“Pog does not have to cook tonight,” Jee said firmly. I glanced at her, feeling shy. She had definitely been eating. She had on a pair of designer jeans she hadn’t fit into for weeks. Her face twisted. “Oh, come here.”
I stepped into her arms for the longest hug ever.
She looked at me more openly. “You look good,” she said.
I looked down at myself. I wasn’t immense anymore, but I was definitely saftig. Like a Chicago girl softball player. Tall but way, way curvy. I didn’t give a damn. If I didn’t eat soon, I’d be a whole lot bigger. And hornier. And gnawing on demon bait.
Ish slid his arm around me. “She’s fucking gorgeous, and I’m starving, too.”
“Is it time to celebrate?” Reg said. He looked better too.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Amanda said. “We have to reset the trap.”
Everyone growled, nobody louder than me. While Ish and I drank margaritas straight from our pitchers, the team put the door back on the demon trap and reset the Mary Jane and rose petal incense burner thingy to refill it with smoke, and then they took packing wrap, like clear cling wrap only three feet wide, and wrapped it around the whole damned demon trap, layers and layers. Reg turned off the fan. Once again, the colored lights punched down through residual smoke and lit phantom tables loaded with a banquet.
Melitta said, “That looks amazing. I want some.”
“Is that Pog?” Beth’s voice came from the manager’s balcony. “You’re back!” she yelled joyfully. “You’re just in time! Wait there! I have to get them out of the oven!”
“Where would I go?” I wondered aloud. “What’s she up to, Cricket?”
“She’s been baking a lot,” Cricket said.
“Oh yeah,” Reg said reverently.
“It’s amazing,” Jee said, making my hackles rise and my heart plummet.
“In my kitchen? You wouldn’t eat anything I cooked for weeks, and I go away for a few days and you start eating Beth’s—” Then I felt like a dork for saying it. Sometime in the past week I’d broken my anger, broke it wide open. I couldn’t rage anymore. “Why—” I tried again. “What’s she—”
The door from the living quarters opened.
The smell hit me, and then Beth came out onto the basketball deck with a muffin tin in her hands.
“Oh my goodness,” I said.
Beth glowed. “I’ve been trying them all different ways. You left your phone behind, you know. It was on the kitchen table with the recipes called up.” She thrust the muffin tin forward. “Try one!”
My ears rang and that roasty buttery cheesey smell filled my head. I speared a crisp ball of pão queijo out of the tin.
“Is it right?” Beth looked suddenly anxious. Her heart was in her eyes.
I put the puff into my mouth and bit. A thin, crisp, buttery crust on the outside, lined with a thin layer of cheesy chewy gooiness on the inside, and then just cheesy hot air, see? No commitment. It’s almost nothing. A hot crispy fragrant buttery cheesy chewy bite of nothing. Have another.
Irresistible.
“She tried four recipes three different ways,” Melitta said.
“We ate the rejects,” Jee said. Her fingers twitched, and she eyed the muffin tin.
“Those are Pog’s, guys,” Amanda said. “We’re going out to eat, remember?”
My world swung around. Jee was eating. She was thin again. She was my buddy again. All because Beth had made the recipe I couldn’t remember and made it right. Beth did exactly what I would have done, and she understood why I wanted it, and she did it for me, not because she wanted Jee to eat but because she knew how much it mattered to me. I’d forgotten how to be angry. Mal was my friend again. I was done with my parents at last, and I didn’t know how I felt about that.
“Beth,” I said around a jagged lump in my throat. “They’re perfect.”
She smiled damply. “Well, eat them up. I don’t think I can keep these animals away from the pan much longer.” She sniffed.
I crammed four pão queijo puffs into my mouth, took the pan away from her, handed it to Ish, and hugged her, puffing crumbs into her hair and leaking from my eyes.
A noisy squabble broke out behind me.
“For the love of mike, let’s eat,” Reg said.
“I know a new Mexican place up Broadway,” Cricket volunteered. She had that mischief look in her eye.
“It’s close, right?” I said, letting go of Beth.
