In her look, I recognized the blind expression she used to get when she was between husbands, when she didn’t have a man to tell her what to do, so she fell back on letting her daughter boss her. In those icky between-times, I had had to tell her what to wear to work and when to go to the store.
Ugh.
I prayed hard right then that someday, Mom would see her life as her own, not hers-and-Melitta’s, or hers-and-Howard’s-and-Melitta’s, not anyone’s but hers.
Having me move out could be the making of her.
Finally, her lips twitched. “Anything else?” she said tightly.
“No, that’s all for now.”
I turned and went out, shutting the door quietly behind me. I made a point to stop in the girls’ room to look at myself in the mirror. Yep. Still taller, thinner, smoother, and…beautiful. I pulled in a healing sigh and felt about one percent better.
Homeroom was a little nuts. Ms. Caisson took one shocked look at me and left the room without a word. The room erupted into conversation, and eleven people tried to talk to me all at once.
“Guys, guys,” I protested. “Do you have something specific to report? Because I haven’t done a lick of homework in three days and I’d better get cracking.”
Jacob Welfman came up to me, handed me a handwritten sheet torn off a yellow pad, and solemnly went back to his seat. I picked it up and looked at it. Report on Mr. Dorrington blackmailing the Welfman family, 4423 Magnolia Street, Kenilworth, Illinois.
“You know I have to turn this in to the authorities.” I said.
He nodded. I shrugged. When I turned back, there were two more reports on my desk. I glanced at Jacob’s sheet. It was terribly spelled, but it was a detailed account of how his father was running for assemblyman and getting blackmailed by Dorrington over something that happened when Mr. Welfman was back in college. I finished it and looked back at Jacob.
While I read, more papers appeared on my desk. My phone also pinged.
Regina Sholter leaned over and hissed to me, “I sent it by Facebook message. Because email is forever, right? In case something happens.”
“Uh.” What did she think could happen? “Okay.” I supposed I could run into my mother in the hall and she could take all these highly incriminating papers off me. If I let her.
I looked at Regina’s message and did a double-take. She had something to say about Howard. My eyes bugged out and I stuffed the phone in my pocket. I looked back at her and swallowed. “You guys should really be talking directly to the police.”
“You’re the only one with the guts to do it,” Regina said.
“Yeah. You’re our leader,” Bill Kummel said.
The PA blurted, “Melitta Grove, please come to Mr. Slusser’s office. Melitta Grove, please come to the principal’s office.”
I rolled my eyes, gathered up my stuff, and was immediately besieged by classmates thrusting more papers into my hands.
At the doorway I turned and said to the room at large, “You know I’ll have to turn all this stuff in, right? We can’t nail him if we don’t report him.” I didn’t specify which him. “Anyone want theirs back?”
David Cukor, basketball team captain, made a noise. I looked at him. He scowled, then waved a hand. “Fuck it. Do it.”
“Consider it fucked,” I said, saying that word aloud for the first time in my life, and turned to the door just as it banged open in my face. Ms. Caisson was back. She glared at me.
I went to the principal’s office.
I wasn’t too surprised to find the police in there.
The cop was a rugged-looking, middle-aged guy in a tweed jacket and tan corduroy pants and Mephisto loafers, oh, expensive. He sat in the hot seat in front of the principal’s desk as if he was the President of the United States dropping in on a minor functionary.
Mr. Slusser introduced me. “Detective Doyle, Melitta Grove.”
Detective Doyle offered me coffee. I declined. He held his cup out to Mr. Slusser and Mr. Slusser, looking more relieved than annoyed, took it to the outer office, closing the door behind him.
“You’ve caused quite a stir, young lady,” the detective said.
“Somebody was bound to snap,” I said coolly. “Did Sanjay give you the stuff off the internet?”
“He did,” the detective said.
