“Well, it is. Melitta already knows that.” It seemed like Amanda didn’t talk much because it was hard for her. That quiet jock thing was apparently for real. “She just doesn’t know she knows.”
I blurted, “I thought it was just complicated if you were—you know—had a stepfather problem.”
“It’s complicated for everybody, baby,” Beth said. “When you have more friends, you’ll hear the stories.”
“I’d like to hear your stories,” I mumbled, and then wished I hadn’t said it. Jee had sort-of told hers already, and Beth might tell me someday. But Amanda acted like words hurt coming out, and Pog scared me a little.
Looks flashed around the hot tub.
I shrank down until I was immersed to my chin, sorry now that I’d spoken.
“I don’t mind,” Amanda said. She turned to me. “I bounced around the Regional Office for ten years. I’m a sports nut. In the RO, intramural teams are either all-male, so they won’t take me, or they’re co-ed, which means they’re strictly recreational and/or all about corporate climbing. Slack motherfuckers,” she added dispassionately. “When I heard they were assembling this team for the field, I applied for a transfer. Figured at least I might finally be able to form a women’s softball team that didn’t suck.” She smiled, and suddenly she looked almost pretty.
“I think she wants to know about the sex,” Jee said patiently.
Amanda blinked. “Didn’t I say? It’s something else to do with my body. I like it. It helps that they rewire you so that you have to like it.”
“Re—rewire?” That sounded uncomfortable.
“Part of the perfect body thing,” Pog said. “A lot of your memory resides in your body. Especially sexual memory. Getting a new chassis means you can put some of the past behind you.”
“It’s not a cure,” Beth said severely. “Don’t mislead the child.”
“No, but you do get a chance to work out your issues,” Jee said. The white points of her canine teeth showed.
Beth patted my wrinkly hand. “Even if you have suffered abuse that’s blocking your sexual response, your new body will not be blocked. But there is no pressure,” she looked at the others sternly, “to get back on the horse until you’re ready.”
“I doubt she was ever on the horse,” Jee said. I flushed.
“Why did Ish recruit her if she’s messed up about sex?” Amanda said.
“That’s who benefits from this work the most,” Pog said.
“Pog’s right. There’s nothing like a little empowerment to unclog your circuits,” Jee said.
“Empowerment is not the same thing as revenge,” Beth said. “If she’s not rushed—”
I blurted, “I don’t know Ish. Delilah recruited me.”
Everyone got very quiet. I looked from one young, beautiful, perfect face to the next. Was I in trouble?
Pog said deliberately, “So I guess we’d better get her through this.” Nobody spoke. She turned to me. “What’s your plan, again?”
I outlined my plan. Much of it would be improvised. The main idea was, accuse Dorrington in public and see what happened.
Jee looked at me soberly. “Once you challenge him, he may find ways to stop you that you won’t like. He’ll have to.”
“I’ll think of something.” This was pure bravado. My big idea was to make a big splash, a completely unsilenceable splash, start a scandal and hopefully some official scrutiny.
Pog made a face. “We’ll give you some pointers for if he gets rowdy. There are things you can do that work in public.”
“Like what?” I said, unable to hide my eagerness.
“There’s a look I use,” Jee said. “Works like a kick in the nuts.”
She explained the look and how to do it and how to use it.
“I get it,” I said. This was the stuff my mother had been carefully teaching me never to do for the past nineteen years. “I just have to look mean.” I remembered slapping Sanjay down in the lunchroom and felt crummy.
“If you have a choice between looking scared and looking mean, always look mean,” Beth said.
Everyone looked at her in surprise.
“My daughter was bullied in fifth grade,” she said. Bingo. Knew all along she was a mom. “I know something that’ll work better,” she said. “Stop being afraid.”
“Oh,” I said. “Easy.”
“No, but when it works, it’s amazingly effective. Once you’ve been a succubus a while, you’ll have had every trick in the book tried on you, and you’ll develop ways to handle them, and then you’ll know how powerful you are and how helpless the jerks are, and finally you won’t need any tricks. You’re not there yet.”