“No mom-and-pops,” Jee said flatly.
“Fancy fish and blood-orange margaritas,” Cricket promised. “No entrees under twenty bucks. And it’s only a few minutes by car.” She was looking at her phone. “Three point oh miles. Imagine that,” she said proudly.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Reg, you drive. I think I would take a bite out of the steering wheel.”
Ish fed me Twinkies in the van.
The restaurant was called Los Bigotes de Maria (Mary’s Whiskers), one of those high-concept joints founded by someone with passion and vision and playfulness and what-not, which was fine by me, because his bartender knew big money when it walked in the door. We had pitchers and pitchers of those blood-orange margaritas with our chips and salsa.
I began to relax.
“Jee,” I said, high as a kite between the Mary Jane in the demon trap and the margaritas, “I owe you a big, big, big, big,” I hiccuped and sighed, “big apology. I’m sorry I’ve been ragging you about your weight.” I swigged margarita. “And,” I confessed, “I hate fat people. I hated myself when I was fat. I was taught to do it. And I still did after I was recruited. It’s my weak spot, and those bastards at the Regional Office, or maybe their software, I never did figure that part out—” My train of thought was derailing.
Ish said it for me. “They knew your weak spot.”
I sighed. “That.”
“They put her in a room without a door,” Ish said. “Just a doorway. Only she could barely get in when she went in there, and they never fed her, so she got bigger the longer she was in there and she couldn’t get out.”
He’d said it and I didn’t have to. Relief filled me.
“That’s just mean,” Cricket said.
Melitta raised both hands. “Duh? It’s hell?”
“So how did you get out?” Beth said quietly beside me.
I turned to her, and she looked me in the eye. Suckup. Team leader’s best friend. Smart woman.
“I had help.” There was more I had to say, and it was just for Beth. I took both her hands and lowered my voice. “Look, I know you’ve had this high school crush thing for me ever since you moved in.” Then I cursed myself for my tactlessness.
Beth heaved a giant sniffle. “It’s not that.” She took her hands away and looked up at me, wiping her nose.
I put my arm around her. “Hey. “
“You’re not—I’m not—it’s not about high school. You’re like my daughter,” she blurted.
I blinked. “What?”
“My daughter Darleen. You’re like a good twin of my dumb, venal daughter,” she said, sound resigned.
I drew back, doubly shocked. The mom credo said that her kids could do no wrong. Of course, I knew a lot about Darleen’s role in Beth’s divorce and post-divorce wranglings with her ex and I would have described Darleen in far harsher terms.
Beth looked at me with woe. “I screwed up with Darleen. I couldn’t—” She sniffled. “I couldn’t make a better person of her. I couldn’t be a better mother to her.”
“Uh, you know, genetics,” I began, thinking of the other half of Darleen’s gene pool.
“But you’re so bright and pretty and such a good daughter,” Beth went on, blowing the top of my head off. She hugged me fiercely. “I’m so proud of you and what you’ve done with your life,” she whispered into my ear.
Call me pathetic. I sat there and let her hug me and lapped it up. Beth was such a mom. A good mom. Actually, I needed one of those.
“You’re a good mom,” I w
hispered back to her.
I didn’t feel the least bit corny or stupid.
Someone tinked on their waterglass. Beth and I disentangled from our moment.
“So,” Amanda said, calling us to order. “Do you think Buugh is gonna let it go, now that you’ve escaped fat jail and the Regional Office?” Maybe I would stop being team leader and make her do it for a while. I was so tired. And so damned hungry. Where was our food yet?
“Maybe,” I said. “If he doesn’t have too much on his hands right now.”
Ish said, “I used up all my rose dust on the carpets, the toilet paper in the bathrooms, and the coin return pockets in the vending machines.”
“Nice one,” Reg said.
“And those felt-tip pens,” I said. “What was with that? You had me dropping one on every fifth desk in Greed.”
“The ink is tainted with rose petal tincture,” Amanda said.
“I figured, but why every fifth desk?”
