The Unfortunate Story of Roddy Mayhem, Julie Steimle [i can read book club TXT] 📗

in a half-laugh, realizing I was serious.

“Where from?” Spastic asked, peering at them now.

“Rick Deacon’s closet, I think,” I said.

The entire room stared.

Someone grabbed at my PJs, looking for a monogram. Clearly they knew who he was.

“Rick said I could keep them when I got honey on them,” I said.

Spastic looked confused, not sure why someone would give away pajamas over a bit of honey.

“Why did you get honey on them?” someone asked contemptuously.

“It was on my bagel,” I said, “and it dripped.”

More of them stared at me.

But then I realized it was because I had put the jar of honey in the pocket to hide it from Rick as I knew he was allergic and I had wanted to keep the honey. The honey was currently in my suitcase. If the school had bagels, I’d want the honey later.

“You know Howard Richard Deacon?” one of them asked.

I thought about it and said, “I know a guy called Rick Deacon. Rich dude. Let me sleep in his apartment in LA one night.”

“That’s where you were?” Spastic asked, staring at me while washing. “How come we couldn’t go to his apartment? It sucked being in jail, you know.”

I shrugged, thinking about it. “I dunno. Because I bumped into his friend Eve when trying to get away—”

“Wait?” Spastic gaped at me. “That demon really was his friend? The freaky vimp that had been going to your beach?”

I nodded. “Yeah. And she’d not as bad as I thought. I mean sure, if you get her mad she’ll rip your heart out—but when she likes you she’s pretty much like anyone else.”

More people shifted away from us. Apparently what I had said to Morgan Butthurt had spread in a rumor. Good, I thought. I needed people to understand that it was stupid to mess with us. So I added, “She’s half imp too, you know.”

“Yeah,” Spastic replied as if winded, “But isn’t the other half of her a vampire?”

I nodded, cringing. “Yeah. And that even freaked Tom when he met her.” Then I thought about it more. “You know, he met her for the first time the same as I bumped into her. But Rick had told him about her. And one of those DA’s actually came and warned Tom to, you know, act guardian angel for the guy she was dating. I mean freaky weird.”

Spastic went pale. He knew what I meant when I said DA. Death Angel. We didn’t like to talk about them much, though we all saw them. “No kidding.”

“Not a bit,” I said.

And I finished washing.

When we went to get dressed, Spastic and I were given a wide berth by everyone in the room. Perhaps it was not wise to freak everyone in the school out, but I wanted to be left alone when I slept. I knew all the devious things people could come up with, and after seeing all the imps in that school I knew plenty of them would do it.

“That’s my roomie.” Spastic pointed out a lean kid with rattled imps, mousy hair, and nervous eyes.

“He got a name?” I watched the kid skirt away from us, his imps screaming at him to swear at us though he kept a tight lip.

“Sean Moorley,” Spastic murmured.

The guy Sean scurried away from his room, going to the far hall to, I assumed, get breakfast.

I frowned, thinking out loud. “Why can’t that Sean dude share with Morgan Buttman?”

Cringing, Spastic said while ducking into his room, “Uh, probably because he his scared of him too.”

Good point. Morgan had attacked me on the first day and clearly had a superiority complex. If Spastic freaked him out—and Spastic was a nice guy—then that Sean kid probably jumped whenever a person cut a fart.

After we quickly dressed, we went downstairs to find the cafeteria. After a few wrong turns, we discovered it in the school’s basement—and the room was packed. And I don’t just mean with kids. Imps were everywhere screaming awful stuff these kids could do to one another, and several of them were doing it. Now I know that imps for some kids were always fat, as kids had poor impulse control, but seriously this place was like an imp playground. My head was pounding from their noise while Spastic could hardly keep focused because of the tumult. Because it was so disorienting, it took us a bit to see though the imp haze to find the obvious food line where at least we would be able to fill our bellies. I just wished there had been earplugs against imp sound. It was driving me nuts. And once we got to the head of the line we stared at what choices we had.

Admittedly, I was disappointed. It wasn’t sausage muffins or a full spread of whipped cream on crepes with fresh fruit and the like—though waffles were available—but it was a cafeteria fare with mass-produced fried eggs and bacon with toast, jam, and bagels. I snagged a bagel and made an egg-bacon sandwich with it while Spastic plucked up three pancakes with lots of maple syrup. We carried our trays out into the noisy room and looked for a place to sit. It was hard to see clear enough with all the imps in the way, but we finally found the one table where Wispy was sitting—or perched. Her hands clutched her head. She was rocking.

“She’s always been oversensitive,” Spastic muttered, going faster to her.

I nodded, remembering. She didn’t like being in public. Wispy was always a little frail. The noise had to be killing her.

“Where’s Piranha?” Spastic asked, hopping onto the bench in a crouch rather than sitting.

Wispy was humming to herself, trying to block out the noise, but she pointed across the room. We followed her finger and saw Piranha facing a froofy red-haired girl with heavy eyeliner and mascara who had a posse of chicks behind her. The chicks has expressions of snobby mockery, their imps shouting mean words. The two girls seemed to be arguing. I put down my tray and sauntered over, trying to hear the argument over the imps shouting.

