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

by Jennifer Stevenson

  I shook hands with her. “One of these days. If I ever get out of here.”

  The door opened and the nurse came in. “So you convinced Melitta to talk? I’m so glad.” She was beaming.

  Ms. Waroo turned and looked at me. Then she looked the nurse straight in the eye. “That’s not Melitta.”

  Of course I wasn’t going to get off that easily. They were tickled to death that I’d asked them to invite Ms. Waroo down to visit me, which had compromised my denial some. But they hadn’t asked me for my reason right then. They’d been too pleased to think that I was cracking. Now I had an excuse ready.

  “But you asked to see your PE teacher, Melitta. Surely you’re not going to deny your identity any more.”

  “She was in the school gym that day. I saw her running the—” I bit back Spirit Bar, a term only a student would use. “—The thing by the ceiling with writing on it. The kid I was visiting with, Sanjay, he told me her name.”

  In fact, I’d remembered that bit with the Spirit Bar shortly before Ms. Waroo showed up, which had reinforced my conviction that she was the right person to call. When a teacher copies graffiti that supports your revolution onto a school announcement board, you pretty much know she’s an ally.

  “How do you know Sanjay, Melitta?” the nurse pursued.

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not Melitta. I’ve signed a five-day paper. This is tedious and frankly it’s harassment. I’m going to my room now.”

  In my room, waiting for lunch, I ate candy bars and reflected on the Ms.-Waroo-and-the-Spirit-Bar thing. Why had she posted that graffiti up on the Spirit Bar? Why wasn’t she surprised by any of my revelations today? What did she know about Mr. Dorrington?

  Maybe he’d tried to blackmail her. He’d tried to blackmail everybody, apparently.

  I still felt kind of icky and unsatisfied, but maybe that was because the whole locked ward smelled faintly gross. I’d been avoiding the other patients. In a way I really wanted to talk to them, because I was curious. Did any of this help anybody? Or was it only to get them out of their family’s hair? Did having the doctors and nurses hassle them all the time actually make them “work on their problems,” as Mom would say? Seemed to me the patients were just as happy to be drugged. That way they didn’t have to work on anything.

  I kind of envied them.

  Okay, not-Melitta, what are you avoiding thinking about?

  I was beginning to hate that reality-check part of my brain.

  The unsatisfied feeling meant I hadn’t got what I wanted from Ms. Waroo.

  And what did you want from her?

  I wanted her to talk to my Mom. Tell her the truth for me. Surely the evidence was piling up. Surely she had to wonder.

  When I first heard that Howard had been shrinking Daisy Rawson and Daisy had dropped out of school, I hadn’t put the pieces together.

  Sanjay also said someone had come forward or made an accusation against Howard...or something. I hadn’t had the courage to ask him more about that. Was it Daisy?

  Another icky thought occurred to me: Had my mom sent Daisy to Howard for shrinking?

  Reluctantly I added that to the list of things I wanted to ask my mom. It was only a matter of time before she showed up here at the hospital. Would I agree to see her?

  Well, of course.

  Ulp. My stomach did a loop-de-loop.

  I’d put myself through all this horrible crap, starting with the contract with Delilah and ending up here in the locked ward, because I wanted to confront Mom and never had the nerve.

  On the up side, I felt readier. Was that good or bad?

  I suspected it was a lot like taking two tries at finishing twelfth grade. You screw up for the first part and you do your stellar best in the second part, and maybe it evens out.

  I wished I knew what would count as “stellar best” in the coming confrontation with Mom.

  This line of thought made me so miserable that I ate four fancy chocolate bars in a row: a plain eighty-five percent cacao (meant to eat it slow but I woofed it, ew, bitter), a sixty-percent cacao with sea salt (oh dear lord, more!), a milk choc filled with caramel and sea salt (audible moans), and a milk choc with raspberry filling (meh). Of course by that time I was a little ill from all the sugar.