“Because people steal pens in the RO,” Ish said, “like everywhere. If only one in five guys gets one of these special pens, somebody’s gonna steal it from him. And somebody else will steal it from him. And somebody will try to confiscate them all because he’ll worry they’re contaminated, but that guy’ll keep using them because they’re special and nobody else has one. Until somebody steals them from him. You remember how they were when we played basketball against them. They had the fanciest shoes money could buy.”
“Worst basketball team in the Nine Circles,” Reg said.
At that point our food came. I ate until I was crying. I think I was crying even before that. Hard to tell. The weed and tequila were shaking hands in my system and disassembling my ability to focus or control myself.
I pigged out on Pulpo Norteño (baby octopus sauteed with smoked guajillos and garlic), Caseras Mas Vare (masa boats filled with minced shrimp, epazote and garlic-sauteed mint leaves), Bistec y Platanos Yucateco (thin-shaved beef and plantains sauteed in butter with pine nuts and served with a scoop of frozen mojo de ajo), Cochinita Pibil (my favorite, pulled pork stewed with tequila and achiote, served with pickled onions and hand-thrown tortillas), and Ceviche Mixto (shrimp, bay scallops, and octopus in a serrano-lime-tobacco broth). The blood-orange margaritas were good, but I fell in love with the Paloma de Fumar (smoking pigeon) margarita, which was served in a big, big, really big martini glass: El Presidente Blanco, blue curacao, absinthe, a chunk of dry ice, and a candy cigarette. I think I had eight of those. I have no idea what anyone else ordered. It had been a rough week in hell.
Amanda resumed the management of our crisis as we tightened our belts and sighed, waiting for dessert to show up.
“Pog’s and Ish’s trip to the RO proved something important. If these guys come after us, it’ll be a war of will, imagination, and inner balance. That means confidence. If you know who you are and you’re rock solid on that, you have a better chance of standing up to them and pushing them off balance. That’s why we spent a week laying traps for guys who haven’t tasted beer in several hundred years.”
“Confidence,” Cricket said thoughtfully.
“Pog, you’ve overcome your body image stuff. They can’t do that to you again. They may not have anything they can use against you anymore,” Amanda said.
Food had made a huge difference. “Maybe. Probably,” I said. “I have a lot of thinking to do. I still kind of hate fat people.”
“I suspect we all have a lot of thinking to do before we get that rock solid. That’s why we’re on this team.”
I blinked at her. Once again, the team robot had come out with some fancy psychology.
“We prefer not to talk about it,” I said.
“And that worked so well for you when you got to fat jail,” Beth said. Some things about her would never change.
Cricket interrupted. “So we want something that’ll inject us with a jolt of confidence, and for bonus points also hit the enemy with a lot of tastes and sounds and smells and feelings.”
Amanda twitched. Her head came up, alert and watchful, and she dove her hand into her back pocket and pulled something out. “Yeah. We want it kinda quick. Because they’re here.”
Reg and Melitta stood up, looking fiercely around the restaurant.
“Not here in the restaurant, but here in the field. They just arrived in the demon trap.” She grinned, and for the first time since I’d known her, I thought she looked a little demonic. “There’s a videocam running. I don’t know if it’ll catch demons.”
“Be fun if it does,” Reg said.
“Blackmail material,” Ish said, and I stopped shoveling flan into my face and gazed at him with awe. “Worst case scenario, if Buugh grabs us again, you can trade us for the video. He won’t want that getting up on YouTube.”
“You didn’t miss a trick,” I said to Amanda admiringly.
She said to Cricket, “That confidence boost. Can we get it in about half an hour? Because I’m guessing we have that long, no more.”
Cricket grinned. She pulled some slips of cardboard out of her purse and fanned them out. “It’s across the street.”
ISH
That was how Ish wound up going to roller derby for the first time in his life.
Ish had grown up with strippers for day-care. He thought he was pretty jaded. Hot babes doing something athletic, yeah, groovy, no doubt about that, but how many ways can you climb a pole naked? He thought he’d seen it all.
Roller derby was next-level shit.
