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

bit back with venom in her eyes. “Lorelei.”

I closed my eyes. Of course Piranha did. She never really liked Lorelei. She probably had felt replaced by her. And I was mad myself. A real friend would have stayed true no matter what.

“Lorelei,” I said, “Needs to learn to keep her mouth shut.”

“Or what?” Ms. Arntz snapped. “You’ll cut out her tongue?” She then whipped toward Mr. Wilderman, pointing at me. “This is why they can’t be at our school! They’re violent! And he has been sexually harassing the girls in his class.”

“Have not!” I shouted, preparing to sick the imps on her. I hated her. Ms. Arntz wasn’t even my teacher, but she was a despicable human being. She is what was making me hate psychics—Officer Calamori excepted.

“They have proof,” she said back, but did not look at me.

“It’s a lie,” I said again.

“Imps are the liars.” She looked at me from the side of her eye.

“Imps don’t lie!” I snapped. “They reveal your darkest desires and tempt you with them—and yours are shouting to have us all thrown back on the streets and shot.”

Mr. Wilderman blinked at me then up at Officer Johnson. The cop set a hand on my shoulder, preparing to steer me away. Mr. Wilderman said, “Is that all they are saying here?”

“You’re listening to him?” Ms. Arntz shouted, eyes wide on the headmaster.

Closing his eyes with a deep breath, Mr. Wilderman said, “Your vendetta against Tom Brown is coloring your view on this subject.”

She was prejudiced against Tom? Was that where all her hate came from?

“Tom harassed me from day one!”

“And us all,” Mr. Wilderman said calmly. “And you harassed him first.”

“I was hired to handle him!” she bit out.

But the headmaster shook his head. “You were hired to drive him toward West End Prep—which he foiled out of sheer will power.”

“He still joined the CIA anyway,” she said with bitterness.

Nodding, Mr. Wilderman replied, “True. But for better reasons.”

Ms. Arntz huffed. Then she eyed me. “The CIA don’t want that one. He is too much trouble. Way to conspicuous. But they are all trash. I thought it was a bad idea from the start to recruit imps into the Company.”

It stunned me to hear her say it, as I knew she believed it. And blast it, I now realized that she was an agent of the CIA. Tom hadn’t even known. I could also see that same sentiment of loathing in the eyes of Ms. Amherst and Dr. Folger also. The other teachers looked uncomfortable, though Ms. Eifert was bristling alongside Ms. Keyes.

“No ghoulie is trash,” Officer Johnson said through his teeth. His imps were screaming at him to rage on with a train of epithets at the woman and sick ghosts on her. I didn’t know he could do that. He was shivering again, as if there were ghosts gathering in the room at that very moment. I felt cold also, being near him.

Ms. Arntz’s eyes whipped to him. “He’s not a ghoulie. Imps are something els—”

“They’re not!” Officer Johnson bit out. His face was red. “Tom and I might not have gotten along in school, but I will be damned to fall into your sick mindset and treat a fellow ghoulie like garbage!”

She stepped back from him.

“Now I am going to take this young man upstairs so he can clean up and get some rest,” Officer Johnson said. “He’s had a hard day, and he doesn’t need more crap out of you.”

He immediately steered me back through the door and into the hall. I could feel his warm solid hand on my shoulder.

A fellow ghoulie. It was the first time I had heard that. My mind went back to the things Tom had said about the school, the fondness Rick had recalled about it. Even how Officer Calamori said the name of the school as if it was place of affectionate memories. And I began to wonder it had been a different kind of place then. This cop had said he hadn’t even gotten on with Tom, but he still saw him as a fellow ghoulie. I wished the school was like that now. And I wondered, how in the world it had changed. Why had it changed?

Officer Johnson stood guard outside the showers while I washed. I wondered whom he was guarding though—me or the student body. My mind was racing, trying to figure out who would dare mess with Wispy. Was it Morgan? Or was it one of those guys I had spied on earlier? Or was it just those girls. I knew she wasn’t just upset over her reputation being smeared. It was more than that. She had been attacked in some intimate way. Wispy really didn’t care what people thought about her. It was that they did to her that mattered.

Once I was all dressed, Officer Johnson escorted me to the school’s assembly hall—which wasn’t what I had expected. I thought I was going to go back to my room to rest. But we stepped into the back of the full, darkened room, listening to the tail end of the presenters on stage. I braced myself to hear the end of a lecture about what had happened to Wispy, to be the subject of staring eyes and shouts from imps. But as I took in the speaker’s words I realized wasn’t what I had first assumed. It was a planned assembly for some kind of school recruitment, one I had heard about in homeroom but had ignored as it was for West End Prep—the school Tom had intense disdain for.

The speakers on the stage looked like businessmen and women. Almost men-in-black types. And their imps were silent. They creeped me out.

“…today. Now we will be testing for suitability tomorrow. This program is not for everyone—”

“No kidding,” Officer Johnson muttered. “It’s a fast track to government spy work.”

