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

hand.

Big mistake. In his palm was a gross thing—which squished into my skin and made it itch. I immediately jerked back, and wiped it off on his shoulder.

“Ew! He wiped his boogers on me!” Morgan let out a loud cry.

And everyone pulled back in horror—except Piranha of course. She scowled at the creep and rose out from her seat. Everyone quickly gave her a wide berth. She was scary after all. She looked ready to wallop Morgan with her tray, but instead she hissed in my ear, “We should have known better than to listen to Trouble. We should have stayed in LA.”  

And she marched off.

I won’t go into the details of the rest of the day. It was equally abysmal. I got sent to the principal the same as Spastic, after some jerk tugged on my horns and asked me if they made me really horny—and I decked him. I missed most of Spanish class (which I could already speak and could have proved I wasn’t a dumb-dumb devil boy). And I walked in at the tail end of History class. The only real reward of the day was study hall, where I was allowed to slip into the library and just grab a book off the shelves to read like old times—tutoring cancelled for the day as Mr. Wilderman had administrative work to do. So I was not happy when I had to drag my feet out of the library into dinner, where the chaos and malice was no better than at lunch.

My evening class was Art with the same teacher from the first hour—Dr. Chaz Pierce. But Dr. Multiple Piercings ended up being really cool. He didn’t put me in the back of the class. He set me in the middle where I could do the project with everyone else as he said, “Creativity is all I care about here.” And he pointed us all to the paints and what he wanted us to learn with them. And when the class was over, I gazed at my painting with a degree of holy-crap-why-had-I-never-tried-this-before this-is-so-fun. Dr. Pierce even praised it.

Honestly, I didn’t want to go back to my dorm room.

Piranha found me when I was dragging my feet up the stairs to my nasty shared space with Morgan Buttface. Hooking her arm in mine, she whispered, “Valhalla. We have to find one.”

Brightening up, I nodded, remembering. We needed to get a haven.

Piranha dragged me back to her floor, snagged Wispy who was clearly giving Piranha the silent treatment. Then we searched for Spastic whom we found in the gym cleaning off writing from the boy’s lockers. All four of us then scoured the school for a space to call our own. It was late when we finally found one.

Our new haven was an empty apartment space which we could enter through a closet wall on the top floor. We discovered there were several of these empty apartment spaces surrounding the school as buffer spaces for sound. This was how no one could hear the school clamor outside the building. But this particular corner apartment had a balcony overlooking the back alley and access to the roof if we wanted it. It was perfect as it also was a buffer against imp noise.

“Ok,” Piranha said to the rest of us. “Valhalla is a secret. No one—and I mean no one is allowed to know about it. Not even Mr. Wilderman or any stupid friends we might—in all improbability—make.”

“It is not improbable for us to make friends,” Wispy muttered at her, though her eyes took in the entire room with relief. I had a feeling Wispy would come here often to clear her head. “You just have to not be so caustic.”

Piranha glared at her.

“Our imp-only zone,” Spastic grinned around at the walls. “Ok. That’s good.”

“Imp free,” Wispy murmured.

“A haven,” I said, glad to have one.

“Second rule,” Piranha said, glaring at the rest of us. “Don’t let anyone follow you here.”

I smirked at her. “What are they going to do? Walk through the wall?”

She met my gaze sharply. “There might me someone who can do that here, Roddy.”

I wondered who could. They’d have to be part demon like us to do that, and I had not yet met one with the same ability as us.

“Fine,” I said. “We won’t let anyone follow us. Any more rules?”

Spastic and Wispy smirked at her also, as no imp liked rules

She stepped closer to me and said, “Yes.”

And I waited. She was just so angry, it bothered me. Usually Piranha was so nice. This trip east had rattled her, making Piranha entirely unpleasant.

“Don’t forget who your real friends are.”

She then walked through the wall, leaving Valhalla.

We stared after her, wondering what she meant by that. It wasn’t like any of us would forget. No one at the school really liked us but us.

 

Battlefront

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ten

 

 

Things didn’t get much better after the first day. Though Morgan was forced to go back to his room, he continued to be a total creep. He did, however, learn to stop telekinetically throwing things at me as I just dished it back. But he did find ways to make me miserable at every chance he got.

I spent a lot of time in Valhalla.

So did Wispy.

Despite becoming friends with Lorelei, the girl only every hung around Wispy when Moyra and her posse weren’t looking. Lorelei had explained plaintively to Wispy that she was overly affected by the emotions of others—including how they wanted her to act. It was difficult for her to act on her own sometimes when everyone else’s emotions were so overwhelming. And the terrible thing was, Moyra and her gang of mean girls were passionate in their hate for all the half-imps in the school. And even worse—though they picked on Piranha—they found Wispy a better target as Piranha viciously fought back, whereas Wispy just didn’t.

