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

by Jennifer Stevenson

  Beth scowled. “How can an intent need fuel?”

  “Oh, please,” Jee said. “You were married to a jerk how long? You intended to do something about it, but you didn’t have any fuel.”

  “No fire in the belly,” Pog said.

  “No go-juice,” Amanda said.

  “How does an intent need to write an essay?” I said.

  “Esse. It’s a Latin term,” Amanda said. “The—the is-ness. The being-ness. The emotional charge. It’s force. One way to see the universe is to divide it into planes that correspond to our senses, our five material senses and also the senses that extend into other planes. Because some of the evidence we want to destroy is probably electronic—the photo of that kid smoking a joint, for example—it can be anywhere, possibly backed up in multiple places, and it can’t be burnt by fire or washed away or dissolved into powder by water or air. It’s almost on another plane already. We just—release it from its ties to this plane, all the copies everywhere.”

  “Like letting go of the string on a balloon,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Amanda said, smiling at me.

  I felt smart.

  “Oh, good grief,” Pog said. “Another magic geek is born.”

  “I don’t know anything about magic,” I said.

  “There’s another consideration,” Beth said, and the others looked at her. I was beginning to see Beth as some kind of moral compass for this group. Everybody else said and did whatever they felt like, but sometimes they checked in with Beth, even if it was just a look. That mom thing again.

  “What?” I said, looking to Beth.

  Beth said, “The blackmail victims may not be nice people. And not all the bad guys will be your stepfather. You can choose to protect him, but what about the others? The ones who did something really bad to get blackmailed?”

  My heart sank. I never thought about that. Mr. Dorrington’s nose for evil was clever enough to tag Howard for molesting me. Who else had done something inexcusable, and he found out?

  For that matter, I had to face facts. I couldn’t hide evidence that would expose Howard, not even for Mom’s sake, after what he did to Daisy and who knew how many other kids in school.

  That was just wrong.

  My stomach twisted. I looked down at the table to avoid all those eyes.

  Jee erupted. “Why should she have to be the one to decide that?” she said fiercely. “There’s a whole high school full of blackmail victims out there, and a whole society full of laws to deal with it. The cops are already involved. Why put it on Melitta?”

  Pog said, “Because she’s in a position to do something about it.”

  That hit me like a baseball in the stomach. “Oh.” I sounded tiny to myself.

  Beth said, “The victims can’t suppress the evidence. Even the cops can’t, not if it’s about something really serious. You’re talking about destroying evidence.”

  “So only I can decide,” I said. That felt horrible, but it felt familiar. It was all back on me again. Melitta on her own, making bad decisions.

  It didn’t look to me like any good decisions were possible.

  “She’s not alone,” Amanda said with finality. “She can ask me to construct this spell and run it, but she’s not the only one involved. I’m the one making the spell.”

  “Will you use it even if she asks you not to?” Pog said.

  Amanda looked at me. “Maybe not.”

  “Why?” I croaked.

  Amanda, the unemotional one, launched into a speech. “Look, I hate this guy already, and I hate what he does. But we have a whole society and a law system to deal with the consequences of stupid shit. The four of us—we’re all victims of the system breaking down. We’ve all fallen through the cracks. So I kind of hate the system, too, and sometimes I hate the people who think it’s all perfect and infallible, right up to the moment it bites them personally in the ass. I want to see Melitta’s stepfather in jail. Far as I’m concerned, if anybody else has been doing jailable shit, let ’em face the consequences. So this kid smoked dope. Do you really think they’ll cancel his scholarship? I don’t. What if somebody slept around on their spouse? If they can’t square that with the spouse, then who am I to save their ass for them?”

  I blurted, “So you care about the people you know, and you don’t care about the people you don’t know.” I bowed my head. “I’m that way, too.” My hands were ice cold. I buried them in my armpits.

  Beth put her hand on my shoulder. “Think of it this way, Melitta. Sometimes you can trust other people to help, to do their jobs, maybe even to care.”

  “Sometimes,” Jee sneered. I looked up.

  Beth looked her in the eye. “Yes. You care, for example.”

