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

by Jennifer Stevenson

  I interrupted Detective Doyle’s angry questions and Mr. Slusser’s lame excuses. “By the way, Mr. Slusser, can you tell me anything about the meetings you had with my parents and my teachers last year when it was decided to stop me from graduating? Did those meetings happen in your office? I bet they did. Did you record them, too? Because I would love to hear those recordings.”

  “Now, Ms. Grove, you’re a minor—”

  “Not any more. Thanks to you holding me back, I am nineteen, and I can insist.”

  “I’m afraid I must insist, too,” Detective Doyle said.

  Mr. Slusser croaked, “There is no recorder.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “It’s in his computer. All he has to do is set it up before he leaves the room, put on the privacy screen saver, and we wouldn’t have a clue it was happening. Oh, Mrs. Entwich,” I said, as she came in, looking annoyed, as who wouldn’t, if their in-tray was piled high and they’d been booted out of their desk for forty-five minutes on a Wednesday the week of spring finals. “Can you dig up a couple of files for us?”

  Detective Doyle had stopped harassing Mr. Slusser and was now staring at me with his mouth open. “I’ll do this, Melitta, if you don’t mind.”

  “Be my guest,” I said.

  “We’re looking for the meetings with Melitta’s parents and teachers,” Detective Doyle said helpfully.

  “Before finals last year,” I put in.

  “That would have been in May,” Mrs. Entwich murmured, sitting at her desk and tapping on her keyboard. “Here we are. There were three meetings.”

  “Just email them to me,” Detective Doyle said. “Here’s my card. Send them to both addresses. Suspenders and a belt,” he added blandly, looking up as Mr. Slusser whimpered.

  I looked at the card. It was the one he had written my email and phone number on.

  I lifted my startled gaze to the detective’s face. He looked back at me with a hint of amusement crinkling the corners of his eyes.

  “There you go,” Mrs. Entwich said from behind her computer screen.

  “Also Melitta’s transcripts,” he said. “Better go back the whole way. I have no idea what the judge will want.”

  Mr. Slusser quivered slightly.

  “May as well throw in the rest of her permanent record,” Detective Doyle added.

  Mrs. Entwich looked up at him blankly. “What?”

  “You know. The works. They’re always threatening you with stuff that goes on your permanent record.”

  Mrs. Entwich dimpled. “Now, sir. You know there isn’t any such thing.”

  “There isn’t?” He looked astonished and a little hurt. “Well, visits to the nurse’s office. The guidance counselor. Tardies.”

  “We don’t keep records of tardies past the term,” Mrs. Entwich said, sending him a scolding but humorous glance. Boy, he really could get a lot out of people with charm. I made a note of it. If I ever found some charm of my own, I would try it. Save wear and tear on the glowy eyes and the fang.

  She tapped for a minute. “Anything else?”

  “Today’s recording, if you don’t mind. It may still be open. Like a dummy I didn’t turn it off,” Detective Doyle said, turning toward Mr. Slusser’s office, and danged if Mr. Slusser didn’t try to block him.

  “I can do that from here,” she said crisply.

  Mr. Slusser stopped edging toward his office. His shoulders slumped.

  The detective pocketed his card, the one with my email on it. “We’ll be in touch very soon.” He nodded to Mrs. Entwich and Mr. Slusser.

  Then he took my elbow and piloted me out of the office.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” we said to each other simultaneously when we were in the hall.

  He pulled me into the doorway to the sophomore C Group homeroom. “You first,” he hissed.

  “Thank you for having her send me all that stuff. Especially the grades and the parent-teacher meetings from last year. Somehow I have this feeling it’s not a very cop thing to do.”

  “Look,” he said, his voice even lower. “I’m going to be frank with you. I’ve been sharing information probably a little too much, because it’s very hard to bring a conviction in these cases.”

  “What cases? Child molesting?”

  “Blackmailing,” he said. “The child molesting is pretty much open and shut, with this many complainants.”

  My whole body shrank up cold. Then, as I realized what he meant, I began to feel warm, maybe for the first time in two years. He really was sharing too much. And I was suddenly so happy, I felt I could fly.

