I blurted, “Mom. I don’t want to move out. I want to finish high school. I want to go to college. But—” I gulped. “But things have to change. I want—”
“Respect,” she said. “All children do.”
“I’m an adult now,” I reminded her. “All humans want respect.” I wasn’t sure if I was still human, come to think of it. Now to see if I could stonewall her. “I won’t talk about my job. Let’s just say that they’ll pay me very well, and they’re treating me with respect. It’s—it’s spoiling me, Mom,” I said, and heard the ring of truth in my own voice, in between all the dodges and half lies. “I can’t go back to—”
I was about to say, being a child. But it occurred to me that not all children were growing up as I was. Seemed stupid to think of it like that. But my mom and her husband had got away with as much of their bull as they had because I assumed—they’d let me assume—they’d flat-out told me—that I was no different from anybody else my age, and they weren’t being unreasonable, and this was all perfectly normal. My misery was normal.
Sure, Mom. All kids get diddled by their stepfathers.
I felt my anger heating my ears again.
It was not easy, asking for respect.
“Very well,” Mom said, sounding quavery. I could tell she wanted to sound in control and grown up, too. “What exactly would make you feel that I respect you?”
I hate this kind of conversation. She asks point blank what I want, and I can’t tell her, either because it’s a forbidden topic, or because I know she is incapable of understanding that her whole attitude, her sense of herself as a mother, means she can’t even see what she’s doing. She won’t ever notice herself crossing the line into disrespect.
Try anyway.
“Stop thinking you understand me. Stop assuming that a book you read explains me. Stop telling me that I don’t know my own feelings.” That last one was the biggie. That was the one I’d never have. When her world view and mine collided, she always assumed I just didn’t see things correctly. You know. Big picture. Grown-up perspective. You don’t know your own mind, Melitta.
She said levelly, “That’s going to be hard for me because of my job.”
“No, it’s going to be hard for you because you’re my mom. If I was somebody else’s daughter, you’d give me more room to be unexpected. But you do like the security that being a shrink gives you. You protect yourself from my surprises with it. You’ve seen it all, so obviously your own daughter can’t surprise you.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Fair enough.”
“But I do surprise you. And then you freak out, and then you tell me I’m wrong about how I feel. That’s just crazy talk, Mom. How I feel is what it is. Even I can’t change that. It’s disrespectful for you to try to change it. It hurts me.”
I got all that from a book the school librarian put me onto. Didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
“I’ve read Judy Blume,” Mom said dryly.
Okay, it was worth a shot. I was ready to give up, but I was still curious about Mr. Borington and which of them he was tormenting and with what.
Mom handed me the straight line. “What goes on at home is negotiable,” she said. Hoo boy, Mom. “But your behavior at school has consequences.”
“Maybe you should let me suffer them,” I suggested. “It’s not like you intervene for me at school. You bend over backwards to prove you aren’t favoring your child.”
That wasn’t fair of me. That was one of those can’t-win double bind things my stepfather was always throwing on me. But I wanted to stop her. Make her just think for a minute. I delivered my fish hook.
“What can Mr. Bor—Mr. Dorrington do to me? Give me a C instead of a B?” I shrugged, but I was watching her.
Her lips pressed tight. Okay, this wasn’t good. I waited a minute, but nothing more came out.
“Guess I’ll get started on my homework.” I got up. “Oh.” Some weird impulse made me turn in the doorway and come back to her chair. I picked up her hand off the table and held it and kind of patted it. “Mom? Can I have the key for my bedroom door?”
She looked at me as if she hadn’t even heard me.
I put her hand down gently on the table and went up to my room.
In my room I sat on my bed with the lights out. What had made me ask for a key for my door? Our house is old and the keys have probably been lost for eighty years, long before we moved in. For five minutes I contemplated the fantasy of a life where I could lock my bedroom door.
Then the floor outside my door creaked, and I braced myself. There was a long, silent pause. Then my stepfather’s heavy tread went down the stairs.
For a long moment, I stared at the tattered Owl and the Pussycat poster on the back of my bedroom door.
Then I relaxed. I had maybe ten minutes to half an hour before the next round.
What had I learned from all that? I had learned:
My mom was afraid of Mr. Dorrington, not on my account, but because he might do something to her or her husband. So, what, was he threatening my stepfather?
Did Mr. Dorrington want something from Mom and/or Howard? Or did he just get his kicks from poking at her and making her squirm, the way he made us all squirm?
If she couldn’t tell me about it, that meant that what Mr. Dorrington knew, or could prove, was a) grown-up stuff, b) something to do with my stepfather, because she knew I would defend her and protect her, right? Didn’t she? So it must be something about her husband.
Well, considering what I had on him myself, it was a good bet I already knew what b) was. But if Mr. Dorrington was pressuring my stepfather somehow, some-why, and my mom knew it, then did that mean my mom knew what her husband was doing to me?
That was a sickening thought.
I realized now that that’s what had kept me from telling her about him these past two years. My worst fear. What if she already knew? What if she’d weighed the cost—the cost to me—and decided my suffering was worth keeping her comfortable life with Howard’s money and Howard’s power in the school district and whatever the hell—I swore in my mind and flinched and hated myself for it—whatever it was that she got out of living with a M.A.N. that was so awesome that she could sacrifice me for it?