“Good. Here’s a bunch more reports from Mr. Dorrington’s victims. They also sent me email and Facebook messages. I haven’t had time to read it all. I kinda feel like it’s not my business to read it, actually,” I added, queasy from my brief scan of Jacob’s account of his family’s sufferings at Mr. Dorrington’s hands.
“Your feeling is correct.” The detective accepted the reports and glanced through them. “Hm.” He slid them into a little flat attaché case. “If you don’t mind, from this point on, I’d rather you refer people to me, rather than accept evidence on the police’s behalf. It taints the credibility of the paper trail.”
“Of course. Delighted,” I said. “Was there something you wanted from me? Because I didn’t do any homework last week and I need to get started.”
“Right. You were in the hospital and you had no time for homework?”
“I had bags of time. But they snatched me out of pep rally without my backpack,” I said. “No books, no homework.”
Detective Doyle said, “How did you know your father was being blackmailed?”
“Stepfather. My fourth. I didn’t know right away. But my mother told me that ‘everyone is afraid of Mr. Dorrington.’” I used quote fingers. “So I knew ‘everyone’ had to be Howard. Howard started diddling me right after he married my mother. I…did some snooping.” Well, Amanda had done the snooping. “He’s been making regular Paypal payments to someone secret. It seemed like a solid guess.”
My god, that just came blam out of my mouth. I felt a wave of cold, as if my skin had got caught on a passing car and ripped off.
“Did anyone else know about your stepfather molesting you?”
I swallowed sour bile. “Beats me. When you’re in that situation, you think you’re all alone in the world. Even when you’re not.” That was a mouthful. I wished I had ten or fifteen years of free time to think about that factoid.
Detective Doyle made a note. “Would you be willing to testify as to when your stepfather, um, initiated this activity?”
“Yes,” I said crisply.
“And have you any idea when Mr. Dorrington may have—uh—”
“When he may have noticed how I was a walking zombie and put two and two together and started blackmailing my stepfather? No clue. It would have been last school year. Because I’ll bet you a cookie Howard had Mr. Dorrington’s help holding me back from graduating. I was kind of out of it that year,” I added.
The detective raised his eyebrows. “You certainly don’t seem out of it now.”
“Reality caught up with me,” I said.
He studied me for a while. “It suits you.”
“Doesn’t all suck,” I agreed.
“Now,” he said, pulling some papers out of his attaché case, “about the allegations on your Facebook page, can you identify some of these people who posted here—”
“I didn’t see the posts. Can we look at them online? I have a tablet,” I said, pulling mine out.
He shook his head. “Most of them have already been removed. These are printouts of screen captures provided by your friend Sanjay Halong. You didn’t see them before?”
“I was in the hospital without my backpack,” I reminded him. “Not even a phone.”
“You have your stuff now,” he observed.
“Sanjay held onto it and gave it to me when I got out.”
Detective Doyle didn’t blink at that. “Can we contact you in the future?” he said too casually, and then I wondered if he was trying to figure out where I was staying now. My hackles went up. I wanted to keep the Lair my secret. That was my future, and I wanted it free of Melitta encumbrances.
“Contact me via p
hone.” I gave him the number. “Or my mom can reach me during school if my phone is off. I keep it off a lot. We’re not allowed to call or text during school hours.”
“Yeah, right,” the detective said, and I laughed out loud.
“Well, I don’t,” I said. “I don’t know anybody who wants to call me, and both my parents work for the school system. I’d get killed if I flouted the rule.”
“Really killed?” He raised his eyebrows.
I was beginning to find out how little sense of humor the police had. Or maybe the jokes were funny only if he made them. “No, as far as I know, not really killed. But I’d get my head shrunk for at least two hours.”
“Brutal,” he said.
“You have no idea.”
“So, basically, you stuck a stick into Mr. Dorrington and stirred him up and—then what?”
“You tell me. I was just minding my business—”
“Inciting a riot among your classmates.”
“Look, I just said that thing in class.”
He raised his eyebrows at me again, and I reported exactly what I had said in Social Studies that fateful day, wow, only last week?
