Hands
an excerpt

This is fucked.

“Othello is – he’s this symbol of – well. Um.”

Melanie’s heart is racing. She can feel the eyes of her classmates burning into the back of her neck. In one corner of the room someone lets out a quiet snore. There’s a smattering of giggles.

“What I’m saying is – Othello is black. But Desdemona is white, and so things are – complicated for them. Because he’s an outsider. And when Iago comes around he’s got this solution for Othello, but really he’s just trying to accomplish his own ends, because he’s – um. Wait. What I mean is—”

“We’ll come back to you, okay, Miss Ellis?” Mrs. Grover peers at her over her thin, wire-rimmed glasses, pursing her lips. Melanie shrinks back into her seat, feeling her cheeks flush.

“It’s Damon, isn’t it?” Tristan whispers, nudging her. The concept of id is apparently too sexy for her right now. She nearly swallowed her tongue trying to come up with an explanation of the allegorical relationship between Othello and Iago that didn’t sound like it was cribbed from the Spongebob Squarepants binder of a third grader.

“Shut up,” she mutters.

“It’s okay,” Tristan whispers. “You have a crush, Mel. It’s cool. It happens to the best of us.”

She curls her hand into a fist in her lap. Pain flashes across the back of her eyelids, a white-hot pulse, then it’s gone – a split-second migraine.