I recalled the past two years of listening to his heavy footstep making the stairs creak, hiding under the covers with my heart thundering in my ears, holding my breath until I saw stars, waiting to find out if he would walk past my door to the bathroom...or not.
Had Dorrington somehow figured all that out? He might have. I had been a total zombie and flunked last year. Had he told her, and then threatened to expose my stepfather if she didn’t...what? And therefore, was she letting me go through all that on purpose? Or was she innocent, kinda, maybe willfully blind, or maybe just stupid?
I hated having to be in a position to judge my mother morally. It was wrong.
I shouldn’t have to guess whether my own mother was stupid, or a willing accomplice to a criminal, or just too cowardly to stand up to a child molester and a faculty bully.
A red rage filled my head. I felt my eyes going glowy.
At this moment my bedroom door started to open softly. The knob made no rattly noise. That could only be one person.
I smelled him out there.
I flared my eyes and drew back my lips and let both my canine teeth go ting! Red light bloomed in my darkened bedroom. Whoa.
By the time my stepfather had the door all the way open, I had turned on my desk lamp. I moved to sit in my desk chair. That meant he had to sit on the bed, ew, but I wouldn’t sit on the bed with him in the room.
He had his I’m so concerned about you face on. I was still seething from the thought that my mom might know about him and me through Dorrington.
He’d left the door open.
That meant he wanted my mother to hear when I started yelling. He never left the door open when he really wanted to be private with me.
He stood there looking down at me and shook h
is head. “Oh, Melitta. The more you grow up, the harder it gets, doesn’t it?”
I wanted to kill him. I found myself leaping up.
I punched at him as hard as I could—punched him in the chest—and felt my hand go right into him!
I felt his heart thumping in my fist.
I glared into his face with my glowy eyes and squeezed.
His face went slack and gray.
Ugh!
I leaped away, freaked out. I looked at my hand and shook it—no blood.
No blood on his chest either.
But he still looked gray.
My hand felt tingly and icky.
I pushed him away from me and blundered to the door.
“Melitta—no—” he croaked behind me.
I spun around, but he was slumped on the bed, feeling his chest, staring at me with horror.
Wow, that felt good.
I breathed deeply and twiddled my weird-feeling hand, until the tingles and ickiness went away and I didn’t want to kill him anymore. I argued with my anger as if it was a child or a wild animal. I can’t kill him right here in my bedroom. The blood. And what if he haunts it?
I had to ask him, and I had to ask him in a way that would make him tell me the truth.
Well, he’d probably never be more scared of me than he was now.
I closed the door carefully. Then I strode up until I was in his face, bending over him—wow, I’m tall now—making him lean away, his eyes rolling. I whispered, “Does Mom know what you’ve done to me?”
His face changed. It was creepy, watching him pull himself together and decide to be in charge again. I realized I’d revealed something that mattered to me. I’d told him exactly what he needed to know to control me.
I could have torn my hair out in frustration.
“Of course not,” he said smoothly, as if he hadn’t just almost fibrillated. He looked up at me with that innocent face that didn’t fool me anymore, though apparently it fooled everybody else. Behind his wide open eyes he was daring me—double daring me. I could read that look perfectly.
Well? he was saying. Do you believe me? If you believe me, and I’m lying, I’ve got you in my power, because you still don’t want to risk losing your mother by telling her what she won’t want to hear. If you don’t believe me, I’m in no worse danger than before. And if you aren’t sure—well, then I’m in the best position of all. Because you’ll start to suspect her, and your love and trust for her will corrode, and you’ll be willing to take the easy way out—the way that’s easiest for me as well as for you—because you can’t stand the idea that she knows. It’ll torture you for the rest of your life, because you’ll never, ever dare ask her. Because you want to believe me.
“You could have asked me before,” he said, rubbing it in.
How was he not in the least bit afraid of me, when I had nearly squeezed his heart until it popped?
I studied him up close, closer than I’d looked at him ever. His pupils were really big. He was afraid. But he was so darned crooked that his self-preservation instinct had him messing with my head before his heart had stopped hammering.
I could hear it hammering now, in fact.
Delilah hadn’t told me about that little side effect of succubusing.
I said calmly, “I can hear your heart pounding.”
Mine was, too. But apparently he couldn’t hear that.
He put his hands up in front of him, as if to keep me away, and I knew I still had some advantage.
But he had me at a standoff. He’d be stupid to give up his position, now that I was trapped between the fear that my mother had betrayed me all the way, and the hope that she hadn’t.
I sighed. I was beginning to realize that it was only a matter of time—weeks, maybe days—before I would have to leave home forever. Mom wouldn’t give him up. She just had to have a man. Her poor judgment, as demonstrated so far, would only guarantee she’d pick someone worse, even if I could get rid of this human turd. That thought made me so angry that I kicked his shoe, while he sat there motionless in front of me with his eyes dilating in fear.
“Howard?” Mom called from downstairs. “Do you want dessert?” Is my daughter behaving herself? Have you got her under control? You big he-man, are you helping me?