  Jee grunted and looked away, but not before I spotted how shiny her eyes were.

  So who should I trust, exactly, if it’s all on me? My throat went tight and hot with not-saying it.

  Pog rapped on the table. “Well, Melitta? If you want to protect your stepfather for your mother’s sake, now would be the time to say so.”

  I looked around the table. Nobody was looking at me, not one. Beth looked at her hands with a mom-like, gosh-I-hope-she-chooses-wisely expression. Jee looked pissed at Pog. Amanda looked at the ceiling, as if she did care but she was darned if she’d be accused of trying to influence me. Pog stared past my left ear.

  It seemed that this dilemma was never, ever going to be taken out of my hands. I blurted, “Why do I have to decide? Dammit, why should the victim have to decide if the criminal should pay?”

  Now everybody was not-looking at Pog.

  Pog cleared her throat. “Well, that would be wrong. It’s how society does it in this kind of situation, and it sucks, and that’s one of the cracks that we’ve all fallen into. So I’m with you on this. I mean, I see why you’re mad and why you don’t want to have to decide.”

  I said bitterly, “Everybody in that school, including my teachers, watched me turn into a zombie last year. They all wanted to ‘help’”—I clawed the air—“but the best they could come up with was to flunk me. What the heck?” I cried. I was working myself up into sobs plus hiccups.

  “Has that changed, then?” Beth said.

  “Ha-hic-what?” I tried to think. My breathing was all messed up with the hiccups, and they kept talking to me, asking me stuff, so that I couldn’t just sit there and cry the way I wanted to. After a moment I said, “Yes. I thic-ink it has.”

  “What changed?” Amanda said curiously.

  “When Delilah offered me a way out. She gave me thic-this body and a chance to escape my life.”

  Now everybody looked at each other. Then they all shrugged at once. It was uncanny.

  Once I said that, I realized that I had already escaped my life. I thought of the Lair as home. That bedroom back in my mom’s house was a scene of horrors, and before the horrors had been other bedrooms, and years of watching my mom make dumb decisions about men. I’d spent years pretending she was in charge, letting her open my head with her shrinky can-opener and pour in whatever syrup she cooked up to cover over anything she didn’t like. I couldn’t leave her to Howard. That was why I was still fighting this dumb battle. That was how I’d gotten embroiled with Mr. Dorrington.

  I couldn’t leave her to Howard.

  Howard had to go.

  I said it out loud. “Howard has to go.”

  “He’s gonna go, honey,” Beth said. “That Buttercup girl will testify. And once she does, whoever else will also speak up.”

  “Dic-aisy,” I said, hiccupping one more time. “So it’s really out of my hands, isn’t it?”

  “It was out of your hands the minute he did those things to you,” Jee said in a hard voice. “Because you were a kid, and he was an adult. And he’s your parent. Even for a step-parent, this puts the blame and the consequences on him. They may take a while to come home to him, but they’re coming.”

  “I guess the system really is taking over from here,” I said, believing i
t. That was because of a combination of factors. Sanjay telling me about Daisy leaving school. Ms. Waroo helping me. Detective Doyle making a human wall, or so it had felt, between me and Mr. Slusser and all the shenanigans he kept pulling. Ms. Remirovski meaning well and apologizing for being wrong, and Bub confessing to me, even Bill Kummel making me his commandante. People were helping me. The system was taking over. Hot tears ambushed me.

  “So,” Pog said in her chair-of-the-meeting voice. “We’ve decided to hold the spell for the moment—thanks for the quick work, Amanda, and please don’t tear it up, but we won’t use it yet. Melitta’s stepfather is going down, with or without our help. The blackmailer may have been caught—Melitta, shouldn’t you call somebody and find out? Melitta needs to graduate. And if possible, her academic record should be cleared so she can go to the best college she wants.”

  My mouth hung open, even while tears dripped off my chin.

  “What about your mother?” Beth said. “Will she be all right without Howard?” Trust Beth to get it.

  “Of course she won’t be all right without Howard,” I said crossly. “She’s never all right without a man.” I thought about this some. “Actually, as long as we’re fantasizing here, if I could work it, I’d get Lester back for her. Lester was good to her. I think she told herself she was divorcing him because he and I didn’t hit it off.”