It started with Moyra somehow constantly putting dirt and bugs into their beds. Wispy cried while Piranha sent those bugs and dirt back via imp, along with a dumping of water that soaked the other girls’ entire room. Moyra’s roommate Kendra-the-cuckoo Collins set Piranha’s hair on fire—just by touching it. Of course, Piranha screamed for the imps to douse the entire hallway that she was in—and that got her detention. But the fire in her hair was out.

Spastic was also always in and out of detention—but he didn’t seem to mind it so much. He hung out with that backward speaker, Quinn, talking backwards with him all the time and mostly minding his own business. But kids around him picked on him relentlessly. Spastic did not hesitate to dodge like Tom said to do. But he was hopping all over the place, bumping into people, knocking things over, and the teachers were not having it—especially Ms. Arntz, his geography teacher. She turned out to be a crazy psychic who like to punish people with headaches. And she had a lingering grudge against Tom Brown. Everyone at school who had liked Tom Brown when he was at school were rather friendly with Spastic, though not with the rest of us. So many of our schoolmates shied away from me like I had the plague.

Honestly, I was jealous. The kids in my grade kept calling me dumb-dumb devil boy behind the teachers’ backs besides—though one teacher actually joined in and called me that to my face.

“Look devil boy,” Ms. Amherst said after I had committed some kind of verbal grammar mistake in her presence, “It is bad enough you offend the eyes, but do you have to offend the ears as well?”

I colored. Ms. Amherst had been silently picking on me with obvious prejudice since day one. I was beyond sick of it, but there was no way I could retaliate against a teacher—at least, not that I knew of. The worse part was since she picked on me, it gave the others permission to openly do so as well. And they did it with relish.

But I could endure it.

Well, at first I could. That was before that girl Leah Fail—this half-elemental earth demon girl with the ability to influence rocks and dirt—reported to Ms. Arntz that I had stolen her iPad.

I hadn’t.

To be fair—I had looked at it once, but I never took it. Ms. Arntz wasn’t even my teacher—but she peered down her beady accusing eyes at me as her imps screamed for her to convince Mr. Wilderman to expel me over the so-called theft. They eventually found the thing, but it wasn’t among my stuff. I made sure of that.

Then Moyra said Piranha had stolen her calculator and had broken it on purpose.

She hadn’t.

Piranha was brilliant with numbers and didn’t even need a calculator. And her math teacher vouched for her that Piranha was never seen with one during the time Moyra said hers had gone missing.

So Moyra blamed me next.

Of course I hadn’t. I had been giving Madame Froofroo a wide berth. I didn’t even have a reason to get at her—even though her calculator was most definitely smashed as if someone had dropped a hammer or a rock on it. I figured it was her friend Leah who had done it to frame us imps.

Then I got blamed for stealing their money and buying a churro with it. I had gotten a churro from outside, which I had bought when no one was looking—never mind that I had used my own money from LA. But I was sent to Mr. Wilderman’s office over my churro purchase as they did not have them in the cafeteria.

The headmaster peered across his desk at me, frowning as he thought to himself while his imps were screaming for him to just keep me in detention forever. He looked me in the eyes and finally said, “You are being accused of stealing things around school.”

“I didn’t—”

“Tom had the same habit,” he continued as if I had not spoken.

I shook my head forcefully. “Tom said to never steal from anybody who didn’t have a sense of humor. And I haven’t.”

Mr. Wilderman coughed, nodding while… Oh my, he was hiding a smirk. “Yes. He only ever stole from his roommate, who most definitely had an enormous amount of tolerance for Tom’s hijinks.”

Was he believing me? Was it possible?

“Look,” he said to me gravely. “I understand you are having a difficult time adjusting and the kids aren’t exactly playing fair—”

“Not playing fair?” I nearly gasped in exasperation, ready to pull my horns out. “They’ve been waging war on us.”

He nodded, sighing. “Yes. That’s what Captain Eifert says.”

I didn’t know Captain Eifert. I didn’t have her for any of my classes, though Piranha said she was cool.

“She has been watching it.” Mr. Wilderman shook his head. “This school has got a collection of mean girls, I’m afraid. And no amount of detention has been able to solve this issue.”

I frowned. I was glad, however, that he believed me. And I was glad he was aware it wasn’t our fault what those girls were accusing us of.

“You’ve been doing well.” But the headmaster was still frowning. “But I need you to do better with handling things. Morgan has filed yet another complaint against you—this time about the smell in your room—”

“I can explain that,” I