I studied them coolly. Hm. Jacob was sensitive about his zits. I took a deep breath—something I hadn’t done much since my bra had hit double-D size—made eye contact, and thought about jabbing him, being mean about his zits.
Right before my eyes, one of them popped.
Jacob’s hand flew to his face. His dismayed expression made me feel guilty for a nanosecond.
“Melitta, sit down,” Ms. Caisson said.
His hair-gel friend yukked.
I gave the friend The Look. What was he embarrassed about? He was checking out my boobs. I took that deep breath again. When he finally glanced at my face, he flushed really hard.
I knew where to jab him. While I thought, You’re losing self control, sucker, I put my right hand casually over my breast, and turned away, pressing my hand to my breast as I sat down.
When the bell rang, that guy didn’t leave his desk until everyone else had left the room.
I know, because I waited.
It looked as if he’d wet his pants.
I smiled meanly as the guy scuttled out, his books held low in front of him. I followed him into the hall.
“They were throwing the spitwads at me,” Sanjay said, appearing suddenly beside me in the rush of students going to second period.
I looked up, then realized Sanjay was now only a head taller than me, not a head-and-a-half like he used to be. “I didn’t notice you doing anything about it.”
“No,” he agreed. I waited, but that was it. No more Sanjayisms.
“Why are you sitting behind me in two classes?” I said suddenly.
“Three.” He smiled. His voice lilted ever so slightly. “May I join you at lunch?”
Something in my chest thumped. “What have you done to earn my friendship?” I countered.
“It’s not what I’ve done, but what I would like to do.” Sanjay used his lips a lot to talk. I caught myself watching them. After a moment he said, “Is there anything you need?”
I blinked. “As a matter of fact, there is. But you have to answer one question honestly.”
He bent his head. “Of course.”
I glanced up and down the hall. “Are you afraid of Mr. Dorrington?”
He stared at me for a moment as if the machinery was grinding away. Then he shook his head a little. “Should I be?”
“We’ll discuss it at lunch,” I said, and scampered away down the hall just as the bell started ringing.
Gym. President’s Fitness stuff. Ms. Waroo put me in a group doing crunches and then walked away to help the school nurse score the blood pressure test. She was away a long time.
After about two minutes, groans and whines erupted around me.
“How many are we supposed to do?”
“She said keep doing them until she stops the stopwatch.”
“But she’s way over there! When is this going to be over? I’m dying!”
“Ms. Waroo! Ms. Waroo!”
“She won’t look over here!”
“Owwwwwww! We should be done by now!”
I just kept crunching. In fact, I began to feel pretty good. I felt warm all over, but supple. My body folded up comfortably—way better than it had last week, when I’d weighed thirty pounds more. I lifted one foot off the floor, then the other, and started doing cross-crunches, touching each elbow to the alternate knee.
I was actually feeling really good. I sneaked a look at my watch.
Ms. Waroo came back six minutes later. I had been doing crunches the whole time.
The other girls had stopped. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed they were wearing cheerleader uniforms.
I’d been crunching with Daisy Rawson and her accomplices. And they were watching me back out of the corners of their eyes.
My heart completely failed to stop dead with fear.
Huh.
Ms. Waroo sent our group over to climb the rope.
It occurred to me as I waited for my turn at the rope that I never made eye contact with anyone during gym, not ever. I always kept my eyes on the floor. After a certain amount of practice every autumn, when this humiliating torment started up again after summer break, I relearned to narrow my focus so that if I had to look up, like when playing a ball game or something, I was only looking at the pitcher’s hand, or at the other girl’s racquet, at the goal but not at the goalie.
Daisy got five feet above ground on the rope, shrieked, and slid down again. There she complained about her palms burning to everyone in her cabal who was not shinning up the rope. There was a bit of white tape across the bridge of her nose.
Hah.
My turn. My horrible onesie gym uniform was looser on me, like all my clothes. Maybe it wouldn’t crawl up into my crack as I embarrassed myself by trying to climb.
