I let the hand holding my notes fall to my side, signalling that I was done, and looked at every face in the room one by one, very carefully.
Mouths had dropped open everywhere. Three people had their phones out and were texting. Awesome. No getting this cat back in the bag now.
I made a mental note of the names of those who turned white, or red, or seemed to shrink in their seats like bunnies on a dark road. Laura DeVries. Patty Ableman. David Cukor. Juaniece Watkins. I noticed Sanjay was calmly looking around as if taking inventory, too. I wondered if Mrs. Potter Palmer had ever done a stunt like this. Probably not. She probably sounded people out one by one at her afternoon teas. But Mrs. Potter Palmer probably never got locked out of her mansion by her own parents.
The loudspeaker erupted over our heads. “Melitta Grove, please come to the guidance counselor’s office,” my mother’s voice said.
Perfect timing.
I almost walked out then and there.
Then I remembered that in a couple of weeks or so they wouldn’t be able to touch me. They couldn’t make me repeat senior year again. I wondered what would happen if I just sat down.
I turned and looked at Mr. Dorrington. He was dark red and glaring. And then I went back to my desk. As I met Sanjay’s eyes, I made a tiny keep it turning gesture with my forefinger, down at my side.
My mom did not summon me via the PA again. When I didn’t show up in her office, I guess she must have realized I was ignoring her, and that everyone in whatever class I was in knew it, and she let it go. She had some dignity. Or maybe she was biding her time. Or maybe she was calling her husband. Or maybe she was getting email from Mr. Dorrington right this minute.
That was entirely possible. Mr. Dorrington called the rest of class up to the front, one at a time, to deliver their reports. He seemed not to be listening, but we all knew better than to assume that. He had his laptop open on his desk and he was typing furiously.
I kept one eye on him and one on the people around me.
Regina Sholter, sitting in front of me, turned slightly in her seat and looked at me. The white of her eye, the one eye I could see, seemed a little crazed. I realized she wasn’t eyeballing Melitta-the-wack-job. She was sending a message.
I tore off a tiny piece of paper and wrote my Facebook ID on it. Then I slipped it down the back of her dress collar. A minute passed...two minutes.
Mr. Dorrington called another luckless student to the front.
Regina put her hand back on her collar and fished out the tiny piece of paper.
That gave me an idea. I tore off another dozen slips of paper. On some, I wrote my Facebook ID. On some, my cell number. On some, my gmail address. Mom might be able to shut some of them down—although, now that I was over eighteen, maybe not, hm!—but not all. Maybe not any. I made a mental note to get online and remind all my social media providers that I was now old enough to be the boss of my own stuff.
I waited until Mr. Dorrington seemed to be concentrating venomously on his laptop. Then I passed the slips to Sanjay behind me.
Beyond the serial humiliation of each of my classmates, nothing else happened. The bell rang. Mr. Dorrington closed his laptop and smiled his unpleasant smile and dismissed us. The PA came to life again and reminded us that next period was cancelled and everyone should attend pep rally in the gym.
Sanjay slipped me a piece of paper as he passed my desk. It was one of mine, with my Facebook ID on it. I turned it over. On the back he had written, Got DT?
He was gonna make this sucker go viral.
He had help. Everyone was murmuring on the way out of class, some looking back at me and ducking their heads, some just looking wall-eyed, like Regina. Everyone’s thumbs were working overtime.
Over their heads, I saw my mom standing in the hallway with her arms folded, looking like death.
Sanjay paused at the door and I bumped into him. “Grab the back of my shirt,” he hissed to me. I did. He sort of spread himself out somehow—he’s not skinny, and he wears these horrible big baggy officewear shirts—spread his arms out with his books in them, and walked straight across the hall toward my mom. “Mrs. Grove-Horwitz!” he said loudly, “Thank you for coming,” just like a deacon welcoming someone to church, or the vice principal shaking hands on Parent-Teacher Day.