I finished, “Whatever happened after that, I mean, I assumed that Mr. Dorrington was arranging some icky kind of payback, because he was furious and he spent the rest of class typing on his laptop while everyone else gave their presentations. But I really don’t know how the whole thing at the pep rally happened. All I can say, next thing I know, I’m at pep rally and the paramedics and the cops have come for me.”
He pushed his lips out and nodded, looking thoughtfully at a picture of Mr. Slusser’s kids in gymnastics clothes. “Well,” he said finally. “Apparently he took the ‘Got DT, call MG’ campaign seriously.”
“That was not my doing,” I said. “It was already on all the walls and stuff when I came out of Social Studies.”
“Went viral on you. Congratulations. You’re famous.”
“Today Chase Washington, tomorrow the world,” I said cheerfully.
“Actually, last week the world,” the detective said. He turned the top screen capture sheet around so I could see it. His finger tapped under a line. I looked.
It was a picture of me getting dragged down the bleachers by the paramedics.
Holy poop. Four hundred thousand shares. Two million likes.
“Everybody wants a picture of you,” the detective said. “The funny thing is, all the existing pictures are a little out of date.” He looked me up and down again, and this time I wondered if, in a very careful way, he was letting me know that he thought I looked good. Well, I did.
Cops flirt? “I had a makeover.”
He nodded again, as if checking something off on a list in his head. Now he started on a new topic. “You really impressed the hospital staff.”
“How? I didn’t talk to them.”
“They said you were, ah, a very poised young lady.”
I felt weirder and weirder. What was with the spotlight on Melitta? I wasn’t trying out for reality TV here. “Howard has talked too much at the dinner table about what it’s like in the booby hatch. I knew what to expect. I was ready for it.”
“Three of your hospital visitors who know Melitta Grove stated that you weren’t you. Including your mother.”
“They didn’t want me incarcerated.”
“But if you had told the hospital staff who you were, they would have released you.”
“Would they?” I said patiently. Clearly this guy didn’t spend a lot of time in hospitals. “Do you know that? Do you know for sure that they would have kept my stepfather away from me if they had known for sure it was me in that locked ward? Do you know for sure that I wouldn’t have been medicated against my will, for my own good, because Howard claimed I was suicidal? Do you know that they wouldn’t have tried to force me into group therapy while I was waiting out my five-day paper? Have you ever been in group therapy?” I added, because Mom had forced me into countless groups last year when I was such a zombie.
Detective Doyle didn’t blink. “Actually, I have.”
“I don’t believe it. When?”
“I shot somebody when I was a rookie. They make you do all kinds of psych-leave stuff before you can return to work.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “Badass.”
“Sucked big time. And you’re right, I don’t know what your hospital experience would have been like if you had confessed your identity. Was that why you didn’t? To get out of group therapy?”
“Were you not paying attention? My stepfather is a psychiatrist. He can prescribe drugs and administer them, bada-bing, bada-boom. He exudes a poisonous cloud of mindwhack. Until they knew who I was, they couldn’t very well let him wander into my hospital room whenever and, uh, do whatever.” I flushed.
“The reason they wouldn’t let your mother or stepfather visit you is because they were on record as locking you out of your own house. This fits the profile for child abuse.” Detective Doyle was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry I haven’t been very sensitive about your abuse history. That’s not one of my areas of expertise.”
I waved that away. Hearing it described like that was freaking me out, even though I’d already told the sluts and my mother and Daisy and Daisy’s mother. The cops were different.
“I don’t mind talking about it,” I lied, over a hum in my ears. “But I really do mind being asked if it really happened. Or constantly having to remind people that I’m a child at risk. Wait, an adult at risk, now, I guess. I’m nineteen, woohoo.”
“So you’ve moved out?” he said.
I was getting antsy. “Look, I gave you my phone number. You may not walk me home and carry my books.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” he said in a pained voice.