  “Told herself?” Jee said.

  “I have no idea what goes on in her head. She says stuff. Whether it’s true or not?” I shrugged. “Anyway, with me gone, she doesn’t have that excuse.”

  I pondered the possible obstacles involved. Chief of these was that Lester might be married again. Mom wasn’t his first. Why should he have stayed single for the past two years?

  It amazed me that these things were being discussed so calmly. Every little problem in my life, poof. All I’d had to do was agree to become a succubus.

  “You guys,” I said, choking up. I looked at their faces: Beth sweet and girlish; Jee sharp and smooth the way I hoped to be, her perpetual anger covering what I now saw was a big squishy heart; Pog a skinny weather girl, all blonde hair and perfect oval face and pragmatism; and Amanda, the big-boned, Olympic-athlete version of a hot babe in spandex, cowlike in her composure, as if nothing ever flapped her because she didn’t give a damn. “Thanks.”

  Beth gave me a hug. Jee nodded. Amanda started picking up the empty beer bottles on the table. Pog shook hands with me.

  But when I phoned Sanjay, he had bad news.

  “Mr. Dorrington wasn’t at Mr. Slusser’s place when the cops got there.”

  “He wasn’t?” I was amazed at how quickly terror struck me.

  “But the cops took Mr. Slusser in for questioning anyway. Apparently some kid testified that he had met Mr. Dorrington there, and Dorrington gave him a note for you, and Mr. Slusser gave him the keys to the high school kitchen and the freezers.”

  I scowled. “How did you find out all that?”

  “The kid blabbed on Facebook before he went to the police.”

  “I’m amazed he’s still alive,” I said. What on earth had Bub been thinking? I could see why he was so desperate to save that football scholarship, the dumbbell. “Did he say why?”

  “Not exactly. I get the impression he thought that was what everybody was doing, so that’s what he did.”

  I sighed. “That sounds about par for one of Chase Washington’s heroes.”

  “Can I—do you want to meet for coffee or something?” Sanjay said now.

  It took me a minute to get it. “You what?” This was the weirdest week of my life. “Sanjay, are you asking me out?”

  “I just thought you might want a strategy meeting,” he said. “With Mr. Dorrington still on the loose.” He sounded hurt.

  Oh, brother. This is what happens when you get friends, Melitta. You hurt their feelings.

  “Soon,” I said. “I’m, uh, I’ve been short of sleep. I’ll probably pack it in early tonight. But, um, yeah. Let’s. Tomorrow after school okay?”

  “Thanks,” he said with such relief that I knew it was not about strategizing.

  Sanjay wanted to date me!

  Holy poop.

  As I put the phone back in my pocket, I relayed the bad news to the sluts. “The good news is, I have a pretty good idea where Mr. Dorrington shifted base.”

  Everyone looked at me.

  “Not your mom’s house!” Beth said, incredulous.

  “Where else? Unless he has actually fled to Canada or something already, he’ll want to get to his bank and pull money out, and they’re no doubt watching his bank, and he left his laptop at the pep rally, so he’ll need an accomplice. He’ll probably try to take one last shot at my college fund, too.”

  “No!” Beth protested.

  “Half a million dollars,” Jee reminded Beth.

  “Plus now it’s personal. He wants revenge on you, Melitta,” Pog said.

  I looked at them: Pog poised, Beth with her brow furrowed, Jee militant and vigilant, Amanda silent, awaiting a decision.

  “He won’t hurt me,” I said, hoping that was true.

  “Don’t count on it,” Amanda said. “I think you’ve scared the shit out of him. You. Personally.”

  We all looked at her.

  She just sat there like a cow. Finally she said, “What?”

  Jee smiled at me. “So we scare him some more.”

  We were getting ready to go when my cell rang.

  “It’s that detective,” I said, checking the number. “Can I answer?”

  “You can be tracked if your phone is on, dummy,” Jee said. “Even if you’re not using it.”

  “Not in here,” Amanda said. “Qabalistic shield.”

  “Should I answer?”