Over his shoulder I saw Mom’s eyes go wide. Sanjay is not small. It must have been like getting hugged by a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.
While mom was distracted, I slipped away sideways behind him and slithered off down the hall. Normally I would dump my stuff in my locker before a pep rally, but I didn’t dare go back there. I probably didn’t have much time. My best move would be to get into the crowd, spread the word around, and get as many names as I could.
Fifty feet along the corridor I saw something scrawled on the glazed cinderblock wall in big blue taggers’ marker. Got DT? Call MG.
Holy poop, that was only forty-five minutes ago!
I whooshed out a sigh. Step one, complete. I wouldn’t have to spread any word myself.
The whole school blundered through the halls toward the gym. Here and there I saw the same tag: Got DT? Call MG.
Holy poop. Whoever came up with that was a genius. Everyone at the pep rally would be wondering what that was about, and the word would spread in two minutes, and my phone number and Facebook ID wouldn’t be far behind.
“There you are,” Sanjay said. I looked up to find him looming beside me. “Let’s sit up high in the middle somewhere.”
This was going to be interesting.
“HONEY BADGERS! HONEY BADGERS!” yelled my schoolmates. Daisy Rawson and her snake-pit crew were flinging themselves into the air and shaking their pompoms. The pep band played brass-heavy favorites of pop rock from forty years ago. Members of the basketball team came out and smiled awkwardly at people, then sat down on the row of chairs in the middle of the gym floor.
Up in the bleachers, wedged into the second row from the top among the heavy drinker sophomores, Sanjay and I watched, waited, and passed slips of paper with my Facebook ID to people on all sides of us. After about sixty of those I said we should stop. People could copy them. My FB profile name was OwlFan.
Below us, I could see heads turning, not all at once but one at a time, faces looking up at me. Every one of them looked a little nervous—sometimes a lot nervous. The energy in the gym was raucous, on edge.
I was pretty on edge myself.
Then I saw what I’d been waiting for.
“Sanjay,” I yelled into his ear as the band blatted out an Earth, Wind & Fire classic, “Can I leave my backpack with you?”
He looked toward the gym door, saw what I had seen, looked back at me, and yelled, “Go! Go, go!”
I started climbing past the kids seated in my row.
At the first doorway to the gym that led back into the hallways stood my mother and my stepfather. Beside them was a guy in white short-sleeved shirt and pants—the uniform of a paramedic. Beside him stood a cop.
They meant business this time.
I was headed toward the crash doors leading to the parking lot outside. That wasn’t going to work, I realized, as more cops came into the room, filed across the floor in front of the bleachers, and positioned themselves at those doors.
My stepfather pointed straight at me. Thanks, Howard. I’ll always remember you like this.
My mom looked like she’d been crying.
The kids up in the bleachers made room for me. “Go, Melitta, go!” one of them shouted.
The band finished their song and the cheerleaders were at it again, and the students were shouting along with them. But some of them were shouting something else.
“Go, Melitta, go! GO, MELITTA, GO!”
The principal started yelling over the PA for order.
Paramedics were clambering up into the bleachers now. I changed direction twice, but it didn’t look good. Didn’t help that kids kept trying to shove little bits of paper into my hands, o
r yell stuff to me.
“Not now, not now!” I kept yelling back. “Message my Facebook! Text me!”
A cop joined the paramedics, and suddenly kids started screaming and leaning away from him.
I saw that he had a Taser in his hand.
Okay, I did not want to be responsible for my classmates getting Tased. “Move your feet!” I yelled to the people closest to me, a bunch of freshman I think, and they shrank away from me. I grabbed the seat and slid down between the seat and the bleacher platform. I doubted I’d get away by monkeying under the struts of the collapsible bleachers, but at least they wouldn’t dare collapse ’em on me until they’d evacuated the room. If I could slither back out unnoticed, I might get out in the crowd.
