I felt sufficiently full of life experience after Lit that I told my Civics teacher I had my period and had to go home. He just waved me out the door. As I left the classroom I looked back and saw Sanjay frown. Two minutes later I was outside the building.
My cell kicked up a text. LOOK OUT BUB FOLSOM LEFT CLASS RIGHT AFTER YOU DID. Who spells “right” correctly in a text? Oh, Sanjay. Bub Folsom was Daisy’s boyfriend. I looked over my shoulder, wondering if he’d got the memo that Daisy and I were kind-of on the same side now. Behind me, the building door opened. I ran to the corner and jumped onto a bus.
I thought maybe Bub hadn’t caught up with me. I got off the bus and got on the Metra, headed down to the city, where the Lair was. Then I spotted him in the back of the Metra car.
Bub was not a small guy. He played football for Chase Washington. Granted, I was way taller than I’d been in recent years, but I was nowhere near his size. Why hadn’t I asked Delilah for kung fu chops as well as extra inches and fewer pounds?
I pretended I didn’t see him. He didn’t look comfortable. Suddenly I found myself betting a great big cookie that Bub was the one who put the hamburger in my locker.
Great. Now he was gonna make hamburger out of me.
One stop before mine, he moved up to sit in the seat across the aisle from me. I looked at his shoes. He seemed to be looking at my shoes, too. As soon as the doors opened, I bolted out of the car onto the platform and ran down the stairs, smashing through the turnstile, clattering out onto the street, with my heavy backpack thumping me on the leg as I ran.
I heard his footsteps clumping down the stairs after me.
“Oops, oops, oops, oops,” I chanted under my breath.
I sprinted across Lawrence Avenue between cars and buses. Hoping that the traffic was slowing Bub down, I took two seconds to struggle into my backpack so that my arms were free. Now I could really run.
Hm. This new body sure could run. Maybe Ms. Waroo wasn’t wrong about that. With twenty-five pounds of books on my back, I ran like a deer down Ravenswood Avenue.
Bud caught up with me at Berteau Street, just half a block from the Lair.
“Melitta, wait!” He grabbed my arm.
I spun around and slammed against the wall of the factory on the corner. “Ow! Hey!” Was he gonna mug me right here in public? “You idiot!”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, looming over me like a bus. “Just wait, will you?”
I jerked my arm loose. My backpack was too big to let me put my back against the wall. I still felt plenty cornered. “What is your problem?”
Bub was panting pretty hard, which made me feel good. “Look. I’m sorry I put the hamburger in your locker.” He was red in the face, but I couldn’t tell if it was from embarrassment or from running. “Dorrington made me do it.”
This news didn’t surprise me, but his apology did. “What? How?”
“He—he has of a picture of me smoking a J. He could totally fuck my athletic scholarship to Ohio State.” Bub was close to crying. “I didn’t want to do it, I swear.”
I slid my backpack down the brick wall and thumped to my butt on the sidewalk.
Bud hunkered down in a squat in front of me. Then, apparently because some forgotten “gentleman” circuit kicked in, he moved around to sit beside me. Now at least he wasn’t blocking my escape.
I whooshed out a sigh and felt my heartbeat start to settle down. “So why tell me? Aren’t you afraid I’ll tell Mr. Slusser on you?”
He let out a laugh like a quack. “He knows, too.”
“He what? Wait, slow down.”
“Melitta, I don’t know what you can do about Dorrington, but it must be big, because he is out to get you. That’s why I came after you. If you can stop him—” Bub gulped. “Can you help me?”
A smile spread across my face. Daisy Rawson’s boyfriend, star quarterback for the football team, was begging me for help. “Gimme a minute, will you? I want to think.”
Mr. Slusser knew about the hamburger. He knew Bub had done it. “How does Mr. Slusser know about the hamburger?”
“I used his keys to get into the freezers in the kitchen.”
My mouth fell open. “Then—wait. That note was in Mr. Dorrington’s handwriting. How did you get it?” Dorrington had run away from school the day I got busted. The cops were looking for him. The whole school knew it.
