Already I’d disliked him. When he said that, I’d tucked that phrase away in my dumpy, sallow, raging teenage heart.
And here it was, saving my butt when I needed it.
The nurse got a very disapproving look. “Very well.” She flipped some papers on her clipboard and handed me two copies of a single sheet of paper. “We’ll need some kind of identification.” She sure thought she was crafty.
“I don’t have any. I was kidnapped. I left my bag in that gym. It’s probably lost forever,” I added grumpily, and then shut up, because she had me talking again.
I was pretty sure I didn’t need identification. They would have to prove I was me, first. Which they couldn’t, because I didn’t look like me. They had five days to do it in.
Meanwhile, I would spend as much time as humanly possible hollering to Delilah for help. My plan depended on her. How I would reach her, I had no idea.
In that moment, the door opened and Delilah walked in, wearing a doctor’s white coat.
“Thank you, nurse, I’ll handle this,” she said.
The nurse said, “No, thank you,” looking at me with dislike.
Delilah held out her hand. “Is that the chart?”
The nurse gave it to her and left without a backward glance.
Delilah waited for the door to shut behind her. Then she waved to me to come behind the desk, reached under the edge of the desk, and let me see how she threw a switch. “Recorder off.”
Her hair was pulled back in a pony tail. She didn’t look quite so sleek somehow. I realized her skin looked blotchy, as if she had no makeup on. Delilah without makeup! It was unthinkable. She must be pretending to look like that.
As if she heard me thinking, she smiled. “Yes, it’s a disguise.”
I blurted, “I’m so glad to see you! When can you get me out of here?”
“Patience,” she said. “That depends on what you want out of all this.”
“Want?” I said incredulously. “How about an open door?”
“Do you want to give up on nailing your mother’s blackmailer? Are you going to leave her with,” she paused to consult the clipboard in her hand, “Howard?”
“I can do that just as well outside this horrible place,” I said, and suddenly realized I was being unfair. The locked ward might not suck as bad as high school.
“Can you?” Delilah waited while I stared at her blindly, thinking. She pointed. “Better fill that out right away. The clock starts ticking the moment you sign it.”
Blinking, I pulled the five-day paper toward me and bent over it with the pen the nurse had left. “Do I have to give them some kind of identification? I mean, tell them who I am, if I’m not Melitta Grove?”
“Nope.”
I smiled happily. If it hadn’t involved waiting five whole days, I’d have been delighted at this victory. It wasn’t that easy, of course. Gnawing the end of the pen, I realized I’d have to fill in something in the name-address-phone fields.
“Would you like me to help?”
“Please,” I said gratefully.
Delilah dictated a fake address, a phone number which she said was a land line that would work but nobody would answer. “Would you object to being Jee’s sister, for purposes of this record?”
I thought of elegant, permanently-pissed-off Jee and smiled. “That would be cool.”
“Make up a first name for yourself. Put her last name down as Pungguk.” She spelled it for me.
I made a face. “What does it mean?”
“It means, ‘owl who longs for the moon.’”
I love owls. That’s why my Facebook name is Owlfan. After a moment’s thought, I signed the five-day paper, Brownie Pungguk.
“Sign both copies,” Delilah said. “You get to keep one, in case the office ‘loses’ theirs.”
I filled in my info and signed the second copy. “Do you think they would?”
Delilah checked her watch, wrote on both copies, and clipped the hospital’s copy on top of my chart. Then she sat back in the swivel chair behind the desk.
“Actually, no. That’s why I’m counseling you to think about your plans before you walk out. The staff here are favorably disposed toward you—all except that intake nurse. She was ready to help you, and you gave her a hard time.”
“She was?” I gaped. “She didn’t want to give me the five-day paper!”
“They never want you to sign a five-day paper. They’re medical professionals. They know better than you do, always. Even if she’d been able to discharge you tomorrow, she wouldn’t have wanted you signing that thing.”
“I hate the mental health profession,” I snarled.