  We all looked at Beth. Beth nodded.

  “Hello?” I said.

  Detective Doyle was all business. “Hi, Melitta, can you come to the police station in Kenilworth? Your stepfather is in here for questioning and we’d like to check some of his statements against your testimony.”

  I gasped. “Wow. Did Daisy’s mom call?”

  Detective Doyle snorted into the phone. “Ahead of me again. You’re being careful, aren’t you, Melitta?”

  I looked at my friends, dressed like me in frumpy, shapeless, too-short jeans and sweatshirts and scuffed army boots. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Shall I send a car?”

  “I don’t want to talk to Howard. I don’t want to see Howard.”

  “You won’t have to.”

  I waffled. “I’ll be available in a couple of hours, I think,” I said. “I’ll let you know.”

  “Dammit, Melitta,” he began, but I hung up.

  I turned off the phone, too. “Might as well not advertise where I’m going.”

  “Smart,” Pog said.

  “Let’s go,” Jee said.

  We went downstairs and piled into a midsize mommy wagon parked deep in the bowels of their old factory space, a six-seater with a side-loading door and a cargo hatchback. Although first they had to unload about thirty giant packages of toilet paper and paper towels and a couple of cases each of beer and tequila and Cheetos and thick-cut bacon and fresh avocados and chocolate-covered potato chips. Everybody grumbled, and Beth pointed out they could have unloaded it when she brought it home, and Pog told them to shut up and unload it, and I felt so happy.

  We drove to my mom’s house. Only her car was in the driveway. I guessed that Howard had made it to the police station under his own power. That meant we might hear the garage doors open when he got home.

  Beth parked two doors down from my old house. We looked at each other in the van.

  “You ready?” Jee said.

  I swallowed. “As I’ll ever be.”

  “You can do this,” Pog said.

  Beth smiled reassuringly.

  Amanda held up a dealie like a walkie-talkie. “Test.”

  I turned on a little micro-recorder-broadcaster and showed them that the red light was on.


  “The dummy?” Amanda said, as I pocketed the micro-recorder in my jeans.

  I pulled down the neck of my shapeless sweatshirt. A similar recorder was taped lightly near my armpit. I put the shirt back and scritched under it at the tape.

  “Leave it,” Amanda said. “It’s barely stuck on now.”

  “Zero hour,” Pog said, looking through the windshield at my house. “I just saw a curtain twitch.”

  “Go out the side,” Jee said.

  I shouldered my giant backpack, which was empty at the moment. “Geronimo. Or something.” I flashed them a grin. Their answering grins made me feel ten feet tall.

  Mr. Dorrington looked terrible. His face looked like he’d been sandblasted, and he seemed puffy all over, and his hair was on end. He was wearing the same navy polo shirt over his paunch and the same tan pleated-front pants with the gold “D” belt buckle that he’d been wearing Friday at the pep rally. A cup of black coffee stood in front of him, untouched. He sat at my mother’s kitchen table and watched my mother fuss over me.

  I tolerated it. She was being extra-weird. I had shrunk myself down to within a couple of inches of my old high school self, although I’d left zits and pounds off. I just couldn’t face being zitty and heavy any more. But I guess I looked enough like my old self that Mom felt she could try her old stuff on me.

  “Where have you been staying?” She didn’t give me time to answer. “I’ve been worried sick! Are you getting enough to eat? What time is it? How did school go? Oh, honey, your face is all dirty, here, let me. Your father’s still at work. Raymond is just waiting for him.”

  My stepfather’s at the cop shop, facing child molesting charges from several of his patients. I smiled at Dorrington. My eyes glowed just a tiny bit red. And he’s probably turning on you even as we speak, you jerk.

  “I just came by to get a few more things,” I said around the wet paper towel Mom was dabbing on my face.

  She said, “I have meat loaf in the oven. It’ll be out in five minutes.”

  I took her wrists in my hands and held them. “Then you should set the table, huh?” I said, meeting her gaze finally.

  She held still. “All right, darling.” There was a crazy look in her eyes, crazier than I’d ever seen. “You set it. I’ll get the salad ready.”