Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5

by Jennifer Stevenson

  “Shoot,” said Amanda.

  “For one thing, apparently, my last stepfather put half a million bucks into a college trust fund for me.”

  Jee whistled. “There’s your motive.”

  “What?” I blinked. “Oh. You mean, there’s Howard’s motive. Only, he didn’t have to molest me just to get that money.”

  “Guys like that don’t have to molest anybody. It’s just more fun for them,” Pog said.

  Jee said, “The question is, when did Dorrington find out about the half-mil?”

  I blinked. “What makes you think he knows about it?”

  “Oh, come on,” Jee said. “He didn’t have his knife into Howard until after you started dragging around school looking like a zombie, yesno?”

  Looked at from the outside, I could see why my change of affect, as my mother would call it, might have tipped off someone who was already suspicious. Dorrington must have been wary of Howard from the first. Because the district psychiatrist is the guy most likely to hear about, say for example, someone being blackmailed. Dorrington must have watched Howard closely. And with good reason. Howard could have gotten a story about blackmail out of anybody. He was slick.

  “I think,” I said slowly, “I need to talk to my nemesis.”

  “Howard?” Beth said, wrinkling her nose.

  “Daisy Rawson.”

  Finding Daisy Rawson was not as hard as all that. Her mother was on the school board, and those addresses were on the website for Chase Washington.

  “Can I see Daisy?” I said to the stiff-faced woman in a silk blouse and a navy German Army skirt who answered the Rawson front door. “It’s Melitta Grove from school.” I didn’t mention Mom, obviously. If Daisy had dropped out for Howardy reasons, and her parents knew it, then my family connections wouldn’t help to get me past the front door.

  “I don’t know, dear. She’s not feeling well.” Mrs. Rawson was taking in my costume, for it was nothing less. Beth had put it together for me. Certainly I would never choose to wear a pink-and-green pastel plaid pleated skirt, a white blouse with a lace collar, or all that gold jewelry. The Docs were my hold-out garb. My argument to Beth when she was dressing me up was, Mrs. Rawson would never believe I was a high school student if I didn’t wear something teenagery. Jee had backed me up on that. But Beth had also done something totally other to my hair. My hair now looked expensive.

  Apparently it was the hair that did the job, that and the gold hoops, and the diamond tennis bracelet Jee had given me. Mrs. Rawson looked from my hair to my jewelry and opened the door. “Just for a few minutes.”

  “I really appreciate this. I feel like I’m intruding,” I added, which was no less than the truth.

  Mrs. Rawson led me upstairs to a room so pink it hurt my eyes.

  Daisy was in there, staring at her blank computer screen. She didn’t look around when we came in.

  “Dear, one of your school friends to see you,” Mrs. Rawson said. When she got no answer, she closed the door behind her.

  I waited a minute or so, hoping Mrs. Rawson wasn’t one of the listen-at-the-door type moms.

  I swallowed. “It’s me, Daisy, Melitta.”

  She looked around at that. She really did look different. Her hair was a mess, and she looked, I dunno, not like she’d been crying exactly. But her face was puffy and her eyes were dull. A zit had bloomed on her chin and another one on her forehead.

  I had a sudden feeling that I was looking into a mirror. This was what I must have looked like two years ago, when Howard started in on me, and I lost hope.

  I stood a little taller in my skinnier, taller, prettier body, while Daisy took in all the details of my jewelry and hairdo and fancy outfit.

  “What happened to you?” Daisy said dully.

  I went for the short answer. “I ran away from home.”

  She didn’t seem to take this in. Just stared at me. Like she was waiting for me to say something that she had to respond to, because it was too much work to make conversation.

  Suddenly I felt bad for her. Daisy was clearly not equipped to deal with Howard. Not that I’d done Olympic class work, either. But years of training with my mom’s psychobabble had definitely taught me the language, you might say.

  I went and sat on the bed and pulled her swiveling computer chair around so that she faced me. Daisy just slumped in the chair for the ride.

  Very gently, I said, “He did it to me, too.”