“Focus, Ms. Pungguk. I only have so much time with you.”
“Right, focus. Right.” I was totally bemused. “What on earth can I accomplish in here that would be better than getting the hell out?”
Delilah put her elbows on the desk and clasped her hands. She then put her pinkies out and touched them to the desk. “Your family wants you locked down, under control.”
“That’s what they’re doing to me now!” I protested, spreading my hands at the walls of this tiny interview room.
“It was a stupid thing to do. Your father—”
“My stepfather,” I insisted. “His name is Howard.”
“Howard was apparently so confident he could handle you that he never made a plan for the day when you escaped his control. Did he think you would live with your mother forever?” she asked rhetorically and shook her head.
“I might have,” I said uncomfortably. “I mean, I flunked senior year. U of C would hardly take me after that. Mom and Howard said that if I got my grades up this year, they’d let me reapply somewhere with lower standards.” I swallowed and flushed. “When you came along, I’d about given up hope.”
She looked at me with silent sympathy.
“So how does Howard being unprepared for me to leave home make it smarter for me to stay in the loony bin?”
Delilah put one finger in the air. Her manicure was still nice, even if her clothes and hair and makeup job were dowdy. “First of all, you were smart to deny your identity. Until the staff here know for sure that you are indeed Howard’s daugh—stepdaughter—they can’t medicate you, treat you, or even make any assumptions about your history.”
I made a face. “Sooner or later, I guess they will.”
“Maybe not. If you continue to look very different from the Melitta Grove on record—if you look even taller, for example, and even thinner. Less than a week ago you were five-one and weighed almost two hundred pounds.”
I winced. “Don’t sugar-coat it.”
“That reminds me, I filled one of the drawers in your private room here with candy bars. Try not to let the nurses catch you with them.”
“What?”
She pointed at my waistline. “You’ll gain weight if you don’t eat at least double the calories they will give you.”
I looked down and groaned. She was right. My high-water jeans were already too tight to button the top button. “Thanks. I am starving.”
She resumed, “The point is, you don’t look like yourself now. All they can do is produce school pictures, nurse’s records, and witnesses who know you as the old Melitta.”
I interrupted her. “Look, I worked all this out yesterday when I was crawling around under the bleachers, waiting to get arrested. If you could see your way to giving me another few inches and pulling some more pounds off, there’s no way they can claim I’m her. Boom, I’d be out of here even faster than five days.”
Delilah nodded. “But then you would be through with your mother.” My blood chilled. “She won’t know you any more. You will have no leverage in your fight to get Howard out of her life. You do want that, don’t you?”
At this bald question I felt a hot, terrible sob rise up in my throat. I covered my face with my hands. “I don’t know.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said quietly.
I let s
tupid sobs flop me around. There were, of course, tissues handy on the desk. I wondered why I couldn’t bring myself to ruin Mom’s marriage to that asshole, and I bawled and felt really dumb. “I feel—” I gulped. “I really feel it has to be her choice. And the awf-hic-awful thing is, I’m afr-hic she’ll choose him.” My face crumpled all over again.
This was where Howard had me by the short hair. What if Mom would rather see me suffer than leave Howard?
I didn’t think I could face that. It was why I’d never told on him before.
My mom isn’t perfect but she’s all I’ve got.
Delilah sat out my tears.
As I began to calm down, I realized that I felt less afraid of losing my mother than I had before. I guess watching her watch me get chased down like a criminal, shot full of drugs, strapped to a gurney, and hauled off to the booby hatch had kind of blunted my filial trust and love.
I also knew that I was not going to let her protect Howard. What he did to me, he had to be doing to other girls. Because I hadn’t let him touch me for more than eight months. I supposed Mom had a right to sacrifice me—wait a minute, no, she did not—but, well, anyway she had no business siccing him on other people’s daughters.
I swept all my used tissues off the desk and flung them into the wastebasket. Then I gave a grim sniff.