All except for Bub Einstein here.
Bub shrugged. “Mr. Slusser gave it to me.”
I gripped Bub by his rocket-scientist ear and made him look me in the eye. “Bub. Where is Mr. Dorrington?”
“He’s at Slusser’s house.”
I rolled my eyes. “I should have guessed that.” I pulled out my phone and found Detective Doyle’s number. While the rings rang, I said to Bub, “They won’t publish all that stuff he has on everybody, you know. They don’t, when it’s blackmail. Detective Doyle? Melitta Grove. Mr. Dorrington is at the principal’s house. Mr. Slusser’s.”
I’ll say this for the detective, he wasn’t slow on the uptake. “How do you know?”
“Informant,” I said briefly, watching Bub swell up and turn red again. “He saw Mr. Dorrington there and he got Mr. Slusser’s keys to pull a prank on my locker. Mr. Slusser’s in it up to his neck.”
“Well, we knew that,” the detective said. “What was the prank?”
“He stole raw hamburger out of the kitchen freezer and packed my locker full of it.”
I heard what might have been a laugh, or maybe a cough. “Anything else? Are you at school?”
“Nope,” I said, realizing I’d have to be discreet on my own behalf, too.
“Where are you?”
“Nuh-uh. Need-to-know, detective.”
“Well, tell your informant to come down here and make a statement.”
I covered the phone with my hand. “He wants you to come in and make a statement.”
Bub was doing a bobble-headshake, no-no-no.
“You dumbass,” I hissed. “We all have to stop keeping secrets. Somebody’s going to get hurt. I’m smaller than you, and he’s out to get me. It’s time to trust somebody.” I seemed to be saying that a lot.
Muffled noise came from the phone. I put it to my ear. “Sorry?”
“Is he another blackmail victim?” Detective Doyle said.
I watched Bub. “Yup.” Bub looked like a bull processing the sight of a porcupine in his paddock.
“Tell him we’ll keep his dirty secret confidential. I need that statement.”
“I told him that already,” I said.
“How did you know?” the detective said.
“Duh, you can’t prosecute blackmailers if you’re not willing to bargain with the victims. I’m sure there’s a law about it somewhere.”
Detective Doyle laughed into the phone. At least I think it was a laugh. “Ask him if he believes you.”
I frowned. “Why don’t you ask him yourself? I can hand him the phone.”
Bub made jazz hands and another silent no-no-no face.
“I don’t want to spook him,” the detective said.
I rolled my eyes. I put the phone against my shoulder and put both hands reassuringly on Bub’s knee and said, “He wants to know if you believe me that cops won’t tell your secret, the one you’re being blackmailed about.”
Bub chewed his cud. “Is it true?”
I opened my mouth, but then I thought, if it wasn’t, I should make the cop tell the lie, not me. Someone was walking down the street toward us, so I lowered my voice as I spoke into the phone. “Is that true? If he tells you what Mr. Dorrington is blackmailing him about, you’ll keep it a secret?”
Two Mephisto shoes appeared next to me.
“Absolutely true,” said a voice over my head and also in my ear.
I looked up. Detective Doyle was putting his cell phone in his tweed jacket pocket.
Bub jumped up and backward so fast, he fell over on his ass.
I stood up.
&nbs
p; Detective Doyle was giving Bub all his attention. “She’s right. The law won’t disclose a blackmailer’s allegations. Not even if they have proof. It’s like a plea bargain.”
“What’s a plea bargain?” Bub said, rising and dusting off his butt.
“It’s like, you give me a statement, and I won’t bust you for using the principal’s keys to steal hamburger and put it in Melitta’s locker.”
Bub looked dark. “It might be worse than that.”
Detective Doyle took him by the elbow just as an unmarked car rolled to a stop in front of us. “Nothing could be worse than that.” He turned to me. “Can we give you a lift?”
Nice try. “No, I’ll get back on the El and get on downtown to the library. Last minute paper due.”
