I let go of her and she moved away, putting on her apron, getting a bowl out of the fridge, fussing. Crazy.
I turned to Dorrington. “I’ll give you my college fund if you promise not to expose Howard.”
Dorrington was watching my mom act like a TV mom on crack. “Are you going to promise not to expose Howard?” he mocked. He watched my mom stop moving, then start again, as if she was a robot whose circuits had stuttered. “I was under the impression you don’t control the fund.”
“I don’t, not now. When I matriculate and get to campus, then I’ll have access.”
“Nonsense.” He sounded as brusque and insulting as he always did in class. “A year’s tuition at a time, probably. No more.”
I said coolly, “You must think I’m incompetent.”
He looked at me then, and I nearly recoiled from the stab of his glare. Amanda was right. This was personal.
He said in a nasty, smooth tone, “Tell your mother what I’ve been trying to tell her, Melitta. Tell her what Howard does with young girls.”
My eyes turned involuntarily to Mom. The whites of her eyes were showing.
“Go ahead, Melitta,” Mr Dorrington said.
“Mom, you told me yourself Howard was afraid of him. Didn’t you ever ask Howard why?”
Her nostrils pinched. She said to Mr. Dorrington, “He said something happened when he was at his previous school and you dug it up and threatened to tell lies about it and ruin his reputation.”
Mr. Dorrington slapped his thigh and laughed. “That Howard. There’s a slippery guy. It took me two weeks to convince him he was on the hook for what he was doing to Melitta, and another week to get the money flowing. Mind you,” he said to me slyly, “I didn’t make him stop. Not my place to interfere with a man’s private pleasures.”
At that moment I felt the red eyes begin to glow hot in my skull.
“Whoa,” my Social Studies teacher said, and I don’t think he knew he said it.
I parted my lips and let one fang show with a sinister ting!
My mother gasped. I didn’t look at her.
“What are you now?” Mr. Dorrington blurted.
Outside the kitchen window, something moved.
“I’m recording your confession now, you stupid schmuck,” I said, and pulled aside the collar of my sweatshirt so he could see the tape, and the top of the tiny fake digital recorder.
He lunged to his feet, and I let the other fang show.
Someone began hammering on the patio door. “Mom! Mom! It’s me! Let me in! Mom!” Bam bam bam bam bam!
Sigmund bayed once, somewhere in the basement.
Mom darted out of the kitchen.
Mr. Dorrington threw the wooden kitchen chair at me. I batted it away one-handed, and was amazed when it shattered into kindling at my blow. Pieces of chair flew all over with clanking sounds.
In the dining room, Mom slid open the patio door.
Someone who looked just like me, right down to the old stained sweatshirt and jeans, tumbled into the living room through the patio door. “Omigod, Mom, are you okay?” Was that how I sounded? “I saw Mr. Dorrington in the kitchen with you!”
Mr. Dorrington spun around. For a second he just stood there, while I battled a titanic urge to pick up a splintered chair leg and stab it through the back of his head until it came out his eyeball. Pog had been very specific. No violence. Not even if he started it. We want to crack him open, not kill him.
Mr. Dorrington moved like a sleepwalker into the dining room.
I couldn’t tell which of my succubus friends this was. She looked like me. She sounded like me, I guess. I realized suddenly she looked more like me than I did at the moment, because she was shorter, dumpier, zittier, and her face was blotchy from crying and she had my old not-brown-enough-for-the-diversity-crowd complexion.
I could see my teacher thought the same thing. He looked from her back to me.
I pulled my shirt collar aside to expose the taped-on decoy recorder again. “Wanna fight me for it?”
The fake Melitta scowled at me. “Mom,” she said to my mother, who was sobbing on her collarbone, “they’ve arrested Howard. He’s at the police station now. He’s telling them what Mr. Dorrington did. Mom, you have to tell them everything—”
“No!” Mr. Dorrington yelled. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out—what? a cell phone? “See this? Anything happens to me, anything at all, every secret you or anyone else has ever had gets sent to the media. All I have to do is push the button.” His face was an unhealthy hot pink. He was panting. “You got that? Believe me. It’ll be worse than anything you can imagine.”