I said, “No kidding.” But now I couldn’t wait.
“The short version is, everybody has only their confidence to get by on. Size, looks, money, that’s all secondary to how solid you feel inside.” Beth sounded like she’d been there.
“I feel like I’ve had all my insides scooped out,” I said, remembering how I almost floated away in the middle of Irving Park Road. “Like a chocolate rabbit.”
“Milk chocolate. My favorite,” Jee said, and grinned. Suddenly I felt better. We were both pretty milk-chocolatey.
Beth put her arm around me and hugged me. “You’ll get through this. We’ll help. That bastard doesn’t stand a chance.”
“You haven’t even seen my kickboxing moves,” Amanda-the-silent said.
I imagined Amanda walking up to Mr. Dorrington and kickboxing him base over apex, and I grinned, too.
“The other part of that,” Pog said, “is that everyone is vulnerable. I guarantee you, this Dorrington character is wide open. In some dark corner of his wriggly little many-legged soul, he’s a sitting duck. That’s why he seeks power through blackmail.”
My eyebrows went up. “You don’t think he just likes money?”
“Hell, no. Think of your stepfather. You said, he gets off on risk. He likes playing with danger. That means he’s afraid of danger, but his way of dealing with his fear is to toy with it. He sets up situations and relationships that remind him of his fear, but he stacks the deck—he makes sure he’s in less danger than the other person. He gets to push his fear off onto them. That way he’s outside of his own fear. The fear is now in someone else, and he’s watching them be afraid. He’s making them feel fear. He’s in control of their fear. Now he has power over fear.”
I grunted. “You sound like my mother the guidance counselor.” But she was dead right. I’d seen that look in Howard’s face, his smile, his eyes, when he suggested that he should help me with my homework. That we needed to have a little talk. I felt that new anger hardening inside me. I felt less hollow.
“Now you’re getting it,” Jee said approvingly, as if she could see my anger.
“Just keep in mind that Dorrington is scared shitless of you, and so is your stepfather, and they’re only gonna get more scared as you get taller, thinner, more beautiful, more adult, and less afraid of them,” Pog said. “They live in such an impoverished world. There’s only so much confidence and power in their world. If you have any confidence or power at all, they think you’re taking some away from them.” She snorted.
I made a T with my hands. “Stop, fine, thanks, time out. Enough with the Judy Blume. You’re supposed to be minions of hell,” I reminded them. “Can’t you teach me, I dunno, demonic wisdom? I’ve been getting the other kind ever since my mom was in grad school.”
Amanda made a noise like a horse. “All right, back off, you guys. Let me handle this.”
And she told me just how a demon would handle my Social Studies teacher.
Nobody said anything important after that. We got out and dried off and went downstairs for a bedtime snack of jerky strips and those little apple pies you get at McDonald’s. I was shown to my room. Everybody kicked in some bedclothes and shower gel and other stuff I hadn’t brought with me.
I looked at my phone. Past midnight. I had to be up by five to get to school up in Winnetka by
eight. I showered off the hot tub guck and fell onto my Lair futon, wondering what my life had become.
“You left me! You crumbled up your card so I can’t call you!” I yelled.
“Nobody phones me.”
“Well I might have! Things have gotten really terrible!” I couldn’t stop yelling. “I needed to talk to you!”
“You’re talking to me now,” Delilah said mildly.
I calmed down. Asleep, I actually felt fearless. “I’m homeless now. My stepfather made mom change the locks. They had me arrested.”
“Shocking. I suppose you waited until somebody rescued you.”
“I made the cops let me go and I went back to the Lair.”
We were standing in the middle of nothing. I could tell there were mountains out there in the nothing, I could feel mountains, but I couldn’t see them, because there was nothing to see. There wasn’t even darkness.
“Good. Are the succubi helping you?”
“Yes. They want to kill Mr. Dorrington. And maybe my stepfather.”
“That would be Jee.”