As I climbed through the gap into the dark and the deafening, riot-like noise under the bleachers, I glanced up and saw that the LCD Spirit Bar by the ceiling no longer ran a message of encouragement to our Honey Badgers. It said, G O T D T? C A L L M G! O W L F A N O N F B
Wasn’t a teacher supposed to be handling the Spirit Bar?
I couldn’t remember.
It was dark down there, and I couldn’t move very fast, and people were stamping rhythmically on the bleachers, making the struts shiver in my hands as I half-hopped, half-climbed my way through the maze, banging my shins and my head and my elbows on the metal struts in the dark.
Daylight showed ahead. Then, blocking the daylight, a guy in paramedic white appeared. They were going to get me.
My heart was blattering in my ears like a fly in a jar. I couldn’t tell if I was breathing anymore.
It occurred to me that if I didn’t talk to them—if I denied who I was—I could put off some of the bull Howard would inevitably try on me, or have them try on me. He was always talking about the locked wards, how hopeless his patients were, how no one cared what happened to them. I’d never been in any doubt that he was threatening me.
But they would have to prove who I was first.
Even the cops had been in doubt, when they took me away from Mom’s house yesterday.
I clutched this comforting thought as I dodged between rows of struts, my eye on that paramedic waiting for me at the end of the bleachers.
He dodged, too. Always there, blocking me.
The principal was shouting into the PA out there, and the student body was stomping on the bleachers, and I was going deafer by the moment.
I glanced behind me. Way down at the other end of the bleachers, someone in white started moving carefully through the darkness toward me.
The best I could hope for was to get into public view before anyone laid hands on me.
In desperation I grabbed an ankle through the gap between seat and platform. Above me, its owner screamed. A gap opened big enough to let me stick an arm up and wave. I started climbing through.
Big hands grabbed my arms and pulled me up, banging me against the struts and platform as I came, ow, ow. To my surprise I realized they were classmates. Holy poop, it was the football team, seated down here close to the gym floor, of course. They formed a human wall around me, their arms folded, looking macho.
“Guys, no,” I said, and nobody heard me. “Guys! Let me through!” I yelled. “It’s no use! Don’t let them Tase you!”
Well, that created a nice big open space around me. I was two rows from the gym floor. The cops and paramedics lined up along the floor, looking back at me.
I looked around the packed gym and raised my arm. Everybody roared.
Then I climbed down the last two rows and into the arms of the paramedics.
Somebody injected me with something right away. The screaming and yelling got louder. I didn’t resist when they put me on a stretcher. Then, weirdly, instead of rolling me out of the gym pronto, everybody stood around for a while.
My edges fuzzed out. The riot noise got louder and louder. The principal was yelling continuously through the PA, demanding that everyone sit down and be quiet.
Up around the seam between wall and ceiling where the Spirit Bar hung, the message still ran. G O T D T ? C A L L M G ! O W L F A N O N F B
I felt pretty good, actually. Could have been the injection. So what? For this ten minutes, I was loved by my whole school. I ordered my faraway, numbing lips to smile.
Sanjay stood nearby like a total eclipse of the sun. I could hear his voice, calm and pleasant as always, and realized that I had never noticed how Sanjay didn’t let things bother him. Or if they did, he didn’t show it. He always sounded adult and thoughtful and kind and—I shut my eyes so I could focus better on his voice and realized I could home in on it as if with a directional mike. Wow. This succubus body was really useful.
“—Check the records, you’ll find the incident. It was only a day or two ago. I believe a truant officer was called in and spoke with her.”
“We’re already aware of the incident,” said a brusque, disinterested voice. “Thanks for your help. Go sit down now, kid.”
Kid. They could call us kids while we were in this building. But get us away from a school, and Sanjay and I could pass for adults. We were too tall to be anything else.
I’m tall now, I thought with pleasure, floating on my happy-drug injection.
The riot noise wasn’t settling down at all.
My mother was crying nearby.
“Melitta,” someone said, even closer. “Can you see how many fingers I’m holding up?”