  Mom would have to admit I wasn’t making it up, now.

  “What harm does it do to overshare?” I said, after I’d processed that for a minute.

  He looked me up and down a third time. Finally, I understood that he was not leering. He was referring wordlessly to the fact that I didn’t look the way I looked a week ago.

  “We know there’s something hinky going on here. Cook County has a policy against recognizing that element. That’s why I’m on this case, even though I’m Chicago PD.” He made a face. “I’m the County’s unofficial police officer on the hinky side. You were originally reported kidnapped out of the Field Museum. My beat. It smelled hinky to me at the time.” He gave me a narrow look. “And it’s becoming apparent that you have, uh, special resources.”

  I gaped. “You’re sending me after Mr. Dorrington?”

  “Absolutely not!” He scowled. “I’m just recognizing that you may have access to information, and ways of getting information, that I don’t have. If you can do it safely, you have an opportunity to be helpful. And I’m not talking about ‘Got DT? Call MG,’ for the love of God. Please. Don’t paint a target on yourself again.”

  I looked at him steadily. “You’re right. I do have extra resources.”

  “Cornered blackmailers can be extremely dangerous. On the one hand, if he kills you, we can put him away a lot easier for murder than we can for blackmail. On the other hand, I don’t want you dead.”

  He was not joking at all. I wondered why, after the past two years of agony and fear, he thought I would worry about mere death. I had faced my mother down and stopped a form of torture that had kept me immobilized and mindless and helpless for two years, ruined my academic record, and made me a pariah for my second trip through senior year.

  “You’re not immortal, Melitta,” he said gently. “I think.”

  I was walking toward PE class, so his last two words barely registered.

  In a weird humor, partly feeling very grown-up from talking to Detective Doyle and partly a little alarmed after all his warnings, I went to my locker to throw my backpack in and fetch out my gym uniform.

  I had only two more gym classes. That was one torment almost over. Still, I felt sad that I wouldn’t see Ms. Waroo any more. She had come to me in the hospital when I needed someone. When I considered how I’d been let down by the system, if one could blame Mr. Dorrington on the system, her behavior sort of stunned me.

  Then I found my locker was full of rotten meat.

  It smelled bad before I opened it. Number two cheerleader, Ava Arnold, whose locker was two lockers over from mine, gave me a frightened look and scurried away. I scowled but I didn’t think anything of it. Right now, pretty much the whole world stank to me.

  Yeah. Well, turns out, it was raw hamburger. A lot of it.

  I reeled back, clapping my hand to my nose. Those demon senses could be a huge liability. The hamburger filled my locker from top to bottom, except where it had sagged at the coat hook and I could see the edge of my gym suit. I couldn’t help retching.

  There were maggots moving in it.

  Taped to the coat hook over the saggy, stinking mess was a note on formerly white paper. Beef juices had soaked into it until it was now a pinkish-brown. I thought, Well, it has to be from Dorrington, because who else?

  I turned around. Quite a crowd had gathered behind me, making theatrical noises of revulsion or jus
t staring in horror.

  “Does somebody have a sandwich bag I can have?” I said, sounding remarkably cool and self-possessed to myself. “Because this note should go to the police.” My voice quivered.

  Someone produced a sandwich bag and removed the candy bar from it. Really? Who bags up a candy bar in the wrapper? Oh. Sanjay. I smiled at him and he blushed. Then I picked the note off the yucky stuff with my fingernail-tips and slipped it into the bag. A few shreds of burger stuck to it. Also, a maggot, oh dear god. Well, it was evidence.

  “You all are witnesses. Is anybody taking pictures?” Suddenly they all were. “Someone send the pictures to the police, will you? I’m kind of in a hurry,” I added grimly, clenching my jaw. I slammed the locker shut so that it locked itself and headed off to gym, sans uniform. At least I had an excuse, albeit a bad one, not to do my last sweaty hour at gym class.

  On the way to gym I read the note, squinting around the beef juices and other disgusting stuff sticking to it.

  HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO FLUNK SENIOR YEAR AGAIN? it read. I recognized Dorrington’s smug, square handwriting, not quite printing, from his markups on my Social Studies assignments.

  Well, I wouldn’t like it at all. But the note told me that Dorrington was indeed running scared. Doyle was right. He was getting dangerous and stupid. Because now I had something he had touched. Surely Amanda could do something with that. Heck, even the police could do something with that.

  Somehow, there seemed to be even more information in this message. Stuff Dorrington hadn’t meant to tell me, maybe.

  After some thought I showed the note to Ms. Waroo. Her face darkened. I thought she had never looked more like Jee. “Dammit,” she muttered. “Ava!” she yelled at the cheerleader. “Run these drills. I’ll be right over there.” She pointed at the bleachers.

  Ava looked at me with a scared face. Then she did one of her little I’m-so-glad-to-be-alive cheerleader hops and started haranguing the class in an upbeat voice.

  Ms. Waroo sat me down on the lowest bleacher bench. “I wasn’t going to tell you this. I mean, nothing could be done about it. But Dorrington approached me last year and tried to make me fail you.”

  “What?” I said. My lips went numb.

  “He threatened to make it public that I’m gay,” she said.

  I went Pfft! “All gym teachers are gay. Even the guys.”

  She shrugged. “You’re judging from a nonrepresentative sample.”

  My eyes went back to the stinky pinkish note in the sandwich bag. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO FLUNK SENIOR YEAR AGAIN?

  “Mr. Dorrington got me flunked? But how? Why?”

  Ms. Waroo watched while I worked my way through the buzzing in my ears toward the inevitable conclusion.

  Holy poop. Suddenly way too many things made sense all at once. My world swung around into a whole new shape.

  So imagine Lester, poor old crabby uptight Lester, setting up a trust fund that size for the college education of a kid he never wanted, and who frankly never liked him much. I wondered what he might have given my mother before they parted? Or even after? Mom and I had never lived expensively between her husbands. I was so used to her serial monogamy thing that it never occurred to me to think about money.

  Once Howard knew my college fund was out there, he would want it. Did Mom tell him about it before she married him? Good grief.

  Don’t get distracted, Melitta. Keep following the money.

  Howard marries Mom. Howard finds out I have this college fund. Howard wants my trust fund. Howard messes me around. Mr. Dorrington figures out Howard is messing me around and blackmails Howard. Howard tells Mr. Dorrington about the trust fund. Why? What a dumbass! Maybe he needed Mr. Dorrington’s help flunking me. Or Mr. Dorrington might have found out about it on his own, which made me feel dumb. I was supposed to be the adult in that household. Thinking it over I was forced to conclude that Mr. Dorrington was a bigger villain than my stepfather, which was a big step.

  But once I’d made that step, that Mr. Dorrington knew about the fund, I could totally imagine that Mr. Dorrington would want the money and see no reason why he couldn’t get it. It just meant pulling a few strings.

  While my brain churned like a coffee grinder, I realized Ms. Waroo had been watching me. I thought about Mr. Dorrington pulling strings, asking her to flunk me last year.

  “So this means,” I said slowly, “that Mr. Slusser really was in on it.” Judging by the principal’s anxiety level in our recent encounter, I didn’t think Mr. Slusser was hoping for a cut of my college fund. He would be one of the blackmail victims. A principal has so many opportunities to do something blackmail-worthy.

  “Did you—?” I began. “Do you suppose Mr. Slusser knows that Mr. Dorrington asked you to—?”

  She nodded.

  “So they both know.”

  She nodded.

  “Did Mr. Slusser threaten you, too?”

  My favorite gym teacher of all time showed her teeth. “He tried.”

  I processed this. So she’d threatened him back? What with? “He’s scared of you?”

  “He’s scared of everything. Occupational hazard.”

  I guessed that in a lawyer-rich community, in a school staffed with crazies like my mom and bad guys like Howard and Mr. Dorrington, a principal had a reason to be scared.

  In a place like this, a gay PE teacher was at even greater risk.

  “Boy,” I said. “Thanks for sticking your neck out for me. I really appreciate it.”