“They don’t know who you are. Or maybe some of them do. I told them you recruited me, not this Ish guy, and they had this little silent freakout full of looks.”
I heard Delilah’s smile in her voice. “That’s very well put.”
I felt stuck. You know that feeling in dreams where you’ve been dying to ask someone something, but when you meet them, your mind goes blank? Frustration and panic rose in me. She would leave me stuck with this huge unasked question.
“All I can do for you now is accelerate your transformation,” Delilah said. “Do you think that’s going to help you right now?”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling stupid. “The succubi think I need to collect info about Mr. Dorrington and my stepfather.”
“What do you think?”
“I guess so.”
“You guess you’ll get the information, or you guess you want to be taller and thinner again today?”
“Both. I want both.”
“Good enough,” Delilah said, her voice fading.
Suddenly I felt exhausted. This growing tall and thin thing took it out of a girl. I could totally see why little kids sleep like the dead, and also why they run around like maniacs. Because their bodies are new every day. Every day something different, and stronger and bigger. You feel like you just have to use it. And then after a few hours you’re pooped out.
The alarm on my phone went off super early, as I had known it would. I got ready for school, feeling freaky about how neatly I had laid out my clothes last night and piled my books up with the math homework on top and a note (check formula in homeroom before U turn it in) and...a diamond tennis bracelet?
My jeans were too short and way too loose. I cinched them with my one belt. When I was ransacking my closet yesterday, I’d chosen the summery flowered cotton top because it was tumble-dry and didn’t show stains or dirt, but now I saw that it hung loose on me.
I didn’t look fat or skinny. Just nicely put-together.
I stared bemusedly at the stranger in the mirror on the back of my Lair bedroom door. She looked good. Even my hair was behaving itself. I had meant to French-braid it again, but I thought about being a succubus, and how my stepfather liked to play with my hair, and how I was going to be sexier now and scare off the pervs with my aggressive sex power. I brushed it a little and let it swing long down my back.
The high-water jeans didn’t look powerful. They looked hand-me-down. I bent and rolled up the cuffs until they were capri length. Now it looked like I meant them to be short. The flowery top covered how my belt was the wrong length.
I nodded at the girl in the mirror. Look out, world!
“Did you leave a bracelet on my books?” I said, yawning as I came into the kitchen, where Pog was making breakfast.
“That would be Jee.” Pog put coffee on the table. Holy poop. Venti caramel macchiato. I inhaled coffee aroma and thought. Pog talks to Delilah but the others don’t. And she doesn’t talk to the others about Delilah.
I wondered if Delilah stopped me from asking my questions.
Then I wondered if I even knew what I wanted to ask her.
“Waffles?” Pog said. I could smell them. She put a crisp golden stack on a plate in front of me.
“You don’t have to do this. Cook for me. I love waffles, thank you. But I have money. I was just going to hit Mickey D on the way to school.”
“That reminds me,” Pog said. “Your per diem. And a house key.” She pointed at a key on the table next to my latte mug, and then she dug into the pocket of her ratty old pajama jacket and pulled out a huge wad of twenty- and fifty-dollar bills. “If you don’t want to carry all that, you can leave some of it in your room. Nobody will touch it. They all have way more money than you can imagine,” she added scornfully.
“I can’t take this,” I said, looking at the money. I could run a long way away with that money. I could put it in the bank for my college fund.
“Worry about that later. You have ten minutes to eat all those waffles and get the hell on the train.”
I peeled off a fifty-dollar bill and wadded it up small and tucked it into the smallest pocket of my jeans. Then I gave the rest back to Pog. “Thanks. I’ll take care of it tonight, I guess.”
Amanda walked in just as I was putting the Lair key on my key ring. “Do you have our phone numbers?” That set off a round of people texting each other at the table.
Then I ate. I chowed down waffles with loads of melted butter and this dark stuff Pog called sorghum molasses. It was strong and sweet. Now I’m on hell’s payroll. And wondered what I would be doing to earn it. But the food was so good, I stopped wondering.
