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

her pale eyes boring into me.

I grinned wider, but my eyes were on Kendra. “What? You can dish it, but you can’t take it?”

Ms. Arntz’s glare whipped onto me. Immediately I got a splitting headache.

“Mr. Wilderman will be informed about this,” Ms. Arntz growled.

I blinked innocently at her through winces. “About what? Me laughing at an accident?”

I then strolled away through the solid door before she could retort. Something struck the hard door, but I could not tell what. Yet it sounded like metal. It could have been a knife.

Unfortunately, the next morning came the fallout.

I wasn’t called in by Mr. Wilderman at all. It wasn’t that kind of fallout. Rather, the school was suddenly full of whispers, hisses, and cruel rumors about all of us half imps. Some were true. Many were false. Most were about Wispy and myself. A few were about Piranha. None were about Spastic who for all practical reasons has become nothing more than a mini-Tom to most of the school since Spastic was unflappable.

I could handle rumors. I had long not cared about the opinions of my classmates. However, the girls weren’t so able to let it blow over.

Piranha had struck back against the lies and ended up in detention again. The lies about me has shifted to my actual stealing habits back in California and how I could steal bits of small change to create large cash. People were now putting their hands on their pockets. It was annoying, but only that. The girls were also still saying I was sexually harassing them, this time reporting missing underwear and bras—as if I would steal those smelly things. Gross. I wasn’t like I needed such things. But the stories going around about Wispy… I was afraid some of them were true.

Wispy had many deep dark secrets of which I think only Piranha knew about. Back in California, Wispy had been picked up by the Unseelie Gang quite early. I knew she had been with Jester since she was nine and they had joined the gang later when she was about eleven. But I had avoided the gang as much as possible, and knew so little about most of the members besides Piranha that I really had no idea what Wispy had gone through. However in the winds of the whispers around the school, I was getting an inkling that she had gone through hell with the gang, and that was why she had so readily agreed to come to Gulinger.

Around lunch, I rushed to her room to find her.

In the hallway, I heard some girls whispering as they walked toward the stairs, “I heard she actually has a tail. A tail!”

“That’s nothing,” another girl said. “But she really did sleep with all those gang members back in…”

I walked straight through the door before they could see me. No one was inside. But then it was most likely the gals would have gone downstairs before me. Wispy would have just finished Dr. Coffee’s class and have been in a bad state.

But the gossip passed the door with a, “…total slut. I bet she…”

I popped through the wood, glaring after them. Wispy wasn’t like that. She was fragile. Though as that thought went through my mind, I wondered why Wispy always had seemed so fragile. We hardly ever talked. To me, she had looked trapped in the Unseelie Gang. Like their pet. Anorexic. She was someone I had always felt needed rescuing. I just never had the means. Now, I began to wonder with panic about what really had happened to her in the gang. I had to find out.

Ignoring the stairs, I dropped straight through the floor—all the way down to the cafeteria. I nearly landed on a table. A boy dodged to get out from under me before I hit the ground and him.

I looked around for Wispy.

I found Piranha. She was at a table sulking, with her wings bound up—that kind of detention more effective than just putting her into a room as neither I nor the imps could take it off for her. Spastic was there at another table with his friend Quinn, talking backwards as usual.

“Hey,” I said, marching up to Piranha. “Have you seen Wispy?”

Piranha shook her head, mildly curious though clearly not aware of the rumors. “No. I just got out of detention.” She gestured to her wings. “I’ve been in isolation all day. It’s been so relaxing.”

Raising my eyebrows at her, realizing that maybe spending lots of time in detention had been Piranha’s plan all along. My mind always cleared there with the crowd of imps gone. However, I had to keep to task. I said, “I’ve been hearing nasty crazy rumors spreading all over school about Wispy all morning. She didn’t lash out and end up in detention too, did she?”

Stiffening in alarm, Piranha shook her head. She started to go pale and she looked around, rising.

My skin crawled with foreboding. For a brief moment I was sure I saw a death angel in the room with us. He nodded to me, then looked up at the ceiling.

Panic rose from my stomach to my chest.

I shot through the ceiling, going straight through all the floors—never mind who was in my way and whom I knocked down. I popped out through the roof and landed up top, looking around for her.

No Wispy.

Then, thinking, knowing where I would go if I felt attacked, I ran to the corner where Valhalla was and dropped straight down through the roof into the room.

“Wispy?” I looked around.

My piles of comic books were the same as I had left them. She was not there. I rushed to the closet entrance and stuck my head out to see if she was in there.

Nope.

I pulled back in then jogged to the bathroom where we kept our best stuff as we no longer publicly showered with everyone else. The door was closed and locked.

I pushed through it.

Wispy was there.

On the floor.

The wet red floor.

“No!” I grabbed her off the stained tile, clutching her tightly to me then sank straight down through floor to the levels below.

We landed in Col. Jefferson’s room.