  I would have to remember to eat often and eat well to keep this new body thin. Because I just wasn’t used to junk. That thought made me feel nice—rewarded—strong.

  Someday soon I’d be another seven inches taller. And have to eat even more.

  Just as soon as I talked to Mom.

  Ew.

  Being in the locked ward, I concluded, was just plain icky.

  I dreamed of Delilah that night. I was surprised. She’d kind of hinted that sooner or later I’d be on my own, with only the help available from the succubi.

  “True,” she said as if she’d heard my thought. “Dummy, you’re dreaming. Everything you think and feel and want is right out in the open.”

  I suspected that she’d always been able to read my thoughts, feelings, and desires.

  “True again. Pay attention, darling, because this really has to be it. The girls should be teaching you this, but they’re not here in your dream.”

  Would I remember any of this in the morning?

  “Yes,” Delilah said with patience. “But only if you have time tonight to practice a lot. Are you ready?”

  “Okay, okay,” I grumbled, feeling drool between my cheek and the pillowcase, wondering how asleep or awake I really was. “Ready.”

  “I’m going to teach you how to shift shape. Because you need control of the timing of this thing, and since you’re stuck in here, you won’t know when to do what. You’ll have to trust your instincts. So practice. At least you’ll be able to handle the shifts, even if you aren’t sure when to make them.”

  She told me to picture how I used to look. That was no picnic. There I was in my mind’s eye, scuttling down the halls of Chase Washington with my backpack hunching me over and another textbook or two clutched to my breasts. So fat and short that everyone passing me seemed like a giant. Zits, check. Messy hair, check. Sallow, blotchy complexion, check. Bad clothes and shoes, checkity check check. Someone slammed into me on the stairs and sent all the stuff in my arms flying. Body check.

  “Are we done yet?” I complained. “This is hideous.”

  “Now imagine that you are looking into someone’s eyes. Their eyes become a mirror. Now you see the same image mirrored in their eyes.”

  I thought of my mom, seeing this lame version of Melitta every day and sighing to herself. She always seemed to care. She just hadn’t one clue how I felt, how to talk to me, or what I needed. While I thought all this, I actually felt my shoulders rounding, my face turning greasy, my socks slumping around my ankles. I seemed to shrink. My poor mom. I felt ashamed and powerless.

  “Look at me, Melitta,” Delilah said, and I opened my eyes and looked into hers. She gestured. A mirror appeared out of the dreamstuff. She took me by the shoulders and turned me to face it.

  There I was. Melitta again. Ugh. My gaze met Delilah’s in the mirror.

  “As long as you can picture seeing yourself in their eyes, you’ll control what they see. You will be what you want them to see. If you’re lazy about what you imagine, you’ll mess up.”

  I frowned. “What if I’m in front of a whole bunch of different people and I want them to see different versions of me?”

  “That’s what I love about you, Melitta. You think things through.” Delilah clapped me on the shoulder. “Work on it. You have all night.”

  And then she was gone, and the dream mirror dissolved, and I felt dumpy and ugly again.

  Okay. This was succubus homework.

  I imagined my own dream mirror. Then I pictured looking into it, into my own eyes. I spent the rest of the night stretching myself, smoothing out my skin, taming my hair, grooming myself with nothing but my imagination and a lifetime of dissatisfaction with my face and body to guide me. And bac
k to old Melitta. And stre-e-etched myself again. And back.

  Because Delilah didn’t make idle threats. I knew what was coming at me, faster than a freight train, long before I was ready.

  As the third day of my five-day paper wore on, I began to recognize the gnawing empty hunger inside. It wasn’t about calories.

  It was about my mom.

  I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to give her my love, and at the same time I was so angry at her I wanted to yell at her, to tell her that her loyalty to The Man, in this case the wrong man, was going to cost her her daughter.

  Plus, it was costing me my mother.