Mom gaped.
The fake Melitta turned on him, and I wondered again which one of them it was. “You’re despicable,” she hissed. “A teacher. You work with children! And you do this!” Ah, that would be Beth.
“And you’re my favorite, you lovable girl,” Mr. Dorrington said. For someone who didn’t cuss, he sure could infuse menace into his tone.
Another voice came from up the stairs by the bedrooms. “Mom?”
My Social Studies teacher spun around.
Slow, irregular footsteps came down the stairs. It was me. In pajamas. Which one of them had thought of that touch? The pajama version of me had bed head and zits and she was short and fat, but she moved with a certain athletic grace. She stopped when she came into the family room and stared at the four of us, my mom, Mr. Dorrington, and us two versions of Melitta, with her mouth hanging open.
My mother looked like she’d finally run out of crazy. There you go, Mom. See what my life is like every day? Only this time it’s me throwing you curves.
From the way this Melitta was just staring, I guessed it must be Amanda, the short-on-words succubus.
A delicate knocking came from the kitchen window. We all looked. Another Melitta, this one in the regulation sweatshirt and jeans. She must be eight feet tall if she can peer in a window that’s six feet off the ground. Didn’t anybody wonder about that?
Mr. Dorrington might. But it seemed as though four versions of his favorite student would be enough to complete our mission. He spun wildly in place, his eyes bugging out at each of us in turn. Then he grabbed for me. The real me.
He yanked at my sweatshirt and ripped it, and a second later he had ripped the taped-on dummy recorder off me—yowch!—and stomped on it, making hysterical, screamy, grunting noises with each stomp.
“Hey!” I yelled, forgetting my demonic glare as the tape stung my skin.
“That does it!” Someone erupted out of the basement. This was me in a tall, thin, gorgeous version. Her sweatshirt and jeans looked brilliantly casual on her, and her glowy eyes blazed. Sigmund lumbered past her and sat by the back door, as if the effort of climbing the stairs had worn him out. “Touch her again and die, motherfucker!” Jee yelled.
My mom squealed. One of the Melittas pulled her back as if to protect her.
Dorrington held his dead man switch high, as if it was a bomb. “Don’t come near me, or it’s all over!”
Jee—it had to be Jee—advanced on him slowly. She saw the dead man switch, scowled, and made a grab for it.
Mr. Dorrington jumped backward and tripped over the kitchen chair seat. He stepped heavily to the side. His foot slid on a broken chair rung and sent it clanking across the room. His other foot slid out from under him. His long arms flailed. He fell heavily against the counter and tried to pull himself back to his feet, and then fell against me, throwing me to the floor and knocking the wind out of me.
Suddenly my mom darted out from under Melitta-Beth’s arm, snatched up a chair leg, and swung it hard against Mr. Dorrington’s head. It made a sound like a baseball bat hitting concrete.
Blood spattered the cabinet doors. He went down. The dead man switch went skittering.
I struggled for air.
From the other side of the family room, the Amanda version of me said “Uh-oh,” and started muttering. She no longer looked like me
.
Melitta-Jee looked down. “Melitta! Your ankle!” She, too, was looking more like herself every minute.
I looked. When Mr. Dorrington had hit the floor, he’d wrapped his hand around my ankle. His unconscious grip was still strong.
Mom picked up the dead man switch and looked it over. It really did look like an old-timey cell phone. What, had he set it up to send a big old text? She met my eyes. “No more lies, honey,” she said, and pressed a button.
Everyone else froze.
Something hit me in the chest from the inside.
A feeling of terror squeezed me. I felt as if I were shrinking to mouse-size, and everyone around me wanted to kill me.
Mom stepped forward, reaching for me.
I shrank away. She hated me. She could crush me. It wasn’t in her face, but I could feel it. I was filled with a paralyzing certainty that, along with the rest of the world, she was out to get me, and nobody must ever, ever touch me.
Panic rose in me.
I was drowning in fear.
“Melitta, honey, it’s over,” Mom said, reaching for me. Chasing me.