I remembered my brilliant plan. “I think,” I tried to say in a huffy, dignified tone, “you’ve mistaken me for someone else.” I have no idea what actually came out of my mouth.
Somewhere farther away, Howard was using his I’m sure you’ll see it my way once you hear this voice. I could tell he wasn’t getting very far, because he sounded extraordinarily patient. He always sounded patient when he was in a rage. Interesting.
I heard the principal say something like, “—Ask Mr. Dorrington to say a few words.” This should be good.
About then, I fell asleep.
I wasn’t surprised at all to wake up in a hospital. A nurse was doing the thing with the blood pressure cuff. “Ow,” I said, just as the thing hissed and she popped it off my arm.
“How are you feeling?” she said.
“I’m feeling annoyed,” I said. “Is that appropriate?”
She handed me a cup of ice water. I drank until I got an ice-water headache. I put a hand over my eye. “Ow.”
“Do you feel up to talking to the intake nurse?”
“More water first,” I croaked, and she refilled the cup. “Ugh, I need a shower.” I smelled awful.
“We need to do the intake first,” the nurse said, quite kindly I thought. “So we know if we’re keeping you or not.”
I nodded. “Oh. Right.” I had a really, really clever idea.
They’d be keeping me. I was quite sure, after hearing that tone in Howard’s voice, that they’d be keeping me.
Which they did.
The conversation with the intake nurse went a lot like this.
“Melitta, your father tells us you’ve been on psychotropic medication for several years now.”
“I’m not Melitta.”
“Your mother identified you, Melitta. All your classmates were cheering for you. Do you know why?”
I shrugged.
“But you agree they are your classmates.”
I produced my get-out-of-jail-free ticket. “I want to sign a five-day paper.” And then I shut my lips.
It was really, really hard to keep my mouth shut after that.
“Melitta, you failed school last year. Can you tell me why?”
“Melitta, do you hate Mr. Dorrington enough to try to hurt him?”
“Melitta, are you a prostitute?”
“Melitta, do you think you might hurt yourself? Your father is very concerned about your suicidal thoughts.”
I was prepared for the lies from Howard but it took everything I had not to scream, He’s only my stepfather!
But since the be
st father I’d ever had was Lester, the child-despising, poker-ass lawyer, I realized it was a waste of effort to argue the point.
Plus, I was not Melitta.
It had occurred to me as I scampered around under those bleachers, bruising myself on a strut every two feet in the deafening darkness, that I hadn’t seen a school nurse or been to a doctor or had my school picture taken or anything since I grew these miraculous inches and lost all this weight. Only two days ago! Or was it three? I counted back carefully. How long had I been drugged? My watch wasn’t on my wrist. “What day is it?” I asked.
That had been one of the intake nurse’s first questions. “You don’t know?” she said.
“How the hell do I know,” I said irritably. “Those clowns injected me with something and knocked me out. I’m asking you to tell me how long I’ve been forcibly drugged unconscious and kidnapped. Are you refusing to tell me?”
She looked huffy but she said, “It’s May twentieth.”
I’d lost a whole day. “I want to sign a five-day paper,” I repeated.
“Melitta, are you sure that’s wise? Maybe you could wait a day or so while we talk this over with your parents.” She got a crafty look. “There are discrepancies between their story and the police department’s findings.”
I looked into her blue eyes and thought, Lady, give it up. I’ve been mindwhacked by experts. “Are you refusing to let me sign a five-day paper?”
So she would have to let me sign one.
This was, so far as I could calculate, one of very few advantages to living with shrinks. I’d learned about the five-day paper two years ago, when Howard had just married my mother and was talking about his big-shot psychiatric experience. It seemed that a patient had tried to escape the locked ward by demanding a five-day paper. Once she signed the paper, the clock was ticking, and at the end of five days they would have had to discharge her. But I talked her out of it, Howard had said smugly. She tore it up.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 47