  Angry tears leaked out of my eyes. Why hadn’t she come to visit me? I could see them keeping Howard away from me here at the hospital, but why Mom? Was it because she had told them she wouldn’t speak to me, that day when she and Howard tried to have the cops arrest me and take me out of their house? At least maybe now she might be sorry that she let Howard silence her that day. Or was Howard keeping her away from the hospital?

  Of course that was assuming she didn’t actually want me gone. Assuming she was just going along with Howard’s cloud of mindwhack. All of that assumed that, in fact, she still wanted her daughter and still cared about her.

  Not knowing the truth was eating me alive.

  I was finally, finally at the point where I was willing to risk finding out that she did in fact want me gone, that she had in fact known about Howard’s abuses and looked the other way.

  I was ready to know, just to get the pain of not-knowing over with.

  It was after four. School was out. She should have left her office by now.

  Get over here, dammit, I thought, beaming the thought out to Mom, wherever she was.

  Suddenly the door opened, and there she was!

  My mom walked into my hospital room, looked around quickly, and shut the door behind her.

  She ran across the room to me and scooped me into her arms with a squeak.

  I felt like such a baby. I just squeezed her back. I could feel our hearts beating at each other through our clothes. I thought, Will we still feel like this when I’m done asking her stuff? But I shut my eyes tight and squeezed her.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she kept whispering.

  I soaked that up as long as I could, while tears squeezed out of my squinched-shut eyes and my burning hot body cooled in her arms.

  Finally, she pulled away. “My goodness. You’ve grown!”

  “Three inches,” I said. “And I’m due to grow a lot more.” I stiffened my nerve. “Look closely, Mom, because there won’t be much left of the Melitta you know in a week.”

  She turned pale. “My God. Howard was right. You’re going to kill yourself.”

  I snorted and rolled my eyes. “Mom, we have to talk.”

  “Honey, I know things have been awful, and I’ve decided Howard’s strategy isn’t going to work for me, I’m sorry—”

  “How sorry are you?” I blurted, trying to stem the tide of guidance-counselor-speak.

  She stopped as if I’d punched her in the nose. “Why?” Suddenly her voice sounded hard.

  “How sorry are you?” I repeated. “Because you have to listen to me, and I don’t have much time to talk to you, and when we’re done, we’re done. You’ll probably never see me again. You may not want to.”

  “Don’t harm yourself,” she said strongly.

  “Are you going to listen?” I said.

  We stared at each other. I think she finally realized I meant it. For once, though she didn’t understand me, she wasn’t trying to fill in the blanks from the million scripts of Dialogues With Troubled Children in her head, something comforting that would leave her in control, that would take away the seriousness of the moment.

  We’ll see how long that lasts, I thought. I didn’t feel ready for this, but I couldn’t wait a moment longer.

  “Mom, this is really hard for me to say.” I felt numb, and my ears were beginning to ring with my rising heartbeats. “Mom, Howard sexually abused me for over sixteen months, starting right after he married you until late last summer.”

  She turned white.

  I held up my palms, pleading. “Don’t. Don’t say anything. Give me a little longer to say what I have to say. Then you can—start.”

  She looked whiter and whiter. Her lips pressed together.

  I tightened all over. “That’s not all I have to say. I have to ask you a question. A really big question. Are you ready for the question?”

  She stared at me, and then she nodded.

  “Did? You? Know? About? It?”

  In that moment I realized that I’d always known the answer. And she was about to prove it. If she said, “No,” I’d know she hadn’t known. Mom didn’t state absolute lies to people, not straight out and simple.

  But when she lied to herself, she ran circles around her answers to everyone else.

  “Why,” she croaked. “Why would you say a thing like that?”

  I covered my face with my hands. This was just as bad as I’d feared it would be. It was worse, because now I’d have to listen to the song and dance that she had been telling herself instead of confronting the truth. Where a man is concerned, my mom can sing and dance all night. And she can never be honest with me or herself about it.

  “You really believe that,” she said quietly.