  Her eyes began to shift. Her face seemed to swell, and it got red. She didn’t look pretty or perfect or mean or bossy or anything. Tears started to spill down her face. Her perfect lips, now chapped and puckered, parted. “Go on,” she croaked.

  I nodded. “About two years ago. Right after he married my mom. He would come into my room and tell me we ‘needed to have a little talk,’ and then he would whisper stuff to me.”

  Daisy flinched.

  I nodded slowly. I guessed she knew what I was talking about, all right. “Yeah. That stuff. And then he would touch me. First just stroking on my arm. Then my back outside my clothes. Then under my clothes.” I wanted to gag suddenly. “Do you have a bathroom?”

  Her eyes turned toward a doorway, and I got up and marched into a blindingly pink bathroom and knelt before the toilet. Sure enough, all Pog’s waffles came up, and then the bacon, and the latte, and the orange juice, and the donuts, and the pop tarts, and the toaster strudel. I retched until the bathroom echoed.

  When I felt empty and my throat was raw and my stomach was sore with heaving, I felt the spasms settle down.

  The echo was still going.

  Next to me, Daisy was yarking into the sink.

  I wiped off my face with toilet paper, stood up, shut the toilet, and flushed.

  Then I went and pulled Daisy’s hair back out of the sink. She shook and shook. After a while, she settled down too. I steered her to sit on the toilet so I could rinse my mouth out, using a pink tooth cup, and run cold water over the yark in the sink. Then I handed her the cup.

  She rinsed, spat, and drank two glasses of water in a row. “I hate him,” she whispered.

  “Me, too.” I sat on the edge of the spa tub. I reached for the cup and she handed it over. I filled it at the tub faucet and drank until my throat didn’t feel so rough.

  “Tell me the rest,” she said.

  I didn’t want to go on, but she was showing signs of life. As little as I liked her, I felt fiercely determined that Howard mustn’t be allowed to destroy her.

  “Okay, but if I get diarrhea, you’ll be sorry.” Our eyes met, and we laughed. I felt better. “He told me that my mother wouldn’t believe me if I told on him. He said no judge would accept the word of an MSW counselor over a psychiatrist. He said mom would be broke if she divorced him, and I’d never get into college, and her reputation would be ruined and she would have to leave the school and probably the state. He said he would make me sorry.”

  I remembered shivering whenever he pulled out that last threat. But why? After all those first-world, white-collar threats, I don’t know what else I had imagined he could do to me to make me sorry, since clearly he was a coward. How had I not seen that?

  I hadn’t seen it because I was feeling like a five-year-old. He’d molested a seventeen-year-old and then reduced her mentally down to five. What kind of person didn’t feel safe even with a seventeen-year-old?

  “Coward,” I said out loud. “Rhymes with Howard.”

  A giggle blurted out of her, along with some snot. I reached over to the vanity and handed her the pink box of pink tissues sitting there.

  “He’s a coward, Daisy. I scared the poop out of him just by standing up to him a little.” I didn’t mention the special effects. “I admit he’s a sociopath and a pretty ballsy one at that. That doesn’t mean he can’t be brought down.”

  I looked her over. She seemed a lot more lively. I wondered if I would have perked up this fast if I’d had someone to talk to, someone who believed me, two years ago. Or was fast recove
ry just part of being one of those blonde-blue-eyed-and-perfect people?

  She said, “But what can we do? You said yourself, he’s a psychiatrist. We’re just kids. Why would anyone listen to us?”

  “You’re saying things he told you to think,” I said. I didn’t really have an answer for this one. But I was beginning to realize that we weren’t totally without resources. I rubbed my forehead. “The thing is, he’s right about one thing. We’re kids. Well, we’re under twenty-one. We don’t know what our options are.”

  “We can’t do anything,” she said, slumping again.

  I scowled at her. “Why did you drop out of school?”

  That revived her instantly. “I did not drop out of school! Who says that?”

  “I dunno. Just a rumor going around, I guess,” I said. I didn’t want to get her mad at Sanjay for repeating it to me. “So what really happened? Why aren’t you in school?”