“Don’t touch me!” My feet pawed on kitchen tile that was slippery with Mr. Dorrington’s blood. I crawled backward, kicking that hand off my ankle. “Get away from me!” I shrieked.
Sigmund whined from the kitchen doorway. I flinched, glaring at him as if I’d never seen a dog before. It could bite me. It could give me rabies. “Keep it away from me,” I whimpered.
“The cops are outside,” Pog announced. She looked like Pog again.
“Don’t let her touch anyone yet!” Amanda warned.
Beth, fully Beth now, pulled my mom back just as I was about to throw her across the room.
“Jee, no,” Amanda said.
But Jee came calmly toward me. “I can do anger,” she assured Amanda, or me, squatting in front of me.
She looked into my eyes. It was like looking at a beautiful mirror of myself. “Let it drain away, Melitta. It’s not even your anger.”
As she said that, I felt the squeeze begin to ease. “It’s fear,” I choked out.
“It’s not your fear, either,” she said.
For a miracle, I believed her. The sharp edges around me seemed to soften. I looked down at my hands and realized they’d grown two-inch claws.
I’d almost hit my mom with those hands.
“No,” I whispered. The claws softened too. Slowly the fear began to fade. I was shaking all over.
Jee took my hands and helped me to my feet. The fear and anger drained out of me even faster with her touch.
Amanda said, “It’s the intention from all the evidence he was hoarding. It homed back in on him. And he and Melitta both got zapped with it because he had hold of her ankle.”
I looked down.
Mr. Dorrington lay still as death at my feet.
The front doorbell rang.
“Dammit, we can’t be here when the cops come.” Pog stood by the patio door.
“Are you going to be okay?” Beth said to me, or maybe to my mom.
“Sorry,” Jee said to me. “Gotta go.”
Amanda pulled them away.
The sluts trotted out of the kitchen, leaving my mom standing strangely calm with the piece of chair-leg in her hand. I stepped over Mr. Dorrington’s arm and went to her and put my arm around her. “Better go,” I told the sluts.
One by one my succubus teammates looked back at me, then walked out the patio door. As each one passed outside, she vanished.
Someone knocked on the front door, a big, long, thumpy, authoritative knock-knock-knock-knock. A big, authoritative man’s voice called, “Police. Open up.”
I was shivering all over with residual panic. I hugged Mom’s shoulders.
“C’mon, Mom. You’ve saved the day. Now we get to relax.”
The cops put a blanket around me and Mom made me hot tea. I couldn’t warm up. It wasn’t fear anymore, but I was full of energy—Mr. Dorrington’s energy, Amanda had said—ugh. The very thought made me want to vomit. I threw up nothing much into a paper towel while my mom clucked at me from across the room and paramedics loaded Mr. Dorrington onto a stretcher. I just shivered.
I shivered while they took pictures of the kitchen, which seemed messier without all the people in it. I shivered while Mr. Dorrington’s stretcher was carried out by burly paramedics. I shivered and shook and blinked at everything they said to me, as if I was too much in shock to talk.
Detective Doyle was not pleased. “Your friend Sanjay called us. He came over and looked in the window, and apparently he saw you in here with your teacher and your mother, and it occurred to him that this might be a hostage situation, so he called us. Do you notice how appropriate his behavior was?”
I nodded and blinked and shivered.
“Can I get a statement?” Doyle said more kindly.
“I came to get some more clothes. Mr. Dorrington was here. He said he was waiting for my stepfather.” I was trying to be careful. Whatever I said, if it differed from Mom’s version, I was afraid she would try to convince me how wrong I was—right in front of the detective. “Mr. Dorrington smashed a chair. He attacked me. Mom hit him.”
That was my statement—six sentences and nothing more. Over and over and over and over and over. Doyle was brutally persistent.
Finally he gave up on quizzing me. “By the way, your stepfather. He’s been arrested and he’s in custody now. He’ll probably be released on a high bond. I wanted to be the first to tell your mother.”
