“You make a lot of Latino foods,” Beth remarked, washing poblano peppers at the sink.
“I know. My parents once had a cook from Brazil who cooked amazing stuff for me and Mal—Ish, when we were in junior high school. I learned to love it. I thought I saw her at the store this afternoon,” I recalled.
That reminded me of the inspiration Ish had given me. Pão queijo! I could make Brazilian cheese puffs for Jee! Maybe she’d eat my cooking again!
Without a word I abandoned breakfast and sat down at the table with my phone.
Mr. Google came up with seventy-four recipes for pão queijo. I grabbed the kitchen table pad and flipped through them, jotting down commonalities, discarding the obvious no-nos, listing ingredients.
Beth’s voice cut through my trance. “Pog? Want me to put the chorizo in cold water?”
“Hm?” I looked up. I realized she’d been trying to talk to me. “Yeah, sure. Listen, can I impose on you to make breakfast? I can talk you through the sandwich filling.”
“I can make it,” she said stoutly. “It’s just chorizo sauteed with diced poblanos, right?”
For once I didn’t argue. “Yes. And scrambled eggs. But you’ll sauté and scramble them in the morning.”
“I can do that.” Beth seemed stupefied.
“I have to work out this recipe,” I said and buried myself in Google again. Ten minutes later I said, “Dammit! Is it sour cassava flour, sour manioc flour, or tapioca flour? And this one woman throws it all in the blender! Brazilian cooks didn’t do that a hundred years ago.”
“Maybe it’s a recent recipe.”
“Maybe Gabrielly used her blender. Only I’m pretty sure I don’t remember that. She was showing me how to make ’em when—” No point thinking about that. “Fuck. Do we even have tapioca flour?”
Beth walked out of the kitchen. When she came back, she was on her phone. “Melitta, can you pick up some tapioca flour? I don’t know, Whole Foods? Also if you can find it, cassava flour or sour manioc flour, but only if you’re driving by a supermercado that’s open. Really? That’s helpful. Yes, Pog’s on the trail of a new recipe. I know, right? It sounds amazing.” She hung up. “Tapioca is cassava flour. Also, cassava is the same plant as manioc. That child is an encyclopedia.”
“No kidding.” I stared at her. “Thanks for calling her.”
“Well, you seemed to want it really bad. While we’re waiting for her to get back, what about these peppers?”
I felt intensely grateful to Beth for four whole minutes. Then, while she was trimming and dicing peppers like it was brain surgery, she got nosy. “Ish was a revelation tonight.”
“Wasn’t he?” I was shaving twelve-year cheddar and then crumbling it, getting it ready for when the tapioca flour arrived.
“He sure put us in our places this evening,” Beth said. “‘Be kind.’”
I wrapped the remaining cheddar and put it back in the fridge before I admitted, “He’s right. I was ashamed of myself for picking on Jee. And Reg. Of course you’ve already kicked my ass over that.”
A cold beer appeared at my elbow. I drank.
Beth confessed, “I’ve been scolding Cricket for waking up old and not fixing her face right away.”
“We all used to make fun of Amanda for being stupid.”
“She’s not stupid,” Beth said. “She was going through that adjustment period. When she first came to the Lair, she was fresh out of the Regional Office. Like Ish is now. She was bombarded by so much sensory input that she just...shut down.”
“How do you know all that?”
“Cricket told me.”
“Sheesh. Don’t tell Cricket your secrets.” I finished my beer and went for another. Beth had one, but it was almost empty. I set the rest of the six-pack between us.
“I think Amanda wants us to know. She’s letting Cricket tell us.”
“Not stupid at all.” Next, I measured out milk and butter and oil so I’d be ready to dive into testing pão queijo recipes when the tapioca flour arrived.
Beth pushed again. “So you were best friends until he screwed up. When was that?”
I sighed. I guessed I owed her this, after she solved the manioc-cassava-tapioca problem.