“Okay. Tell me how staying in here will give me leverage.”
Delilah told me.
That afternoon, Sanjay came to visit me. He looked large and sober and very responsible in his pressed short-sleeved shirt and khakis, with a vast blond linen jacket over them. They showed him into the same little room where Delilah and I had met. He shut the door on them and I showed him how to turn the recording switch off.
I’m not ashamed to say I fell into his arms for a giant hug.
“Are you okay?” he said to my scalp.
I sniffled against his armpit. “Kinda.” It would have felt really nice just to stand there and cry up against him.
“What’s the plan?” he said.
I let go, sat down at the desk, and explained. “Here’s the deal. All this has happened pretty fast for my stepfather and Mr. Dorrington. I think Mr. Dorrington ordered Howard to have me put away. Howard could have handled this a lot more smoothly. But Howard was rattled, too.” I remembered plunging my hand into his chest and squeezing his stuttering heart in my fist. I bet that had rattled him nicely. “So instead of smooth, they’ve done this arrest and hospitalization thing, on top of Howard locking me out of the house and siccing the cops on me, which apparently has made the cops suspicious of anything Howard says about me.”
That idea filled me with so much satisfaction that I fell silent, remembering how Howard had tried to get the cops to see it his way and failed. I went off into gloating dreamland.
“Melitta?”
“Oh.” I returned to the tiny room, the box of tissues, the desk, the recording equipment hiding inside the desk, the layers and layers of nurses and locked doors and doctors outside—and moon-faced Sanjay waiting patiently for me to tell him my plan. “Well, if they can’t positively identify me as me, then they, I mean the hospital, have put themselves in a really tricky position, legally. So don’t call me Melitta. I told them my name is Brownie Pungguk.”
“That’s Indonesian,” Sanjay said, surprising me. “Minangkabau language.”
“Uh, yes. I have a—a friend who’s Indonesian who will pose as my sister and come get me if I need her to. Which reminds me, I need to give you her number. And find out if we got any nibbles after I accused Mr. Dorrington in class.” Goosebumps flew over me again as I remembered sitting down at my desk in Mr. Dorrington’s class, instead of walking out and down to my mother’s office as instructed by the PA. I recalled the faces turned toward me in the gym. I don’t deal well with attention. At this moment, I was having a delayed-reaction, king-size attack of the heebie jeebies. “‘Got DT? Call MG.’ Was that your idea?”
Sanjay shook his head. “It was done while we were in class.”
“Whoever did it knew I’m OwlFan on Facebook.”
“All they’d have to do is search on Chase Washington. You did put Chase Washington in your profile, didn’t you?”
I nodded. My throat was getting tight. “Tell me what’s been happening.”
Sanjay sat back comfortably in the visitor chair and reported on yesterday afternoon as if it were a movie he’d watched. That guy didn’t ruffle. He finished, “Everyone wanted your digits. There was almost a riot. The principal called on Mr. Dorrington to say a few words and calm people down, and he refused. He walked out of the gym.”
“Smartest thing he could do,” I said, though my skin crawled at the thought of my Social Studies teacher. “They were dumb to hospitalize me in such a goofy public way.” Delilah had said that, and I saw now how right she was.
“How should they have done it?” he said, sounding amused.
I shrugged. “I dunno. Probably Howard could have drugged me at home and I’d have woken up here, with no drama and no publicity.”
Sanjay smiled. I don’t think I’d ever seen him smile before. His whole face changed. Instead of looking like a junior alderman, all round stomach and ill-fitting linen jacket, when he smiled he looked like a kid. He couldn’t be more than eighteen or nineteen, like me.
“There was much drama. The principal shouted at Ms. Waroo, who was running the Spirit Bar. She was holding the microphone while he did it, so everyone heard him. Mr. Dorrington seems to have scared our principal.”
“Of course he has,” I said slowly, reasoning it out. “He wouldn’t leave someone in power over him if he could find a way to control them.”