I took hold of the rope with both hands and pulled experimentally. My feet lifted easily off the floor. Huh. I began slowly pulling myself up, hand over hand, letting my legs dangle. About twelve feet up my arms were getting tired, so I wrapped my legs around the rope, trying to get a grip that would rest my arms. I thrashed a bit, to the sound of laughter below me.
A bolt of something amazing shot up through the center of my body.
Well, I wasn’t stupid. I was nineteen, after all. I’d been doing this drill every two years since I was in kindergarten. I knew what it was.
I forced my arms to do more of the work. But I kept climbing.
Every time I took another grip on the rope with my legs, that feeling struck, like dark, sweet lightning. My arms went to jelly and my head swam. I just had to stop and wait it out.
The girls on the floor shrieked themselves silly.
Far on the other side of the room, I heard machinery start up—the floor polisher? Great. Now the janitor would see me having rope-gasms.
Grimly, I hauled myself another two pulls up, left, right—and bumped my head on something.
I looked up. It was the ceiling girder. I’d climbed thirty-five feet!
I clung there, feeling a wave of shock not unlike the recent rope-gasms. Wow. This must be more of my new body stuff. What else could I do with it?
“Don’t try to come down,” Ms. Waroo’s voice said from quite nearby.
I nearly let go of the rope in surprise. I clutched it with both hands and both legs and had another rope-gasm, swaying up there with my head close to the girder and the metal fittings where the rope attached to the girder squeaking in my ear.
When my vision cleared again, I glanced around myself carefully. Down on the floor, the cheerleaders were falling out laughing. And five feet away, Ms. Waroo was piloting the janitor’s big yellow Genie lift in my direction.
“You’re in your own little world, aren’t you, Melitta?” she said in an amused voice. “Can you hold on?”
“Don’t wait too long,” I squeezed out. I had the muscle to hold on, all right, but sooner or later one of these rope-gasms was going to turn me to jelly all over, and then I’d let go and go splat.
The machine growled up to me, and Ms. Waroo reached out a hand, and I swung one leg over, and pretty soon I had both feet in the basket on top. I slid down and sat on the metal floor while she pulled the lever to bring us back to the gym floor.
“You get an A. Go shower now,” she said loud enough for the cheerleaders to hear. They went silent.
I turned and looked her right in the eye. She liked me. Ms. Waroo thought I was funny, but I impressed her. Holy poop.
I said distinctly, “Thanks,” and walked off to the locker room.
Not one remark followed me.
I hurried through my shower and dressed fast. Then I thought, What am I afraid of, exactly? After all that rampant athleticism, they probably wouldn’t pinch me or pull my hair or knock my stuff off the bench or anything. Not today.
I wondered if looking sexy would scare girls, as well as boys. My eyebrows went up. Worth a try.
So I lingered in the bathroom, blowing my hair thoroughly dry, thinking how I wanted it to look, remembering how Je
e just bent her hair around her brush and bam, instant style. Mine was too long to do the fun, flippy shapes hers made. But it did show some body today, some waves that looked intentional somehow. The tendrils around my face curled up. I looked, yes, dewy fresh.
Then I had a daring thought.
I didn’t own any makeup. But all these other girls did.
Coolly, with one ear cocked at the door, I dipped into one locker, than another. I selected a lipstick and a pencil thingy that I imagined would work on my eyelids, then put the other things back and shut the locker. Then I went into the bathroom and started dabbing.
Ten minutes later, I was wiping off the lipstick, having made a mess of my mouth. The eyeliner didn’t look so bad—a little dark, maybe. Of course it looks dark, Melitta. You’ve never worn eyeliner before.
Noises from the gym door—my classmates were returning and hitting the showers.
Hastily, I tossed the lipstick and eyeliner on the floor in front of the locker where I’d found them.
Then I went back to the mirrors. They fascinated me. Who the heck was that? She was the sexy, grown-up version of me I’d always imagined. I’d always believed I was doomed to look like my grandmother, who resembled a blue-haired troll. Well, here I was. The remains of the lipstick had left my mouth stained a little redder. The eyeliner made me look like Cleopatra or Nefertiti or someone. My hair was a miracle of long, thick, casual, chestnut-black tresses. They bounced.
