Mandy- Part 5

    Knowing I’d broken Mandy so easily was almost a letdown; I had expected such a vicious tormentor to hold off longer. If I would have known it would only take a couple of punches, I would have decked him in the parking lot ages ago. It would have save Cory and Sherry a whole lot of heartache.

            “You still didn’t answer my question. Why don’t you dress in drag all the time?”

            “Because I’m not really a cross dresser…I started doing it a couple of months after I started working. I had just finished my probationary period and I applied for one of the management positions. I have a bachelor’s degree in business management and the only other applicant was a flaming homo with just an associate’s degree.”

            “Flaming homo? Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?” I asked. “Not to mention incredibly insensitive. Try to keep it PC, would ya?

            “I’m not gay. I’m bi. Anyway, the fla-, um, I mean the gay guy got it. They said it was because he had been with the company longer and had more experience but I know it was because they didn’t want it to look like they were prejudiced.”

            “So you decided to wear women’s clothes just to get a promotion?”

            “At first, yes, I only wanted the promotion but then I realized that I could wield the same power he had. I could get what I wanted by playing the discrimination card. If people complained about me, I said they were just haters trying to get me fired because I was different. If someone more qualified got a position, then the company was discriminating against me because I’m different. It worked too. I can do anything I want and no one does anything about it because I’ll go to the media.”

    I shook my head in disgust. People like him, with their sense of entitlement and willingness to exploitation of the system, made me sick. I might not be able to rid the entire world of scumbags like Mandy but I could, at least, eliminate one.

            “Okay, question number two…did you kill Sherry’s cat?”

Mandy’s face paled and his bottom lip quivered, making the coagulated blood crack open and dribble down his chin. A pitiful whimper escaped his lips before the tears drenched his cheeks. 

            “Please, man, just let me go. I promise I’ll leave your friends alone.”

Mandy sobbed but I refused to let him off the hook that easily. I repeated my question with a sterner tone but he bawled louder, shaking his head. I was in no mood for pathetic whimpering from a big bully. Even worse, I despised him for being too chicken to admit what he’d done. I stepped out of the root cellar and hefted the sledgehammer resting the basement. When I stepped back inside the root cellar, Mandy’s eyes nearly popped out of his skull.

            “Wait! I’ll tell you the truth. Just, please, put that down. Okay, yes. I did it. I killed Sherry’s cat.”

“Thank you,” I whispered. Just when Mandy breathed a sigh of relief, I finished. “Thank you for making this easy for me.”

In one deft move I raised the sledgehammer and brought it down on Mandy’s left knee. In that split second before his brain processed the pain, I slapped a strip of duct tape across his mouth to muffle the screams and left him there to suffer. The satisfying crunch of his bones shattering filled my heart with glee as I locked the root cellar door. I hadn’t felt that good in ages. Finally, I was able to do something to repay Cory and Sherry for their years of kindness and support. My surrogate family would be avenged!

    Just as I reached the top of the stairs, I heard knocking at my door. Fortunately, just before I opened it, I realized I still had Mandy’s bag slung across my body. I chucked it down the basement stairs before answering the door. Cory and Sherry had popped by to tell me about the movie and see if I was feeling better. I’d forgotten that I told them I wasn’t feeling well. Since my cheeks were flushed because of the adrenaline coursing through my body and I was perspiring from the exertion, I looked the part. Sherry pressed her hand to my head and insisted I felt feverish. She pushed her way inside my house and pulled a glass from my cabinet. She filled it with water then pressed it into my hand along with a couple of aspirin she'd taken from the bottle on my counter.  At her orders, I swallowed the pills and promised to get plenty of rest.

    Just as quickly as they’d arrived, Cory and Sherry departed and I was left on my own with the visitor in my basement.  I crept downstairs and opened the door to the root cellar. The man who’d tormented my family nearly beyond the brink whimpered as he looked up at me with puffy, red eyes. He grunted through the tape so I ripped it off to hear what he had to say. He screamed and I delighted in the sound.

            “P-P-Please, I-I-I can’t take the p-pain anymore.”

            “Maybe you should have thought of that before you put laxatives in Cory’s food and tormented him every single moment of every single work day. Perhaps you should have considered the ramification of picking on a sweet and caring girl like Sherry and making her cry. And you definitely should have thought twice before killing Sherry’s cat!”  
    The words spewed out like searing-hot venom and in that moment I considered bludgeoning Darren, the pathetic waste of space that he was, to death. I even lifted the sledgehammer but it was the look in his eyes that made me change my mind. I saw no reason to give him what he wanted. I thought about all of the people he’d bullied over the years. He hadn’t cared one iota about their feelings so I refused to allow myself to show him even the slightest compassion. I had set out to make Darren/Mandy suffer and suffer he would.