“That was very thoughtful of you, Detective,” Mom said, coming over with a warm-up for my tea. “Now. Can she have her hot shower and get to bed? It’s nine o’clock.” She positioned herself behind my kitchen chair, one of the unbroken ones, and laid her palms on my shoulders. They felt burning hot to me.
“I need to eat,” I said. I put down my tea and got up and went to the fridge. It was still full of Howard’s low-fat groceries. Well, carbs were carbs. I pulled out a one-pound tub of low-fat yogurt, opened it, squeezed maple syrup over it right up to the top of the tub, brought it back to the table, and dug in with a spoon. Ahh, calories. The dog came and lay down on my feet while I ate. I ignored him. Maybe if I ignored everybody and ate everything in the fridge, they would all go away.
That seemed to work. Another hour passed. The evidence techs went away and the uniformed officers went away. Eventually a cop let Sigmund into the back yard to pee.
While I ate, I could hear Mom slathering her version of reality all over Detective Doyle, who took notes. She told him my teacher had come to see Howard. She said that when I came home—her word—Mr. Dorrington was very rude to me, very. She said she thought he had formed a prejudice against me because I had been disrespectful in class. Anyway he had attacked me and ripped my shirt, and she had clobbered him with the chair leg, and that was about it.
“How did the chair get broken, Mrs. Horwitz?”
Mom looked down at the floor, still liberally sprinkled with pieces of the chair. “I really don’t know. He was very clumsy, crashing around my kitchen. Look at this place!” She got up and started tidying. Tears ran down her face, though she didn’t seem to notice.
That decided me. “We’re done here,” I said, putting down my spoon. Besides, there was no more leftover lasagna, health bread, low-fat cheese, low-fat ice cream, spinach salad, cole slaw, fat-free imitation bologna, skim milk, seltzer, or Diet Coke. I hadn’t squeezed the ketchup or the pickle relish bottles directly into my mouth because I was afraid of how it would look. “Thanks for coming and saving us, Detective.” I took him by the elbow and made him stand up.
He gave me a startled look. “Strong little thing, aren’t you?”
I said in a soothing voice, “Just chasing you out so we can get some rest.” I piloted him to the front door. In a move of unexpected tact and level-headedness, Mom stayed in the kitchen, wielding Formula 409 and paper towels. With her out of the way, I could reach into my back pocket.
&nbs
p; “Here. Mr. Hinky Detective.” I handed the detective our real recording device. “I don’t guess you’re going to be able to use it, but, well, here.”
The little red light was still on.
He looked at it, looked at me, looked back at the recorder, and shook his head. He took the recorder. “We’ll be in touch to discuss your statements. In case you forgot anything in your shock.”
Full of food finally, I managed a smile. “That’s very considerate of you.”
He made one more try at me before he left. “Can we have an official residence address for you, for the record, Melitta?”
My smile widened. “You can use this one.”
He pressed the button that turned off the recorder and pocketed it. “No harm in asking,” he said.
“No harm at all,” I said.
He got the hint finally and left. I locked the front door with all the locks, including the fancy new one.
Mom came back to the kitchen and resumed tidying up. She’d stopped crying. She didn’t look at me while she swept and wiped and put broken stuff into a big trash bag.
It occurred to me that the house wasn’t totally secure. I went to the basement and found the window Jee had pushed in and pushed it shut. It wasn’t a great seal. I found some screws to screw into the metal frame. While I was trying to find the charger for the cordless screw gun, I heard the sound I’d been dreading.
The front doorbell rang.
I threw the drill on the floor and bounded up the stairs.
I was too late.
Mom was at the front door.
His voice came through the door. “Cora? It’s Howard. Open the deadbolt.”
Sigmund waddled into the front hall and flopped against the bottom of the stairs.
Mom just stood there, looking at the doorknob.
I stood a few feet behind her. I wanted to touch her, grab her, pull her away from the door, but I was afraid of intruding on whatever she was thinking.
“Cora, I know you’re home. I saw the police leave.”
Mom raised her head—raised it until she seemed to be looking at the ceiling. I saw her arms stiffen and her fists clench at her sides.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 57