I waited while they got into a plain dark gray car and I watched them roll away. Detective Doyle smiled a little can’t-blame-me-for-trying smile through the window. I watched the car go all the way down to Irving Park Road and turn east. Then I walked all the way back to Montrose to the El, waited for a train, got on, turned my phone off and removed the battery, rode down one stop, got off, rode another train back up, got off, and walked back to the Lair through the alleys.
Half a block from the Lair I reassembled my phone long enough to call Pog. “I’m coming in through the back door. Will my key work?”
“Should,” Pog said. “Why, are you being followed?”
“Maybe. Cops have been tracking me through my phone.”
“Hang up.” Then Pog hung up.
I did too.
She was there to let me in by the time I got to the door.
I told the sluts about my day. They took charge immediately. I felt limp with relief.
“So what’s the drill here?” Jee said briskly. “You know I don’t do subtle.”
“No kidding,” Amanda said.
Jee sent her a cranky look. To me she said, “I...happen to know a couple of child-protecting weretigers who would be glad to rip their lungs out for you. Both your stepfather and the blackmailer.”
My mouth fell open.
“One weretiger,” Pog said. “The other one’s watching his mother die.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Jee snarled. “This can happen,” she told me.
My breath came short. “Uh. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not? Bang, bang. Problem solved.”
“Because.” I remembered my first attempt to fight back against Howard. “Because violence doesn’t work.”
“The hell it doesn’t,” Pog said.
“And it makes you into a really awful person,” I remembered. It had been such fun to bloody Daisy’s nose in PE.
Beth leaned over and gave me a one-armed hug. “Good for you, honey.”
I felt warmth spread through me.
“There are times,” Jee said, “when violence is the only way to defend yourself against someone who is using physical force on you.”
This set off an argument among the sluts. Jee and Pog were in favor of killing my enemies. Beth and Amanda were against it.
Pog said finally, “It doesn’t matter what’s right or wrong. It’s about what’s going to happen when someone associated with us, which is Melitta, is associated with a magical kind of crime, and Beth’s boyfriend gets involved.”
Beth had a boyfriend?
Jee glared resentfully at Beth. “That wouldn’t be a problem if you had kept your hormones under control with a cop.”
Beth glared back. “I want to rip them to shreds myself.” I wondered if she was one of the weretigers. “But this is not our fight. This is Melitta’s fight, and she gets to decide. Unless you’re going to say that a nineteen-year-old isn’t competent to make these decisions for herself?”
Glances flew around the room. I got the feeling there was a lot I didn’t know about my teammates yet.
“Okay, fine,” Jee grumbled.
“What do you want us to do, Melitta?” Beth said.
“Quit horsing around,” Pog said. “Melitta, here’s the deal. The cops are involved. They will handle Dorrington if they can catch him—seems like you’ve broken open the silence and got a lot of his victims to report him, which is all it takes. He’s especially done for if they catch him at the principal’s house, because the principal will sing.”
“Sing?”
“Turn against him and talk to the cops,” Amanda said. “That’s not the problem here.”
“The problem is the evidence,” Beth said.
Things were moving a lot faster than I could follow. “Evidence?”
“The cops say they won’t tell anyone what kind of incriminating evidence your teacher may have collected to blackmail people with, but they can’t overlook it if it’s something like murder,” Pog said.
“Or child molesting,” Jee said grimly.
“Oh,” I said, and my body went still, as if my pulse had paused. I’d been talking a good game to Daisy about prosecuting Howard. I’d been ecstatic when Detective Doyle said there were child-molesting charges against him. But did I mean it?
If Howard went to jail, my mom would be alone again. The thing she feared the most. She’d never forgive me.
That was it, wasn’t it? Bottom line, why I’d never told her about Howard. One, I’d been afraid she knew and was condoning it. Two, he would go to jail. Three, she’d never forgive me. And four, she’d be alone again.
Considering the tone of our conversation at the hospital, it was laughable even to hope that she would get over my doing all that to her.