“When I went off to college, they were about to have my stomach stapled, but I managed to wriggle out of that. And when I came home from freshman year fifty pounds heavier, they—” I breathed slowly and quietly. “Kicked me out. Cut off my college money. Told me I could come home when I was ‘ready to make an effort.’ They even took my car.”
Beth turned a scandalized face to me. “Is this the revenge queen talking? How can you not have firebombed their house?”
I blinked. “Say what?”
“Well, you and Jee were ready to frame my ex-husband for murder. What happened then? Oh. Is this when Ish fucked up?”
“Whoa, Beth said ‘fuck.’ Alert the media.” I wiped my nose and drank some more beer. “I had a really stupid idea. I started turning tricks.”
Beth went back to trimming peppers, her hands suddenly jerky.
“My father has this verbal tic. Any woman he doesn’t like, he speaks of her as a fat whore. He says it to her face if he thinks she’s not important. Sometimes he would tell me I had to lose weight so people wouldn’t mistake me for a fat whore. I heard that phrase a lot. Fat whore, she’s a fat whore. So when they threw me out, I thought,” I swallowed, “I’ll teach them, I’ll be a fat whore. They’ll be shocked and horrified and repentant and they’ll take me back.”
I paused to let Beth make her silent judgment about that great idea.
She didn’t say anything.
“I fell in with a pimp. He was good at spotting runaways, even a nineteen-year-old runaway. He scared me to death. I was with him for like a week, and then I went to Ish’s dad’s strip club, and asked Ish for a job.” I choked. “He made me strip just for him in the empty club that day. It was humiliating. I was crying the whole time.” My tears dripped onto the bread. “And then he stopped me and he said, ‘You’re too fat to strip.’ And I went back to that pimp.”
“You’re skipping something,” Beth said.
“Fuck, woman, do you ever let up?” I burst out. “Be patient. This isn’t fun for me.”
She came and stood next to me for a second, leaning against my side. Then she handed me another beer and went back to her peppers.
I wiped my face off and went to the fridge for frozen strawberries and six half-gallons of heavy cream. Beth pulled out the ice cream makers—we have two, because who wants to wait for one flavor at a time?—and together we measured and mixed cream and sugar and eggs and set them to warm in the double boiler.
“He’s still in love with you,” Beth said, stirring.
I ignored that. “Of course I’m leaving something out. After I started at the Academy, we didn’t see much of each other. I was trying really hard to fit in. My parents still had hopes that I’d lose weight. It’s a three-year high school. The first year, everybody ignored me. The second year, my parents threw parties and invited the cool kids’ parents. The third year, the cool kids let me tag along with them, but I could tell I was hanging on with them by a thread, you know? Because I kept gaining weight. And my attitude was poor. And I missed Ish. My parents didn’t want me to see him anymore. I had nice friends now. Backstabbing little bitches.”
“And the last time you saw him, you were with them.”
I flicked a strawberry at her and she dodged it. “Do you want to tell this story for me? Because I hate this.”
“I care about you both,” she murmured.
“So yeah. I went to a Piddlies concert, senior year, with the two meanest girls. We got separated when I went to pee. I met Ish outside the toilets. He was overjoyed to see me.” I handed her the whisk and drank some beer. “Okay, I was overjoyed, too. He dragged me down the corridor at the Cubby Bear. We talked. I was so happy.” I’d never admitted that before, not even to myself. “He said he missed me and he loved
me and he kissed me.”
“And you loved it and you felt something. But then the mean girls showed up and made you turn on him.”
Smart Beth. I couldn’t look at her.
She added, “So it was payback time at the strip club. That must have sucked.”
Without looking, I put a fist out and felt her bump it. “The thing is, I think he felt even worse about it than I did. You know how he told us that he was suicidal and then he got recruited? He told me a week ago it was because he got someone nice killed. He said tonight it was because, when he last spoke to my parents, they said I was dead. He thought Vito killed me and he blamed himself. He ended up in hell because he—wanted to kill himself when I—when he thought Vito—”
“This is ready.” Beth turned the gas off under the double boiler. “Do you think he actually killed himself?” she said.