I looked at him. He had a very-serious-adult face on. In a tone completely devoid of flirtatious overtones, he said, “You are not alone, Melitta. A lot of people are worried about you. They want to make sure you are safe. I’m one of them. That is the only reason I want your number. It’s so, if you call me, I know who is calling, and I can drop everything and make sure you are safe. Your allegedly blackmailing teacher has disappeared, but he may not be far away. Your stepfather is facing child molesting charges—not about you but—” He bit the rest off. “You’re not out of danger, but you’re not doing this alone anymore. So, no more ‘Got DT, call MG,’ okay?”
My shoulders came up, as if I could hide my head between them. I was trying to stay on top of this conversation and process not about you at the same time. “I’ve gone viral,” I reminded him.
“Then give me your phone. I’ll give you another, and you won’t be bothered by your two million fans or everyone in your high school or your stepfather or your blackmailing teacher, and we’ll have a chance to take direct testimony from more of the victims.”
I scowled.
“Do you want to field phone calls and texts all day?” he said patiently.
I put my hand on my backpack strap and squeezed. “It’s my phone.” It had all my apps and settings and ebooks and tunes and contacts. It had taken months to get it just right.
If I gave him my phone, I’d be cut off from a big source of information I could use to nail Mr. Dorrington to the gym door.
Plus, I wanted to read Regina Sholter’s email about Howard.
Detective Doyle sighed. “So you’re going it alone.” He looked worried now. “This isn’t a video game or a movie, Melitta. You could get hurt.”
“Worse than getting molested in my own bed at night and having my mother look the other way? Worse than getting sent back to senior year a second time? Worse than getting locked out of my home? Worse than being forcibly kidnapped by police and paramedics in front of the whole school, sedated, and involuntarily hospitalized for days?”
He looked a little guilty for the first time. “I’m sorry about that. The police acted on the best information they had at the time.”
I shrugged. “Everyone falls for
Howard’s bullshit once.” Besides, I couldn’t hold a grudge. That pep rally had been my first popular moment in my whole life.
Doyle said, “You’re not very old, Ms. Legal Adult. There are one or two things you don’t know.”
I sighed. “I know.”
“Look, here’s one more offer. Do you want to talk to your stepfather—with a witness present?”
“Why would I want to do that?” My face twisted with revulsion. “I’ve moved out. I’m gone.”
“You might have one or two things to say to him that you want to say in a safe place, with a friend listening. A friend with a gun,” he added, smiling like he was funny and easygoing, which I had decided he wasn’t really.
I considered this offer on its merits. “I’ll take a rain check.”
He nodded one final time. Then he slapped his knees, slid his papers into his folder, and stood up. “Thanks for taking time out of the final downhill slope of your second senior year.”
I stood up and shouldered my backpack. “Don’t rub it in.”
“I can always tell the short-timers. They have that thousand yard stare.”
We shook hands. I walked out and found Mr. Slusser waiting in the outer office, drinking coffee. I wondered if he’d been listening at the door. I wondered if he’d been a party to the conspiracy to hold me back a year.
I wondered if I should have mentioned this possibility to Detective Doyle and then realized I didn’t have to puzzle it out for myself, because I had a whole lair full of coed demon sluts waiting for me, full of fiendish ideas and margaritas.
Detective Doyle tried the cell number I’d given him and made sure I’d put him into my contacts list.
On impulse, I decided to try out Detective Doyle’s fancy offer. “Oh, Mr. Slusser,” I said, stopping at the secretary’s desk where the principal was sitting and drinking coffee. “Thank you for giving us privacy.”
Mr. Slusser looked nervously at the detective and blushed to the tips of his ears. Oh, yeah. Privacy.
“Were you listening to my meeting with Melitta?” the detective said bluntly, and I could have kissed him.
Mr. Slusser started gobbling.
“Did you record us?” I added. So that’s why Mrs. Entwich wasn’t at her desk, and he was sitting there instead.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 53