Free The Secret Lives of Emails.docx by A.J. Ramsey Page B

don’t smell, you loser. It must be your hairy back.”
    This time, there was no mistaking it, the troll grew a little taller and said, “Haha, sure you don’t. You reek. I’ve smelled better corpses . . . or stool. Yeah, stool, I’ve smelled better stool.”
    Emal involuntarily chuckled at the absurdity of the argument, and Brittany whipped her head around to see him for the first time. Her eyes were like fireballs; the two flames roared with recognition and threatened to catch Emal’s hair on fire. Emal immediately regretted coming in this direction and the involuntary chuckle his body had betrayed him with. He meekly threw his hands up in defense.
    “Heyyyy . . . Britts,” he said rather uncomfortably.
    “It’s Brittany, bitch,” she snarled, turning back to the troll.
    Emal turned toward the troll as well, debating if he should get in on this argument. Perhaps I can get on Brittany’s good side if I argue with her against this . . . thing. He wasn’t sure what the fight was even about since they hadn’t been making much sense up to this point, but one has to choose sides in an argument.
    “I told you I didn’t smell,” Brittany snapped at the troll. “Smell him. He’s finally wearing clothes at least, but he smells like wet dog. A wet dog that rolled in something dead, then ate the dead thing, puked it up, rolled in his puke, and then ate it again.”
    Emal began to reconsider whose side he wanted to be on, but then the troll spoke again.
    “Ohhh,” it said with excitement. “You called your smelly boyfriend to fight your battles for you.”
    “Listen here, maggot . . .,” Emal and Brittany said together.
    Emal and Brittany glanced at each other, but the fire in her eyes no longer terrified him as he was sure they had come to some type of agreement. They were now in this battle together. No one was going to romantically link the two if they could help it.
    “What do you know?” Emal said to the troll. “You’re just an ugly . . . ugly green thing!”
    “Yeah,” Brittany said weakly in support. It wasn’t her fault she said it weakly; it was just a really lame comeback on Emal’s part, making it difficult to support.
    The troll shook with laughter. “Haha, the stinky ugly boyfriend is defending his stinky ugly girlfriend.”
    “I got this,” Brittany said to Emal and stepped between him and the troll.
    “Just because one of us is a woman and one of us is a man doesn’t mean we are going to be lovers. I am not going to be someone’s sexual object. I have independent thoughts and conversations that don’t rely on a man. I can even have a meaningful conversation with another woman without it being about a man. I can pass the Bechdel test,” Brittany yelled at the troll.
    “No you can’t,” the troll said through more laughter. “You are the only named female character so far in this farce of a novel. The main character is a man. Albeit a man wearing a skirt, but still something of a man. The author, and I use that term loosely, hasn’t even had the courage to describe what your boyfriend looks like because he doesn’t want to admit that he is white!”
    “You don’t know that,” Brittany yelled back. “Maybe he hasn’t described what people look like because he wants to let the reader decide. Emal could be any color in the rainbow for all we know.”
    “That’s lame and you know it. He probably hasn’t described what people look like because he sucks at descriptive prose. I mean have you been reading this drivel?” the troll argued back at Brittany, gesturing about the tube to emphasize that the writing to this point, indeed, had been drivel. The author hadn’t even described the scene properly. No one seemed ready to defend the author, and so the troll continued.
    “Besides, what about the Bechdel test? You still don’t pass that.”
    Brittany raised her fist in frustration but didn’t have an argument against that, and she let her arm fall back to her side.