“He says he did. Or tried. I feel awful about that. A part of me is still mad at him, you know? But how can I say it now? We’ve both paid so much for the mistakes of those days.”
I was responsible for my own mistakes. It was time to confess that. But Beth wasn’t the one who should hear that. And I wasn’t sure I had the nerve to say it to the right person.
“He still loves you,” Beth said.
I dumped frozen strawberries into a bowl and put them in the microwave for a scientifically calculated eighty seconds. “I think I may have kicked that out of him.”
She didn’t say anything. It was, all in all, a very optimistic silence.
Beth set the pot full of warm custard in a shallow pan of cool water.
“Do you know, I dieted the whole time in my fat-whore years? Not always. But I would starve myself, lose ten pounds, realize I was still fat, hate myself even more, gain them back, rinse, repeat.”
The microwave dinged. Beth took the bowl out. “But your parents weren’t there to pick on you.”
“Oh, honey.” I shook my head. “That’s something fat girls do to themselves. We starve ourselves, because we’re desperate to get out of fat jail. Fat jail is like black jail. You can’t get out of it because it’s your skin. Anyone who sees you knows you are fat, just like they know you are black. And they never, ever let you forget it.”
“I was heavy before I was recruited,” Beth said quietly. “Heavy and old.”
I nodded as if to say, Okay, then. The microwave dinged. I took out the strawberries, still cold but now squishy.
Beth gave me a quick one-arm hug. “I bet if you put those strawberries in there now, the custard would cool faster.”
I swallowed tears. “Bet you’re right.”
We were squishing the strawberries with our bare hands and dumping them in handfuls into the custard when we heard a commotion on the stairs, and thundering feet coming down the hall.
Ish burst into the kitchen, his hair wild and his shirt torn.
“Come quick! Melitta’s down there with an Anger commando!” He snatched the paring knife off the sink where Beth had been dicing peppers. Then he dashed out again.
“What?” Hurriedly wiping my hands on my apron, I told Beth, “Get Amanda and Jee.”
I’d been waiting for this. My stomach was in a knot.
Ever since Ish strayed into the circle of Buddha heads and got snatched back into the Regional Office by his angry Departmental VP, I had wondered if there was more to the story than he’d let on. I couldn’t see why the big bug would waste demons on following him around. Because we’d wasted the last one—well, seduced it into going AWOL.
I was prepared to waste this one, too. With extreme prejudice.
I chose a much bigger knife out of the block and marched to the manager’s door at the top of the stairs. From there I could peep out a little window and down onto what used to be the factory floor and was now our basketball court.
Down there on the court, more or less with his back to us, stood the biggest hulking demon I’d ever seen, and facing him was Melitta, a little taller than usual maybe but in her usual college-kid guise. He was seven feet high, built like something out of a tween-boy’s comic book, fanged and thewed and tusked, oh my. All he wore was some kind of Roman leather skirt, which totally didn’t work with the look. His talons were short—only two inches.
I tiptoed down the metal stairs. My heart was in my mouth.
When I opened the door a crack between the factory floor and the residence side of the Lair, I heard faint, tinny music from the classical station.
A breeze blew in from the loading dock door, off to the right in the bowels of the motorcycle-fixing area.
Someone cleared his throat behind me.
“Ish, go shut the back door,” I whispered.
“I can fight,” he whispered with more courage than honesty.
“Close the goddam door. Do you want more of them coming in here?” My back rippled with anxiety.
He slid past me and slithered past the busted motorbikes, past our parked van and Beth’s car with its front doors standing open and its radio still playing, which was where the music came from, and then something moved on the basketball court and I whipped my head back around.
Melitta was holding out one hand. She maintained eye contact with the demon. She didn’t try to bulk herself up, too, which must have been a temptation. Smart. She was doing great. Stay calm, Melitta, stay calm, he’s scared to death or he wouldn’t be that big. Not for the first time, I wished that telepathic powers came with the succubus body.
