed off toward her own kindergartners.
Ava caught her halfway down the hall a few minutes later. Clipboard in hand, wearing sunglasses indoors like she was hiding from the paparazzi.
"Need your signature for the raffle." Ava tapped a pen against the paper. "Don't ask questions. Just sign it so I can get these flatscreens off the loading dock."
"You're raffling off TVs? Did the district even approve this?"
"The district doesn't need to know how we bless the community Melissa. Sign the paper before I forge it."
"They're gonna catch you one of these days."
"Please. I got eyes everywhere. Sign."
Melissa signed it just to get her gone. Arguing with Ava before nine in the morning was how you lost the whole day before it started.
Recess duty happened at the same time it always did. The blacktop was a chaotic mess of screaming kids, jump ropes, and kickballs flying in every direction. One of her second graders went down hard off the top of the slide. It was the kind of fall that looks worse than it is and somehow also looks exactly as bad as it is. The kid was up and crying instantly, holding his elbow. Nothing broken, just a nasty scrape.
Melissa had him on the bench with a wet paper towel inside ninety seconds. Told him he was gonna live, he was tougher than that, little eagles don't cry over a little gravel. She fixed him up, patted his shoulder, and sent him back out to play.
"I'm fine." She said it straight into the documentary lens before anybody asked, arms crossed tight over her chest. "Kid fell. Kids fall. That's what recess is for. Nothing to make a whole thing out of."
What nobody saw, once the kid was fine, once he was back on the blacktop showing his friends the scrape like a trophy, was her brain grabbing hold of something and not letting go.
The thought spiked into her head hot and fast.
What if he actually cracked his skull? What if he's got internal bleeding and it's your fault because you touched the door with your left hand instead of your right hand this morning? What if you killed him?
It was ego dystonic. That was the fancy phrase the doctor used. Thoughts that directly oppose your actual morals and desires. Thoughts that make you sick to your stomach. Because the thoughts were so horrifying to her, she tried desperately to suppress them. But fighting the thought just guaranteed it got louder. The harder she pushed it away, the more intense it became. Her brain locked onto the disaster. The error message was blaring.
If she touched the doorframe with the wrong hand that morning, she had to fix it.
So on the way back inside she touched the outer doorframe again. Both hands this time, once each. Said the nine words in her head she had been saying since she was maybe nine years old herself. Her chest finally settled enough to function. The temporary relief washed over her, even though she knew it just reinforced the cycle for next time.
She caught Barbara watching her do it.
Neither of them said anything. Barbara just held the door.
By the end of the day Melissa had straightened the game shelf in her supply closet three times. She knew it was exactly three because she counted, which was sort of the whole problem. She was elbow deep doing it a fourth time, lining the checkers boxes up so the spines all faced the exact same way.
Barbara knocked on the open door of the closet like it was a room with actual walls instead of a glorified cubby.
"That shelf's been straight since two thirty."
"Kids get in it. Messes it up."
"Nobody's touched that closet since two thirty Mel. I been in this hallway the whole time."
Melissa kept her hands on the checkers box. She didn't turn around right away, and Barbara didn't push. Barbara just waited in the doorway, arms loose, like she had nowhere else on earth to be. Which was a lie. Barbara had a husband and a garden and a six o'clock news broadcast she never missed, and she was standing here anyway.
"I went to the doctor," Melissa said finally, talking to the shelf. "Last Thursday. For my blood pressure."
"Okay."
"Told her some stuff. Real stuff. Not the stuff I usually tell people." She turned around, arms crossed, chin up, doing the thing she did when she needed to look tougher than she felt. "The counting. The thing with the door. The thing I say in my head so nothing happens to any of you idiots when I leave a room."
Melissa laughed, short and dry. "Ever get a thought that scares the hell outta you? Comes outta nowhere, you didn't ask for it, worst thing you ever thought, and there it is anyway, just sitting in your head like it pays rent?"
"Sometimes. Sure."
"Not like this. Not on a loop. Not messing with how I gotta touch a door or count desks so I stop hearing it." She looked at Barbara dead on, daring her to flinch. "Doctor thinks it's OCD. It's not some joke where people just think your pens all gotta face the same way. It's a nightmare in there sometimes."
Barbara didn't flinch. She stepped into the closet, which barely fit the two of them, picked up a checkers box Melissa hadn't gotten to, turned it so the spine matched the others, and set it back on the shelf without being asked.
"How long you been carrying that around by yourself?"
"I don't know. Since I was a kid I guess. Just didn't have a name on it till Thursday."
"And you never said nothing. All these years."
"What was I supposed to say Barb? Hey, sometimes my brain tells me something awful's gonna happen and the only way to shut it up is I gotta touch a doorframe like I'm pazzo. Who wants to hear that outta a grown woman?"
"I would have." Barbara said it plain, no drama in it, just the way she said most true things. "Twenty years I known you. You think I never noticed the door thing? The counting? I figured it was yours to bring to me when you were ready. Not a second before."
Melissa swallowed hard. Her jaw worked for a second. "You never said nothin'."
"Wasn't mine to say." Barbara handed her the last checkers box. "Finish your shelf. Then you're gonna sit down and tell me what the doctor said. I'm gonna listen. Then we're gonna figure out what Thursday's appointment looks like, because I know you, and I know you're already thinking about not going."
"I wasn't."
"Melissa."
"I was thinking about it a little."
Barbara didn't say another word about the shelf. She let Melissa finish it, all the way, no rushing her. When the last box sat exactly where it needed to sit, things went a little quieter in Melissa's head. Not all the way quiet. Quieter.
They ended up in Melissa's room after, door shut, only the desk lamp on. Melissa talked more in one sitting than she had in years, maybe ever. The locks, the numbers, the counting, the years of telling people she was just particular. The part she was most ashamed of, the ugly little pictures her own head cooked up out of nowhere that she would never in a hundred years act on.
She told Barbara about the kid falling at recess. How her brain twisted it into her own fault. How the terror gripped her chest until she did the ritual to neutralize the danger. She couldn't say that part out loud to anybody until tonight.
Barbara sat there with her second cup of cold coffee and just took it. No big reaction, no pity face. Listened like Melissa was telling her about a rough parent conference.
"You don't think I'm a psycho," Melissa said at the end of it. Not quite a question.
"I think you're somebody who's been fighting something alone for fifty years and never once let it stop you from taking care of every kid that walked through that door." Barbara reached over and put her hand flat on Melissa's arm. No squeeze, just steady weight. "The Lord doesn't care what flies through your head baby. He cares what you do. And what you do, every single day, is show up for these kids like they're your own."
Melissa didn't cry. Wasn't built for crying in front of people, not even Barbara. But she let her arm stay under Barbara's hand a beat longer than she needed to. When Barbara said she would drive her to Thursday's appointment herself if Melissa wanted the company, Melissa said fine. Whatever. If it made Barbara feel better about it.
They both knew that wasn't really who it was for.
She still touched the doorframe on her way out. Three fingers, quick. Barbara watched her do it and didn't say a word, just held the door open a little wider so Melissa wouldn't have to reach as far. Melissa figured that was as good a place to start as any.
"Free money on a free plate" is fucking hilarious when you realize that not only did Ava (allegedly) take the money, she took the damn plate too! Just greedy 😭
It also more subtly implies Ava probably ran out of there so quickly that she didn't have time to put the money in her purse and that's what I mean when I say I love how layered her jokes can be.
✨️Kiss Cam✨️ Melissa is determined to find her way to her beloved's heart, so she invites Barbara to watch a Phillies baseball game with her. She just didn't imagine that an unexpected situation would unfold during the game, and that after that game, things between them could change forever.
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