  “I had a breakdown,” she confessed. “I couldn’t go back to any more sessions with him.”

  “Say his name,” I advised. “Say, ‘Howard the Coward.’ It helps.”

  She giggled. “Anyway, I hate Howard the Coward. I told my mother I wouldn’t go back to school if they were going to make me have psychotherapy.”

  “Why did they do that, anyway?” I said.

  “Because I told them I hate pink.” She looked around the bathroom with loathing. “Everything in my room. Every stitch I own. Some days I get to school and I want to rip it off my body and run naked and screaming through the halls, ‘I ha-a-a-ate pi-i-i-i-ink!’”

  I started laughing. After a minute she laughed too. She wasn’t a total pain in the ass.

  “So why didn’t you just tell them you like pink, and get out of psychotherapy?”

  She hunched her shoulders. “By then he had done his evaluation and he said I had a lot of unresolved—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” I interrupted. Howard the Coward doing his famous number. Boy. Let a psychiatrist even blink at you, and now suddenly he was smarter about you than you were. I’d known this before, but I always thought it was a parent thing—my mom, then Howard the Coward.

  I liked that. I was going to think of him that way always.

  I thought about the situation some more. “So why,” I said slowly, “haven’t they sent you back to therapy, especially since you became, what’s Howard the Coward’s term, ‘resistant to therapy?’”

  “My parents said they won’t make me. And I won’t do it,” she added, looking mulish. “I don’t care if I flunk out!” She dissolved into tears.

  I handed her the tissue box again. “You do so. You care.” I thought about the woman in the German Army skirt. Somehow I didn’t think saying I won’t would fly with her. Daisy’s mom must suspect something.

  Oh, well. I’d been burning so many bridges lately, what was one more?

  I slapped my pastel-plaid-skirted knees and stood up. “Do we still smell like vomit? Because I don’t think your mom is going to understand our bonding moment. I need to look as respectable as I can.”

  Daisy blew her nose one last time, looking me up and down past her tissue. “You look great.”

  I scowled. “I’m not white.”

  “You’re beige and elegant and omigod, those gold hoops!” Instantly she transformed into her lunchroom fluttery pink identity. It was a little creepy. Yet it felt kind of nice to have a girly girl fussing over how great I looked. She checked out my jewelry and my hair and then she looked at my army boots and laughed. “You’re still Melitta. Whew.”

  “Should I borrow some shoes from you?” I said uneasily. “I’m serious. This is not going to be a fun conversation. I have to be totally convincing.”

  Daisy caught her breath. “Are you going to tell her what you told me?”

  I put my chin down as if I was about to walk into a poopstorm. “Yup.”

  It went pretty well. I explained that my mom had a pathological need for male companionship and protection, which flew like a bird for Mrs. Rawson, who was clearly a charter member of the same club. I said I had protected my mom up until now because of her feelings for Howard—it was already hard to bite back the Coward—and because he was halfway nice to her and because he had threatened me. But yesterday, I explained to Mrs. Rawson, I had finally told Mom the truth, and she had taken it really badly, as I’d expected she would. That’s when I’d realized that it would take more than my unsupported word to convince Mom. So, remembering the rumor that Daisy wasn’t feeling well, I’d followed a hunch and come over.

  I used as many psychobabble words as I could remember, which believe me was plenty after a lifetime with my mom and two years with Howard the Coward.

  Worked beautifully.

  Mrs. Rawson’s expression got darker and darker as I talked. When I’d told her exactly what Howard the Coward did, and Daisy, who was listening in, had broken down in hysterics, that pretty much ended my presentation.

  I didn’t feel one hundred percent triumphant and invincible when I was done, watching Daisy subside into hiccups while her mom blotted her face with tissues. I kinda wanted to hurl again.

  Mrs. Rawson looked over Daisy’s shiny blonde head at me. “I’d like to discuss this with you further, but not right now.”

  I agreed. “This is her second bout since I got here. I’d feed her some chicken soup and put her to bed.”

  Mrs. Rawson primped Daisy’s face a little more, kissed her, and stood up. “I’ll feed her a nice hot toddy.”