“What the heck is she doing?” I muttered to Ish, who had returned to my side.
“Beats me. She asked me to get her a mirror.”
“A what?” Beth said, crowding up behind him. “Oh good heavens, look at that thing!”
“Quiet!” I thought I saw what Melitta was up to. She had to be trying to get close enough to hit him with a dose of succubus energy.
“What kind of mirror?” Jee said behind me.
Frustrated, I shut the door and gathered my teammates around me.
Beth grabbed my arm. “We can’t leave her out there with it!”
“No, but we need a plan,” I said.
Amanda and Cricket shoved me over so they could peek out the crack in the door.
Jee brushed past me and ran up the stairs.
“That’s what I love about this team. Coordinated effort,” I muttered. I poked Cricket. “Move over and let me look.”
I peeped. Out on the basketball court, Melitta was doing something totally weird. She and the commando demon were copying each other, face to face, for all the world as if they were doing tai chi moves, hands extended, eyeball to eyeball.
“What’s happening?” Reg said behind me.
“Anger commando followed Ish and Melitta home,” Amanda said.
“Where’s Ish?” I said. The last thing we needed was him being heroic with a paring knife.
“Right here. She said to bring her Jee’s mirror,” Ish said.
“Got it,” Jee said. She had a long mirror in her hands. It looked like the one off the back of her bedroom door. “But how do we get it out there without distracting it or her?”
“Why a mirror?” I demanded, but nobody answered.
Amanda elbowed Jee. “Sneak out and put it behind the demon.”
“We can’t do it silently,” Reg objected.
“Yes we can,” Amanda said, and I remembered her casting a cone of silence over our table at the benefit. She did some of those mystic passes with her finger, same as tonight at the benefit.
“Ish,” I decided. “You’re bait. Come with me.”
I cracked the door open, very carefully.
Holding the mirror, Jee slid past me and sneaked ghost-silent to the gas grill and leaned the mirror against it.
In the dimness out on the basketball floor came a tiny snap of uncanny-colored light, like static off a cat’s fur, on a wavelength that only a demon can see. Then another. It was happening at the ends of Melitta’s fingertips—and the Anger demon’s. Whenever their tai chi moves brought the
ir hands within a foot of each other—zap.
I wanted to read the demon’s expression, but its back was to me.
Ish crouched beside me. I was paranoid. I dialed my succubus hearing up to eleven.
“Wait,” Ish whispered to me. “She has a plan.”
“Get ready to run out there,” I breathed to Ish. “You’re the one he wants.” It was definitely a boy demon. A big old pigsticker was poking out between the leather strips on his Roman soldier skirt.
Sparks continued to snap and crackle between him and Melitta as they—wait—were they dancing?
Melitta never broke eye contact with the demon.
“Wait, wait,” Ish whispered again.
The demon kept moving slowly, mirroring Melitta’s moves. Mojo crackled between them.
Mirror! Glancing left, I could see that Jee had positioned the mirror’s shiny side toward the demon’s back. What did she want with the mirror? I felt stupid.
Melitta was murmuring now. I tuned up my ears.
“Good grief, you’re huge,” she said. “You should see yourself in this light.”
See yourself. She wanted him to look in the mirror! What the flying Swiss petunia?
The demon reached out as if to grab Melitta’s hand, and Ish beside me let out a yell. “Aa-ee-aaah!” he yodeled.
Then he ran out on the factory floor.
The demon spun around, snarling. If it was big before, it bulked up extra now.
Ish ran toward it and then dodged, circling, yelling like an idiot.
Melitta lowered her arms, looking exasperated.
The demon whirled, lunged for Ish and tripped over his own feet at the same time, fell with a tremendous crash on the plywood basketball deck, rolled, and jumped up in a fighting crouch, glaring in every direction at once. These were unmistakable signs that he was really a desk-worker down there, dressed up to look scary.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 93