The thing that grabbed him, and he saw what Cricket meant about confidence right away, these girls were hot, they were fast, they were violent. Yeah. But they weren’t doing it for the audience.
Cricket had provided them with seats in the suicide section, where the audience had a good chance of catching a derby girl in their laps. The sluts fanned out along the second row, holding cheap beers to keep thirst at bay. The bout had already started.
Girls whirled by wearing pads and helmets and ferocious-looking things in their mouths, like hockey players. Their skates clashed and pounded on the floor. They fell. They leaped up. If one went down, maybe two or three more tripped over her, sprawling, and the rest just skated around them, or sometimes jumped right over them. Whistles blew, the crowd screamed, and loud music ran in the intervals while one set of skaters left the floor and another set rolled on. Every single derby girl looked loaded for bear.
But they weren’t playing to the crowd. They were playing for themselves.
The strippers always paid attention to their audience. That’s why money got tucked into their thongs—because the watching guys felt good. It was a show for the guys.
Not this. Ish wasn’t sure what the fuck it was. It was noisy and smelly and crowded and violent and sexy and inspiring as hell.
Ish wondered if Pog understood the difference.
About then a skater came flying off the track and crashed to the floor in front of them with a thump Ish felt through his feet. She skidded right into the seats. Three guys in the front row were knocked over backward in their chairs. Beers went flying. The fallen guys roared and groused, and everyone nearby laughed at them. What had they expected? Suicide seats.
The skater got up and rolled after her team.
Pog punched Ish on the arm hysterically. “Look at that.” She pointed at a completely different skater. “That girl is like four hundred pounds! She just picked up that girl on her hip and she carried her! And then she chucked her flying! Fuck!” Pog was squealing and punching him and bouncing in her chair.
Yeah. Looked like Pog got it.
Ish realized he should be paying attention to the entrances. He told Pog he was going for a beer and slid out of his seat.
The Broadway Armory was a sieve, exit-wise, but that cut two ways. If Buugh sent a tactical team after him, they could get into this room by half a dozen doors. But Ish’s team could also escape by all those routes. He glanced up. There was one short gallery at the pizza-and-beer stand end of the room, about twen
ty feet up. One guy was running a sound mixer up there, and another guy in a very loud suit stood beside him, yelling very loudly. Ish considered the gallery. If I wanted to bring some hurt, I’d stage it up there. If I had projectiles.
But would Buugh’s team bring weapons? The Regional Office had had a policy of letting mortals make their own fun, violence-wise, for several centuries. It worked great. People seemed capable of being pretty horrible to each other without demons egging them on.
That doesn’t mean, Ish realized, that we can’t use the weapons we brought. Thanks to Amanda’s magical chops, all their weapons looked dopey and harmless, like paintball guns or confetti shooters. Just the kind of thing a bunch of drunken derby fans might bring to a bout.
As he thought this, someone sitting in the bleachers near him started banging two metal garbage can lids together.
Wincing at the noise, he returned to Pog and Amanda and told them his idea.
“Already on it,” Amanda said. “Take this up to the gallery.” She handed him a paintball gun loaded with rose dust pellets. “I put a little ‘don’t see me’ glamour over it, but try not to hit anybody standing next to you. The glamour won’t stand up to that.”
“Who’s got the confetti shooter?”
“Reg took it behind the bleachers. He’ll be shooting blind, so his accuracy will suck, but that won’t matter. The rose petal confetti’s really light, and people keep stomping on the bleachers. It’ll get airborne in no time and stay that way. And then good luck to those demons trying to keep away from it.”
“What’s the drill for the rest of us?” Pog asked Amanda.
“Once they show up, we spread out, try to separate them—they’ll have to separate, too, when they see how we’re all over the place—and we tag-team them.”
Pog nodded.
Ish smiled. Amanda’s Army background was coming out. She seemed to enjoy it.
With the paintball gun in his hand, Ish leaned over and kissed Pog a quick one on the lips. Then he headed for the pizza and beer corner. Somewhere back there, there must be a stairway up to that gallery.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 100