  The pain squeezed me inside, harder than her hug two minutes ago. I couldn’t stand. I felt myself crumpling, my legs giving out, and I staggered back to a chair and bent over, covering my head with my arms. I’d done it. It was just as awful as I had expected. And now she would erupt with the avalanche of fakery, the psychobabble that would leave her conscience clear, that would smooth her world over, so that ugly bumps like her awkward daughter weren’t making ripples.

  I felt short and fat and zitty and asthmatic and blotchy and ugly again. I squeezed my face hard.

  “You really do believe that,” she said more quietly now. She seemed to be listening to my silence. Why couldn’t she just say, It’s true, then? Why couldn’t I be right about my own feelings and real-life experience, without her standing over me, ready to edit them?

  I felt anger begin to heat up inside me, and the pain began to fade. I stood up.

  Gosh, I was her height now.

  I looked her in the eye. “Mom, I don’t ‘believe’ Howard came into my room at night and—did things to me. I was there. He did those things and I felt them and I was terrified and I felt horrible. And after he’d mindwhacked me then and there, and later in front of you, right in front of you at the table, every day, I felt even worse. Because you sat there and listened to it all and just smiled, like he was this saint or something, fixing your life, putting a man in your man hole,” I finished, shocked at the ugliness of how that had come out of me.

  She seemed shocked too. She took a step back. “Melitta.”

  “Look,” I said, trying to calm down. “I know you don’t feel comfortable without a man in your life. You love being married, and you’re never happy without a husband. That’s you. It works for you. Your judgment sucks, but who knows, maybe mine will suck too when I’m out in the world and picking men for myself.”

  I was surprised to hear that come out of my mouth. I hadn’t ever considered having a man for myself before. I didn’t have time to do that now, of course. I was too busy tearing down my life.

  I waited for her to respond.

  “You haven’t hit it off with Howard,” she said. Briefly, I wanted to stab her through the eye with something sharp. Maybe she saw that in my face, because she veered off-topic. “And I admit my choices haven’t pleased me all the time, either.” Duh, mom. You’ve been married four times already. How many more after this? “But Lester was good to you.”

  I sent her a long, long look of sorrow and contempt. This relationship was over. I was sad, but weirdly relieved. Two years of holding my breath were now over.

  I went along with the topic change. “Lester ignored me
, because children should be seen and not heard. It’s all right, Mom. Next to Howard, Lester seems like a saint. He never laid a hand on me. I don’t totally blame him,” I admitted. “It’s not like I was a little kid, you know, cute like a puppy or a baby duck or something, by the time he came along.”

  “You always wanted his attention. I’m sorry he was just too stiff and shy to give it,” she said, giving the Mom version of history the way she always did. Smoothing over the bumps and ripples.

  “Mom, he didn’t want children. What part of that don’t you get?”

  “He was very generous to you,” she flashed.

  “Really? How?”

  “He gave you that trust fund for college.”

  “Five thousand dollars. Nice, Lester. You are officially redeemed,” I sneered. “A ‘hi’ when I walked in the door from school every day would have been nicer.”

  “He gave you five hundred thousand dollars,” she snapped, then gasped. A stricken look crossed her face. “He didn’t really.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “I misspoke,” she said.

  I grabbed her arm. “Wait. Lester put half a million dollars in my college trust fund?”

  The look on her face told me, Yes.

  I was flabbergasted.

  I’d known Lester was semi-rich, but we’d never lived that way. I scoffed, “He didn’t have that kind of money.”

  “Lester was very frugal,” Mom said. She didn’t try to correct herself again. That’s what made me believe it. Half a million dollars? Holy poop. “He wanted you to have it, but only if you were interested in college. He didn’t want you to go because of the money.”

  I stared at her. “So that’s why you didn’t tell me about it.”

  “I told you you had a trust fund for college.”

  “You said it was five thousand dollars. Technically we call that a lie, Mom.”

  “I didn’t mean to tell you anything about it, ever,” she came back at me. “It slipped out when we talked about it that night, was it two years ago?”