He jumped from his desk whipping around and ripping up a gun from his hidden holster—a no-no for school rules. But his eyes set on me widely and he immediately shoved his gun back in. “Roddy!”

“Help me!” I screamed, my body shaking. I felt sick. Wispy was pale. Her lips were blue.

Col. Jefferson snatched something from under his bed and wrapped both of Wispy’s wrists with it, putting pressure over the gashes. He then said, “Drop down to the bottom floor. I’ll get a car so we can take her to the hospital.”

I nodded.

Holding Wispy tight to me, I sank through the floor, dropping straight through to the bottom where I landed in the kitchens. Damn! Too far. I had gone too far in my panic. I was in the basement.

Cursing, I tried to launch up and fly back to the first floor, but Wispy was too heavy and I could not make her lighter. So, clutching her tightly in my arms, I ran out through all the cooks, pushing my way back up the stairs through everyone in my way.

So many screams. So many imps. So much noise. I could only see the path out, and I ran through everything in my way to it—including the walls to the outside apartment hallway we had first entered with Tom, Rick, and the rest. It felt surreal standing there in that dim corridor, breathless, covered in Wispy’s blood as she was dying in my arms.

I could feel she was dying too. Her imps were watching with grief. So silent, with expressions of what-did-we-do-that-for. Now-our-fun-is-over. I cursed at them.

“Don’t you know suicide is permanent?”

They shrank away from me.

In the waiting silence, I felt my heart fragmenting into nasty pieces.

And that death angel stood at the end of the hallway, staring back at me.

“Go away!” I shouted.

He didn’t move. He just gazed more deeply on Wispy.

“She’s not leaving with you!” I screamed.

My face was nasty wet, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want Wispy to die. She was a good person. She didn’t deserve the life she got. This was supposed to be her second chance.

Col. Jefferson and Capt. Eifert came charging out of the doorway. Capt. Eifert nodded to me then rushed ahead, opening the front door. Col. Jefferson hurried ahead of us, going to the street for the car.

“Do as I do,” Capt. Eifter said, before we went out. “We don’t want to draw attention.” She then slung a large overcoat over Wispy and me both. Where she got it, I did not see. Immediately, we hurried out and down the steps. The captain opened the car door as soon as it pulled to the curb and urged me in first. I did my best, carrying Wispy whom I was not sure was even breathing.

The death angel stared at us from the front step—but did not follow.

I had lost sense of time after that. My ears were ringing. My head swimming. It felt like an eternity before we reached the hospital and carried Wispy into the emergency room.

“Roddy!” Col. Jefferson shook me out of my stupor by my arms. “Did you hear me? She’s going to need some of your blood. Imp blood is… well, they don’t have any.”

I blinked my eyes at him and nodded. “Of course.”

They hurried me to the same room Wispy was in, urging me to lie down. They rolled up my sleeve.

I had never been in a hospital before. The imps in there were pyscho, and I was shaking. Capt. Eifert was talking earnestly to a wide-eyed nurse who was eyeing my horns and pawing her crucifix. With her was a tall policeman who looked as uncomfortable being in that space as I was, though determined. He also appeared to be cold. He was shivering. He saw me looking and came up to me.

“You did good,” he said. “She’s still alive. So don’t worry.”

I nodded, glad to hear it. I was especially glad that he was telling the truth and not just humoring me. I could tell. His imps had nothing to suggest to him, and they were upset about it.

He then said, “I’m going to call Tom Brown and make sure she has enough blood for later.”

I nearly sat up. “You know Tom?”

Smirking fondly at me, he replied, “I went to school with him. I called him Trouble.”

I stared more. This was the dude who had given Tom his imp name.

Capt. Eifert talked to me as the nurse pushed me down again, and the cop stepped back. “Ok, Roddy. We need you to relax. This is going to pinch a bit.”

“Will this really work?” I asked, cringing and trying not to look at the needle they were about to stick into the crook of my arm. “I mean, I don’t actually know Wispy’s blood type.”

Cringing honestly, the captain replied, “We hope it will work. The problem is the imp factor.”

“Imp factor?” I paled, looking also to the cop who stepped back to the door with severity.

She nodded. “Imp blood has its own antigens. Tom learned this the hard way.”

I wondered how Tom had learned this. Had he nearly died?

Nodding more to me, Capt Eifert said, “I’m really glad you found her, Roddy. You are a good friend.”

I was unable to hold it in. I shook my head as my face got wet again. “No, I’m not.”

That blasted teacher had made me cry.

And it was my fault Wispy was there. I believed that I had pushed Kendra and the others over the line to hurt Wispy worse than setting her hair on fire.

The transfusion made me light headed. And when it was over, I was allowed to lie down in a room not far from Wispy. I begged not to be separated from her, actually. And Capt. Eifert remained to guard us.

Col. Jackson went back to the school to report to Mr.