It was working. Whether he’d lied or told the truth, my stepfather was driving an even bigger wedge between me and my mom.
“What does Dorrington get from you?” I asked, feeling my anger collapse again.
I saw the wheels start turning as his eyes changed from scared to calculating. He opened his mouth and I put my palm up. He actually cringed.
“Will you just try for once not lying?” I said in exasperation.
Nope. I could see him settling down, wriggling around the new rules-for-dealing-with-Melitta, trying to work this new aspect to his advantage somehow.
I should have stuck with violence. But I couldn’t. It just wasn’t in me.
I would have to take out Dorrington without his cooperation.
How did things get so complicated so fast?
My stepfather said, as smooth as ever, “Melitta, you really do need to trust the adults in your life sometimes. We have resources you don’t.”
That was a threat if I ever heard one. “Your resources haven’t helped you against Dorrington. Haven’t helped you tonight,” I added, pointing out he wasn’t dealing with old short-fat-scaredy-cat Melitta anymore.
I remembered the fear in his eyes from a few minutes ago. I wanted that power back.
I pulled my arm back slowly, so I could watch his fear start back up again, and then I swung my arm and slapped him hard on the side of the head.
He fell off the bed and tumbled across the floor.
Wow.
I looked at my hand. Strong much?
While I stared at my hand, my stepfather got to his feet, holding the side of his head.
His expression, however, was very different. He looked sly now, as if he knew things about me that I didn’t know.
I felt even ickier than I had when I rammed my fist into his chest.
“That’s how it starts,” he said. “As you grow up, you’ll learn to be more subtle.”
Suddenly I wanted to throw up. “Get out. Get out, before I learn some more.”
He went to my door.
When his hand was on the knob, I added, “And do not ever come into this room again. Not even if Mom asks you to.”
He looked at me over his shoulder and shrugged.
I heard him walk down the stairs, creak, creak.
I ran for the bathroom and threw up my two bites of lasagna and two spinach leaves.
Even while I was retching into the toilet, though, my mind was working.
This is how he got like this. This is how Dorrington got like this. First somebody does bad stuff to you. Then you find out you can do bad stuff back. And then...it escalates.
I thought about my day of petty vengeance, all my little meannesses, paying back the bullies.
I would have to find other ways to establish myself as a new person. Someone out of reach of the bullies. Delilah suggested using sex somehow—that sex was a weapon they couldn’t use against me.
Oh, and I had to stop my Social Studies teacher from tormenting everybody.
And I had to do something to get rid of my stepfather. Which meant making a tough decision about my mom which, quite frankly, I wasn’t up to making right now.
I tossed up a few more teaspoonfuls, wiped my face, got up off my knees, and flushed.
I got ready for bed. Nobody came upstairs. I didn’t even hear murmuring. Eventually, the TV went on.
Whew. They were pretending the problem was solved for now.
But my brain wouldn’t stop, once I was in bed.
I hadn’t much enjoyed finding out how I could turn into Mr. Dorrington. Nothing I’d learned today had been much fun, except maybe finding out how high I could jump when I spiked that ball into Daisy’s face. I thrilled all ov
er again, remembering it, and cringed all over again when I remembered the blood spouting from her nose, and I felt angry and hot inside, justified but rotten, again. I remembered Ms. Waroo’s open permission to me to hit back when I was hit. I still loved that. Ugh, oh, ugh. I turned over and groaned into my pillow.
On the other hand, I was figuring out ways to pry information out of my mom. I didn’t like the information I got much, but hey. It felt as if this whole succubus transformation was going somewhere.
Living with my mom since she married that guy had been painful, and it hadn’t been going anywhere. Because how could I leave her alone with him? And how could I stand living with him? In her struggle to ignore what was going on in her own house, she got creepier and shrinkier with me all the time.
Yo, Melitta, calm down. Something upbeat is happening. You’re taller. You’re thinner. You’ve kicked a little butt and it seems to have improved things...maybe. Okay, it was probably not over with Daisy and Mr. Dorrington, but Bill Kummel had declared peace, and Ms. Remirovski seemed to have got the message—a message—something anyway, and I was pretty sure my stepfather would be going straight to the bathroom and to his own bed tonight and in the future.
Hey, that’s huge. Win column, girl.
On the other hand, Sanjay might never try to sit with me at lunch again.
The optimistic side of me, this new weirdo voice in my head saying all these upbeat things, whispered, Oh, I bet he will.
Thinking about tubby, prematurely dignified Sanjay and his pleated trousers and short-sleeved dress shirts and his hard-on, which he never, ever tried to bump up against me even though we sat at lunch together and often in the same class, I realized that my weirdo optimistic self might be right.
What else had I learned? I wondered, as sleep sucked me down at last.
Thursday morning I got up super early. I was dismayed to find I had lost only seven more pounds. What? I would certainly complain to Delilah about that!
Then I remembered that I had to eat, and keep eating, to keep the weight off. Sure, Delilah had stuffed me full of scones and brownies and things at Starbucks. But I’d hurled up whatever was left of that, along with my scraps of dinner, after I got home. Guess I’d better eat breakfast this time.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 41