I patted them and swung them and let them bounce just as the first girls came squabbling into the bathroom. Their mouths fell open as I turned, looked them up and down, shouldered my backpack, and walked out, nearly running over Daisy Rawson en route. She made an angry-hen noise that stopped in her throat as she looked up at me.
No time like the present for changing stuff.
I looked her right in the eye. “Hello, Daisy. How does your nose feel today?” And I waited for an answer.
God, I’m so mean.
She just harrumphed and blundered past me into the bathroom.
I walked out. I went to Lit.
Ms. Remirovski’s classroom was empty when I went in and took my seat. The teacher was reading a book at her desk. When I was sitting, she looked up from her book.
“Oh, Melitta, I’m glad you’re here early. Have you read this?” She showed me her book. The Hunger Games. “Written in this millennium, right? It’s good.”
My mouth gaped open.
“I think we’ll skip Anna Karenina and read this next instead. I hope you haven’t read the whole year’s syllabus already, the way you did last year.” She actually smiled at me. “Tolstoy would not sit well with you, I think.”
“Read him last summer,” I growled, and cleared my throat. “It didn’t suck. Although I was mad that she killed herself. What is it with nineteenth century male novelists, anyway?”
“Probably punishing their mothers and their wives,” Ms. Remirovski said drily. “Most of those men wouldn’t say boo to a goose, in real life.”
I think she gets these expressions from the books she reads. Maybe Katniss Everdeen would teach her some new ones.
We talked about current bestsellers until the classroom started filling up.
Sanjay did indeed sit behind me again. He passed me a faint smile. I stared poker-faced back at him and tried to think what the third class we took together was. Civics?
Then Ms. Remirovski shocked me again. “Bill, Daniel, Jacob, I’d like you to switch seats today with these three girls in the front row.” She pointed.
“I like it back here,” Bill complained.
“Why?” Daniel said.
“Do I have to?” Jacob said.
Ms. Remirovski didn’t explain. The three girls looked at each other—one had been in gym with me not twenty minutes ago—and then they hauled their backpacks to the back of the room without a word. The boys took their seats.
That was all.
Nobody threw a spitball for the whole hour, that I knew of.
When the bell rang, I stood up and found Sanjay standing behind me. He looked at me. I shrugged.
We turned together and walked out of Lit and down to the lunchroom without a word.
We still had plenty of privacy at our freaks table in the lunchroom. I was darned grateful for it.
Sanjay started talking.
“You look very nice. Why is that?”
“I’m turning mean, Sanjay, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’m hoping to annoy people.”
“Like Mr. Dorrington?” He was taking his lunch off his tray and arranging it on the table as if he would get graded on it. He didn’t look at me. He said quietly, “Melitta, is this really you? You look very different. You talk so differently.”
I had been ready for almost anything to come out of Sanjay’s mouth, but this totally threw me. He’d said the right things. I was so surprised that someone had finally noticed the changes in me—without exclamations of horror—that I almost burst into tears.
“It’s me,” I said. “It’s happening really fast. I thought—” I stopped. I’d come very close to blurting out the whole thing to him. “No one else has noticed, really.”
“I like it.”
“Even when I was mean to you the other day?”
“Even then,” he said. Sanjay sure didn’t talk much. But he smiled at me, and the kindness in his eyes took my breath away. “You woke me up.”
“So you normally sleep through school?” I said. I often wondered how he could just drift around like a very tall, round ghost when this school was so awful for, well, both of us.
“Except in three classes,” he said. He smiled again. I forgot everything else for a moment.
My phone vibrated. Since no one ever calls me except my mom, I keep it on vibrate instead of “off” when I’m at school. After all, she’s the guidance counselor. It’s not like I’ll get yelled at for taking her texts. I came back to earth.
Yup. Mom.
COME TO MY OFFICE IMMEDIATELY.
And so it started—the official harassment. I turned my phone off for reals and put it in my backpack.