When the waffles were gone and I was sucking down latte, trying to unstick my tongue from the molasses, I said, “So what’s the currency around here, if nobody cares about money?”
Pog looked at me funny. “You’re a bright kid.”
“And that’s not an answer.” In Social Studies last year we had learned about money. Cowrie shells, water, land, cows. Everybody has currency of some kind.
She shrugged. “Food. Everybody hoards junk food in their room. Steal my purse and you steal trash, but touch my Cheetos and die. Also, good food. If you can cook, you own their skinny asses.” Pog showed her teeth. “Beth and I cook. Reg, too. He’s our houseboy. You won’t meet him for a while. He’s stuck taking care of his sick mom.” I caught a scowl on Jee’s face. “If you want to suck up, find us a great new restaurant. Or a recipe. But don’t cook in my kitchen.”
I swallowed scalding latte. So that was how Pog managed to boss the others. Everybody loved food, anybody might cook, but only the privileged got to use this kitchen. Beth, I knew without asking, got cooking privileges because she was secretly a mom and hadn’t given all that up just because she was young and hot now.
“Oh,” Amanda said. “I dug into those bank records. Funny thing. Your stepfather has been making Paypal payments weekly to an email with absolutely no Google hits.”
“What does that mean?” Beth said.
“Means whoever he’s paying uses that email only for private business. Never logs it in anywhere public.”
There it was. Blackmail.
“You’d better go to school. Run the brain while you’re on the train,” Pog said.
I thanked her for the breakfast and booked.
I was definitely noticeably taller today. Bill Kummel watched me from a good six feet away. His mouth was hanging open, but I don’t think he knew that. That felt so good, I almost smiled.
I was remembering something from two years ago. A new Russian girl had started school a month late. She was older than the rest of us—Mom had said her placement tests had made her start as a junior. She was tall and pretty curvy, already a woman, while so many of us were still in braces and puppy fat. She seemed terribly self-conscious. I remembered thinking that was a shame that she felt shy when she was so beautiful. In her pl
ace I would have flaunted my adulthood. You’re all trapped here in school, I would have said, or at least thought.
Well, now I was in her shoes. I remembered her way of looking down through her lashes at everyone with a pretended queenly disdain.
I remembered using that disdain, or something like it, in the school bus yesterday. Boy, how it had worked!
Channeling Svetlana, I took my seat in homeroom, announced my presence in a bored voice when Ms. Caisson called my name, and dug into that Math formula.
Sanjay walked in a minute later and sat behind me. I pretended to be too absorbed in reading to see him.
However, I was very conscious of Sanjay behind me.
I fiddled with Math. I remembered Jee said Sanjay was watching me at the Egyptian exhibit, and Pog saying we were on schedule, some condescending crap. Hey, I thought “crap!” I hoped it wouldn’t come out of my mouth in class.
The thing was, Sanjay was one of those untouchables almost nobody messed with. Nobody talked to him, either, I myself had snubbed him in the lunchroom...two days ago? Even when we ate together, he didn’t talk. No, Sanjay did his homework and stayed out of trouble and talked to nobody.
Which got me thinking. What if that was a sign that Mr. Dorrington didn’t have a knife into Sanjay?
It wasn’t like there was anything to stick. He was just this big, doughy brown guy who wore his middle-aged-accountant clothes serenely, as if someday he would be a funeral parlor director. Job security.
I remembered looking myself in the face this morning in the Lair’s spare bedroom’s door mirror. Who was that girl? Tallish, slimmish, brownish, with really nice hair.
He used to hang around dumpy Melitta with the woolly hair and muddy complexion.
The new me looked better.
She was mean as hell, too. And angry.
Pat! A spitball landed near my arm on my desk.
I stood up very suddenly and looked behind me.
Two guys were yukking in the back row. Jacob and the hair-gel boy. They weren’t getting any support from Bill Kummel. He had his head down, busy with something. Uh-huh. The other two made eye contact with me and stopped yukking.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 45