“…at all! Don’t you dare call her street trash! We have done nothing to you!” Piranha’s face was red.

That froofy red-head’s nearly white-blue eyes whipped onto me while she snarled back at Piranha, “You brought all that junk in. Bugs are attracted to filth. They can’t help it.”

“Bugs?” I echoed, hearing that froof-head’s imps urge her to conjure up spiders next to crawl into Piranha’s hair.

Piranha whipped her eyes to me. “It’s nothing!”

I raised my eyebrows at her. Her imps screamed for her to slap me for looking so nonplussed at what was going on. She wanted me to get angry and demand the imps to go to town on this froof-head.

But that fluffy-haired chick pulled back from me, her eyes raking over my everything as if I was the worst example of a half-imp she ever saw. “Stay out of it, devil boy.”

I stiffened. But then I said, “It’s Hell-boy to you.”

Piranha smirked. This, she liked. Then with another glare for froof-head, she said, “Leave Wispy and me alone.”

And she stormed back to her table. I followed her.

“I wish we had never come here,” Piranha said when she arrived at Wispy’s table, grabbing her breakfast tray. Spastic was already munching on his pancakes as if they were the best thing he had ever tasted. Wispy nodded to Piranha, though, hardly eating.

I frowned, thinking about that. And I said, “Tom said it would be hard—”

“Hard?” Piranha picked up her tray, chucking the egg from it at me. “Tom made it sound like all we had to do was make friends. These kids are nearly all demons. Did you know what that Moyra Nixie did to us?”

“Is that Madame Froofroo’s name?” I asked.

Smirking despite her anger, Piranha nodded. “Yes. Madame Froofroo. She put dirt and bugs in our beds!”

I stared for a full minute in silence. Well, relative silence. The room was fraught with the cacophony of imp chatter and kid chatter on top of that. People were also listening in.

“Why would she do that?” I asked, knowing why Morgan Butthurt was ticked off at me. Had Piranha had an altercation with people on her floor also?

Rolling her eyes, Piranha said, “Because, she’s the queen bee here, and she had made a snarky remark about Wispy that I didn’t like and I defended her. But Madame Froofroo does not like to be contradicted. It is really stupid.”

“You’re stupid,” someone said, walking by. A kid about ten. Nothing spectacular about him either. I also didn’t know him. And neither did Piranha.

“Butt out!” Piranha shouted after him.

He waggled his butt at her, and she was tempted to kick it. I caught her foot before it could meet soft tissue. “Nuh uh. We promised.”

Piranha sulked, lowering her foot. “Fine. But these jerks deserve a good butt-whipping.”

I nodded, thinking the same thing.

Spastic sat on the table cross-legged, gobbling up his bacon strips with a, “Imp-kicking, really.”

We grinned at him.

But we also had promised to not go full Tom Brown on anyone at the school. It was imperative that we just weave and dodge.

“Ok. So, we’ve both got bullies to deal with,” Piranha said, folding her arms with a better temper. “And we promised to make this work. But so help me Roddy, if they continue to pester us like that, I am going to follow the eye for an eye law and start taking teeth for teeth.”

I grimaced, wondering if any of those other school kids were thinking the same exact thing. The chaos in the cafeteria was proof that this school was a bit too out of control.

And that got me thinking as to why—because I had gotten the impression that Tom had liked going to this school, and so had Rick. Something had changed about it. I just didn’t know what.

*

Ok, so after breakfast we started our first classes. Wispy was in the grade above me, and Piranha in the senior class above her. Spastic was two grades below me. We had been divided and therefore separated. I wasn’t sure if that was on purpose to spread out imp trouble—as Wispy and Piranha could have easily been in the same class.

And for the most part, the teachers followed the instructions that Mr. Wilderman had given them—to let us sit in the back of the room and do our own thing while they taught the lessons. Of course by doing our own thing that meant the teachers gave us different things to do rather than us sitting around doing nothing. There was only one other boy who was separated from the rest of the class like me, and that was some supersensitive empathic kid who wore these huge headphones all the time with music playing to keep him calm. Morgan Buttman was thankfully in the grade above mine. But that meant Wispy was stuck with him.

I had been handed worksheets—stacks of them—for me to just work on while the weird Science (who had spiked hair and imp-level piercings) teacher lectured about—what was it? Um… plate tectonics—whatever the hell that was. It sounded like a technological plate for food that was made for fat people to tell them to stop eating. My worksheets were about rocks. Most of them talked about the different kinds of rocks. I had to read them and answer questions. The writing on the pages were big, like for little kids to read, and I had a feeling they were used in teaching the kids in a lower grade. I wondered which. It was kind of embarrassing as this was kid’s stuff. My reading was fine.

The second class I had was math. I was handed a progressive stack of worksheet full of math problems and then told to do all the questions I can until I was not able to do anymore. The teacher said she would use it to find out where she had to start my math education. She had gazed at me sympathetically