“Why did you ask if I am afraid of Mr. Dorrington?” Sanjay said.
I leaned forward. “Listen, we don’t have much time. I have reason to believe he may be blackmailing my parents. Especially my stepfather, but he may be pressuring my mom, too. I want you to go home and write that I said that, write it down somewhere and date it, in case you need a paper trail to prove I said it.”
Sanjay looked shocked. “You think he might try to kill you?”
“He’ll want to, after next period,” I said grimly.
“Text it to my email,” Sanjay said. “Email is forever.” He gave me his email.
“Smart. Thanks.” I did it then and there.
When I looked up at him he was no longer smiling. He looked concerned.
“Look, who are you?” I said impulsively. “You don’t talk in class, ever. I’m surprised they don’t hassle you for it. I don’t even know if you’re, like, in chess club or something.”
“Who are you, really?” he countered, but he looked extremely serious now. “‘There are a long way and a short way home. I pack my bags, prepare to make my choice. Familiar or unfamiliar, dawn or gloam, there are a long way and a short way home.’” I was about to ask him so who he was talking about, but at his next words I felt my mouth hang open, empty. “‘Drop what I’m doing, ready myself, come! Unrecognizable imperious voice. There are a long way and a short way home. I pack my bags, prepare to make my choice.’”
I was speechless.
“That’s poetry. By Erin Brandeis-Jaeger. I’ve wanted to tell you that for a long time,” Sanjay said calmly, although I saw a tear forming in the corner of his right eye. “Today I remembered that the advice we want most to give others is the advice we wish we were being given. But I must tell you that you remind me of this poem.”
I sucked in a breath. My head was exploding. I dug into my backpack and pulled out something els
e I had taken from my mother’s desk drawer. “Will you do me another favor? Turn this on during Social Studies today. You’ll know when.”
He took it and put it in his pocket without looking at it. “Perhaps you should tell me the rest of your plan.”
So I did.
Social Studies. Hour of reckoning. I walked in feeling a lot more anxious, knowing that Sanjay was in on it, kind of. I’d thought having an ally, or at least a witness, would help. Instead I was a nervous wreck.
My case of nerves seemed to reassure Mr. Dorrington, however. At first he seemed surprised to see me, then he looked smug. That convinced me he was behind my stepfather getting me locked out. He thought he had me on the run. Well, get ready for some new ideas, you jerk, I thought.
“Today we’ll begin your oral presentations on famous criminals who were rewarded for their crimes,” Mr. Dorrington said, and I was stunned as I realized the arrogance behind this assignment. It was like he was daring me—and all of his victims—to expose him. Suddenly I saw what Jee meant about killing him, and also I understood Pog’s warning about killing blackmailers.
This could be interpreted as taking the short way home.
Well, that was kind of why I’d signed Delilah’s contract.
“Melitta,” Mr. Dorrington said, totally not to my surprise, “Why don’t you start? Come up to the front of the room where we can see you.”
This suggestion would have crushed the life out of me a week ago. At five one and one hundred eighty pounds, I’d hated it when anyone looked at me.
But I’d known he would do this. It was part of my plan, really. Nail him to the perch and then—just nail him.
I took my notes with me. I cleared my throat. Sanjay, in the seat behind my empty seat, took the recorder out of his pocket and laid it on his desk. I stood up extra tall, so my thirty-pounds-lighter, three-inches-taller body could be seen a little better.
“Like our teacher Mr. Dorrington here, Mrs. Potter Palmer was a brazen criminal. She used her position in society to encourage innocent people to put their trust in her, and then she took their valuables and hid them away and wouldn’t give them back. However, unlike Mrs. Potter Palmer, our teacher doesn’t give back what he steals from us, because what he takes can’t be seen or heard. It is in our hearts. He steals our trust and our security. From some, he might even take money. If anyone in this room has had Dorrington trouble, you know, DT?” I made quote hooks with my fingers. “Or if you know someone who has been harmed by him? Contact me at my gmail or Facebook.” I gave the addresses. “Thank you.”
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 46