I looked around at the Lair’s kitchen. Beefcake and naked girl posters were taped to the upper walls and ceiling. A huge bank of refrigerators lined one wall. Another huge bank of TV screens hung on the other opposite wall, faced by a row of brand-new fancy massager-recliners. Summer sunlight came shooting in through the chickenwire-reinforced glass window at the end of the long concrete room. The place smelled like Pog was baking something sweet.
And four supermodels with blood in their glares sat around the table with me, drinking beer and plotting how to save me and bring my enemies down.
I felt like a rabbit that had bolted out of its cage into an open meadow.
Pog and Beth were watching me. Amanda was scribbling on a legal pad. Jee was looking over Amanda’s shoulder.
In the stillness I realized that my mom would not be the only loser, if the cops had to act on any of the secrets they found in Mr. Dorrington’s stash—or if someone came forward to testify, thinking they were protected, only to find that some crimes couldn’t be plea-bargained away.
“What can we do, then?” I said slowly. “The cops have probably arrested him at the principal’s house already. If evidence exists, it’s either in his home or on his laptop, and they already have his laptop. Short of sneaking into jail and slipping him poisoned coffee, I don’t know what we can do.”
Amanda turned her pad around. “Okay, this is very rough, but I think it will cover.”
Pog leaned over the pad. “What is it?”
“It’s a trace-and-destroy spell.”
“What does it do?” Beth said, and I felt good that I wasn’t the only dummy in the room.
“It follows intent,” Jee said, pointing.
I craned my neck. The page was all over drawings and squiggles that weren’t even words or numbers. It reminded me of geometry homework.
“Right,” Amanda said. She tapped the drawings with her pen. “We set it up to follow the intent, and the emotional atmosphere in which it forms.” Swirly pen motion around a symbol. “He’s a blackmailer, so he suffers from fear, and he’s into power. He gets hold of something, say this photograph of the kid smoking pot, and he knows he can control the kid with it. It’s that desire for control that motivates him. Because the kid doesn’t have any money, not yet. Maybe when he’s at college, or if he ever goes pro, then he’ll have money. But the blackmailer isn’t thinking about money. He just likes that feeling of control. It’s a kind of lust,” she said in a
clinical voice.
I got a shiver. Howard loved to control people. With me, his lust for control had combined with his lust for lust. Icky.
“Lust is easy to trace,” Jee said. She ought to know.
Amanda continued her lecture. “So in his lust for control, he acquires information and provenance of information”—tappity tap—“and then he hides it somewhere. He also buys insurance by setting a tripwire on it so that if anything happens to him, all that information becomes public. So his victims don’t dare expose him.”
“Except for Melitta here,” Beth said warmly.
“I didn’t risk exposure for myself,” I said, feeling hollow. “I was just angry. And sick of people keeping secrets.”
Pog sent me a level look. “You painted a target on yourself and stood up in front of the bad guy, over and over,” she said, her words and tone echoing Detective Doyle’s. “I don’t want you going back there. What if this Bub kid hadn’t been chasing you to beg for your forgiveness and help?”
“She can’t be killed,” Amanda said. “The risk is limited.”
“I can’t?” I said. “Nobody told me that.” My new life was getting weirder and weirder. I felt kind of dizzy.
“You can get the shit beat out of you. You can absorb a lot of damage, and it can hurt really bad,” Beth said.
Jee said, “You’ll heal. But that will hurt, too. So stupid risks are still stupid.”
I looked her in the eye. This took more guts than I expected. Jee’s opinion mattered to me. “I. Am. Going. To. Graduate. This means attending all my classes for the rest of the year. That’s four whole days plus finals. Work with me here.”
“People,” Pog said. “The plan?”
Jee gave me a tiny smile and turned her attention to Amanda’s yellow legal pad again. I breathed easier. She touched the drawing. “So, what, we set this off and it chases down all the blackmail material he’s squirreled away and...does what?”
“Vaporizes it,” Amanda said. “Technically speaking, the intent absorbs back into him. The spell sucks the esse out of his intent, using it as fuel to travel back to him. Without esse, the evidence ceases to exist on this plane.”
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 55