  Okay, that explained how Mrs. R. got through her day. At least she didn’t hide behind denial and shrink talk when she was confronted with a crisis.

  “I’m going back to school tomorrow, Mrs. Rawson.” Shivers rippled over my skin. Would I ever not-hate going to school? Whatever. There were only a few days left before commencement. As miserable as Daisy had made me in the past, I didn’t want to see her get slaughtered by gossip. “Do you want me to, well, do some damage control with the rumor mill?”

  Daisy came out of her half-swoon to send me a grateful look. “Thanks, Melitta.”

  “Just tell them she’s had the flu,” her mom said. “Come by tomorrow after school, if you would? My husband will be home.” The way she said husband made me glad I wouldn’t be there when she explained all this to him. Also, definitely, charter member of the need-a-man club.

  I got out of there somehow.

  After a long strategy debate with the sluts, I went back to school on Monday. I know, crazy, right? But finishing school had become an obsession with me, and also, I had to find out what was happening. Plus I was in the mood to punch Mr. Dorrington in the throat and then choke him to death barehanded in front of the whole class.

  After that pep rally, I had a feeling it would be the most popular thing I could possibly do.

  I was beginning to crave popularity in a whole new way. This was something I might be able to have.

  I elected to shorten myself back to about five-five, which was still four inches taller than I’d been, what, a week ago, good grief. I felt a hundred years older. My complexion was nice, though. Jee and Beth had taken me shopping Sunday and found me some stuff I could wear to school without causing a riot, and my hair looked great, and of course I was now forty pounds thinner so everything fit. Wow. I looked good.

  I shouldered my ludicrously heavy backpack full of books and got on the train and hauled myself up the North Shore to Chase Washington at a sickeningly early hour, thinking, Did I really live like this? Seemed a lifetime ago.

  Bill Kummel fell into step beside me as I walked in the front door and headed for homeroom. “Dorrington’s run off,” he said casually.

  I turned to look at him, and he flinched. But his eye was bright. He expected something of me. Cool. I realized that in his mind, he was reporting to the general who had returned to the battlefield.

  I nodded. “Anyone heard from him?”

  “No, but Daisy dropped out and that jerk Dr. Horwitz—oh, sorry—”

  “Don�
��t be. I’ve lived with him.”

  “Well, he’s suspended sessions with all his patients for now.”

  “Interesting. But Daisy didn’t drop out. She just has the flu.”

  “Yeah, right,” Bill laughed.

  “It’s true.” I shrugged. “I saw her yesterday.” I thought of something else I would have to deal with pretty soon. “Listen, would you tell Ms. Caisson I’ll be in the guidance counselor’s office for the first few minutes of homeroom?” As I began to turn off down that corridor toward the offices, I looked back at him. “Thanks for the recon. I’ll need regular updates.”

  Bill snapped off a salute. “You’ll get ’em.”

  Well, that was surreal. The bell rang and I shouldered past rushing students and stepped into my mother’s hideout.

  Her front office was empty again, but Mom was sitting at her desk in her inner office, staring at nothing. I quickly shut the door. She stood up, her face lighting up—what? Why? Oh, right, I looked like her little girl again, kinda. I put my palm out.

  “Don’t get excited. I just stepped in to tell you not to call me to the guidance counseling office on the PA again. That’s a violation of my privacy, as I’m sure you know.”

  Her head snapped back. I hated to feel like we were enemies. That burned in my chest as sharply as ever. My God, was it only a week ago that I’d declared war in this office? When I burned bridges, I didn’t mess around. My stomach sank into my shoes. Mom’s mouth hardened.

  I felt like poop.

  “You never objected to it before.”

  I set my jaw. “Look, you no longer have that right. You never did have that right. You just did it to me because I couldn’t fight back. Well, know this. I can fight back now.”

  “How?” Mom asked.

  I smiled without any humor at all and let the fang in one corner of my mouth go ting! “Try it and find out.”

  She sat there looking confused. I could see why. This wasn’t the six foot version of her daughter whom she had denied at the hospital. But it wasn’t her daughter as she used to know me, either.