Sanjay nodded. “The principal yelled at Ms. Waroo that she was suspended, and the students carried her out on their shoulders. The principal tried to make them stay. But they would not. Some of them were stamping their feet and chanting ‘Got DT? Call MG!’ on the bleachers.”
“I remember that,” I said, smiling myself.
“I was worried about you. They made you lie down. You seemed spaced out.”
“Drugged. Injected,” I said crisply. “Go on. What about the Facebook page? What about my phone?”
He hauled my phone out of his pocket. “Do you want it?”
I shook my head. “Either they’ll take it away from me or they’ll monitor my calls. Plus, having it would totally give away my identity.”
He nodded and slipped my phone back in his pocket. “Your in-box filled up with texts and calls in the first hour after Social Studies. People were texting during the pep rally. I checked your Facebook page. A lot of posts and comments have been deleted so far. I know because I took screen captures every three minutes, all night long. Maybe someone posted, and maybe the same person deleted their post, or someone else forced them to delete it. But I have the captures.”
My eyes stung. “You’re amazing, Sanjay.” He did all that for me!
He flushed and ducked his head. “I owe you for those spitballs.”
“That’s nothing,” I said largemindedly. “You’re—you’re thinking about all this. You’ve got great ideas. I didn’t ask you for that. I didn’t even know you could do all that. That was smart. And I mean, why would you bother?”
“So what I want to know,” he said, swallowing and looking away at the blank wall, “is, what do you want me to do with all this data? We have names of people who contacted you. Some people just said they have ‘DT’—Dorrington trouble. Some actually made concrete accusations, or at least hinted strongly at them. Many of the deleted posts are the best ones.”
“They would be.” I gnawed my lower lip. “Deli—um, I’ve been formulating a plan. The big idea is to make a stink. Take advantage of Howard and Dorrington overreacting, going too public and snatching me out of pep rally. Get a wedge between them if we can. If I can hold them off by refusing to identify myself as Melitta Grove, Howard can’t have me locked up somewhere more permanent or turned into a drugged and drooling idiot. M
eanwhile, you should keep the noise at school as loud and sustained as possible. Put some courage into the kids who have been blackmailed.” I looked at the same patch of wall Sanjay had been studying. “Did—did anyone make any accusations against my stepfather?”
Sanjay didn’t say anything. I finally looked at him. His grave, moonlike face was full of sympathy.
My heart sank. I was going to have to carry this ball all by myself.
I treated myself to a big sigh, and my brain cleared a bit. “Okay. Make sure the cops get all those texts and calls and Facebook posts and screen captures. Explain to them what Got-DT-call-MG means, if they don’t know already. You don’t have to claim to believe any of it. Just report on it. It’ll be more believable if they think you’re, I dunno, representing for the school paper. Impartial.”
“I can pretend,” he said, and smiled again.
I felt myself blushing so hard, I had to look away.
“You, too, are being very brave—Pungguk.”
I breathed deeply, shaking my head. “Don’t. The armor’s only skin deep.”
In the silence that followed, I saw him take looks at me, apparently examining me all over, and then look away. Then back at me. Then away.
He spoke slowly. “Will you—will I recognize you when I see you again, Pungguk?”
I blinked. This was the first time someone had actually come out and said that the changes in me were, well, kinda spooky or something. I gave Sanjay a long look of my own.
He appeared anxious.
I blurted, “What do you know? What do you think you know?” I added, since nobody could ever imagine what had been happening to me, Delilah and Jee and the succubi and the Lair and growing tall and losing weight and becoming—becoming my ideal self. At that thought I wanted to leap up and run screaming in circles. What is my ideal self? Who am I? What’s happening to me? When will it stop? When will it STOP? I felt breathless and panicky.
This tiny room was too small for running in circles. Although it did seem to be soundproof.
Sanjay waited, and when I said nothing, he shook his head. “I must hope that I will recognize that look in your eye,” he said finally.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 48