  She gave me a look I was beginning to recognize, like the one the detective had kept giving me. “Are you going to vanish after you graduate?” she said.

  Was she actually asking me to stop by and say hi after I left? Wow. That would make her the only person in the real world who would miss me.

  “I don’t know. Are you going to disappear after I graduate?”

  She smiled faintly. “Nope. I’ll be right here.”

  “So we’ll say au revoir then.” I offered my hand and she shook it. “Unless I flunk again.”

  “You won’t flunk gym,” she promised.

  I squeezed her hand harder than I intended. My eyes stung. “I can’t tell you what that means to me.” I let go, embarrassed.

  She chuckled and rolled her eyes. “And here I thought you were beginning to enjoy athletics.”

  I remembered climbing to the top of the rope in my last gym class, flushed, and blundered out just as the end-of-period bell rang.

  And there’s one more person I can count on, I thought as I headed for Lit class.

  When I sat down in Lit, Sanjay leaned forward. “Are you okay?”

  I leaned back and muttered, “I’m fine, but my gym uniform is toast. Good thing it’s the last week of school. I wonder who’s going to have to clean it up?”

  Then the start bell rang and we had to shut up.

  In Lit we read poetry aloud, not our own, thank goodness, and Ms. Remirovski smiled her watery smile at me, and I wondered what they’d blackmailed her with to make her flunk me last year.

  On impulse I scrawled a note: Why did I fail English last year? When my turn came to read—Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”—I laid the note on her desk as if I was turning in some homework. Discretion, right? I’d chosen a poem about a guy who has murdered all his wives and is negotiating to marry another one, feeling a hot, dark glee. Ms. Remirovski was a soppy, half-tetched woman, way too much like my mother in her fantasy world, but she wasn’t dumb about books. She would get the point of the poem.

  May I add for the record that no spitballs flew during my reading?

  Ten minutes before the bell rang, Jacob Welfman started reading Vachal Lindsay’s “The Congo,” and Ms. Remirovski beckoned me out of the room.

  Scarcely had she closed the door on Jacob going, “Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom,” than she turned to me with actual tears in her eyes.

  “Oh, Melitta,” she whispered, looking up and down the hall. “I’m so glad you’re better.”<
br />
  “Better?”

  “Your father told me you were hospitalized for depression. Oh, I’d so wished that you were over that.”

  “Ms. Remirovski, when did my stepfather tell you all that?” Howard must have started damage control one minute after I was dragged off to the booby hatch.

  “Last year, dear. I worried. The change in you was so marked. Such a bright, intelligent girl. And then you seemed to go all to pieces.” She sniffled.

  I caught her gaze. “Yeah. Right after my stepfather moved in with us.”

  Then I just held her gaze and waited.

  After a long pause, Ms. Remirovski’s pupils shrank. Then her eyes widened. Then she turned red. Then she started to smell like hot iron.

  “I see,” she said, and her teeth met with a click.

  I nodded.

  She seemed to expand. “Wait until I see that man.”

  “Please—I’m not the only girl involved,” I said. “We’re hoping to prosecute. So if you could hold off talking to him?” I bit my lip. “It would be great to know you would be willing to testify about how he talked you into failing me.”

  She hadn’t actually admitted to that. I was pushing it. Boy, I hoped I hadn’t said too much. I really needed more advice on how to handle this.

  Thinking that gave me a drafty feeling at the back of my skull.

  I never asked for advice. I never looked for help outside my own head. After a lifetime of Mom’s crazy viewpoint, and her kitchen-table psychoanalysis, and a string of stepfathers, I had learned to rely solely on myself.

  But Detective Doyle had got through to me. I was not alone anymore. My new demon friends were on my side, but they were magical. This was real.

  My Lit teacher looked at the floor and sniffed. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “It seemed like a kindness at the time. He felt—both your parents seemed to feel—that you would benefit from another year before attempting college.” She swallowed. “I can’t believe I trusted him. I agreed to lower your grade. I thought I was helping!” She dissolved.

  “It’s okay.” I patted her arm. “We all have to trust someone,” I said, hearing that sentence echo in my head.