 I lifted my eyes to him, shivers going down me more.

“—so if you do not get selected, do not take that as a judgement on your character. We are seeking the most suitable placement for you in your future careers.”

Officer Johnson huffed again, his dark eyes fixing on the presenter, his lips thinning as he folded his arms.

“You think they are lying?” I whispered. We had not taken a seat yet, but both of us had remained in the shadows of the doorway.

He shook his head. “I had already graduated when West End Prep was formed, but Matthew Calamori told me all about it. They select people on their usefulness, they don’t actually care if you want it or not. So ghoulies who are not easily manipulated or are too dangerous never get in—thankfully. West End didn’t want Matt because he can read under their lies. And they were terrified of Rick Deacon because he was a werewolf.”

I stared more. I had not known any of that. And as Officer Johnson’s words sunk it, so had Ms. Arntz’s comments back in the office. Her words finally made sense. That school, West End Prep would not want me because I was too obviously not human—unlike Tom who could hide his impishness a little with wildly fantastic self-control.

“He also said they liked to take mafis the most because they could be easily threatened,” Officer Johnson murmured to himself.

I paled. I then looked to my mafi classmates. To be honest, I sort ignored them as they ignored me out of sheer terror of what I was. It was a live and let live relationship, and it had worked. But now… I realized that in a way the ghoulie kids were a shield for the mafi ones. We kept them safe as no real human thug was up to battling fire-starters, psychics, and half-blood supernatural creatures.

“… all be productive members of society.” The speaker down below then lifted his eyes toward us. He saw me and blinked as if he saw a ghost. But then his eyes lifted to Officer Johnson with a sharp nod. He said to everyone else, “Thank you for your time.”

A teacher from the younger grades, a Mrs. Ottsfield who always smelled like watered grass, stepped up to the front of the stage with a big smile, setting her hands together as if to say ‘Namaste’ with a bow. “Thank you for your polite attention. Everyone can now go back to their dormitories before dinner.”

Officer Johnson set a hand on my shoulder and steered me once more toward the doorway. But I caught sight of Spastic who just popped out of his seat, clearly oblivious over what had happened to Wispy. He was grinning for one—as a person who had been blithely entertained. I looked for Piranha and those harpies who had been attacking Wispy all this time—but I only saw Kendra with a cropped bob hairdo and Leah who had a fresh scratch across her face. Moyra was nowhere to be found. Piranha probably had physically attacked those girls without saying anything to Spastic.

I sprang from the cop’s grip and did an aerial somersault over the crowd to Spastic, landing on the back of the chair he had just vacated.

Spastic busted into a huge laugh, grabbing his chest and Quinn’s shoulder.

“It watch!” Quinn exclaimed, hopping back from me. “Death to me scared you!”

I rolled my eyes at him. But I said to Spastic, “Have you seen Piranha?”

Spastic shook his head. “Not since lunch. She just ran off, and I heard she got detention—again.”

I groaned to the ceiling. Reeling towards him, I seized Spastic by his bowtie. “Wispy is in the hospital.”

The color immediately washed out of Spastic’s face.

I shook him by his tie as I said, “Those girls went too far and—”

“Roddy!” Officer Johnson pushed through the crowd to get to me. “Not here!”

I whipped back to him to angrily give him what for, as I was furious no one seemed to care Wispy had nearly died. But when I saw his expression, I knew something was afoot that I did not understand. The cop’s eyes lifted above us. I followed his line of sight to that dark space. There I saw a death angel—one in a biker jacket chewing on a cigar. Spastic yelped, shrinking down. He shouted at the ceiling, “Stop following me!”

Then I understood. I looked to Spastic. He loved Wispy. Idolized her. She was his angel. What if he lost it like Piranha had? Piranha, for all I knew, did not know how bad it had been. Would he go full demon on everyone? He had no horns, but that did not mean he could not sprout any.

However, I said to Officer Johnson, “Where then?”

The dark-haired, haunted policeman beckoned to me—and to Spastic who was now following me for protection from the angel of death above us.

The others around us stared upward, trying to see what we could see. Their imps were shouting at them to call us psycho. Several listened—spouting that epithet at us. But one kid called to the cop and asked, “What do they see?”

“Death,” Officer Johnson said with no reservation at all.

Those around us hushed. The crowd parted for us, letting Spastic, me and Quinn also through.

Officer Johnson led us out to a side room where—with Quinn listening—I told Spastic as tactfully as I could that Wispy had been bullied to the point that she had attempted suicide.

Spastic paled. “Again?”

I felt sick. I felt all the blood wash from my face. “She’s tried it before?”

Cringing, nearly shrinking down, Spastic nodded. “Yeah. Piranha…” He shook his head. “We didn’t want to tell you. But Thug had—”

I let out a wild yowl. My hands clenched in painful fists. They knew? Spastic knew about what Thug had done to her?

Spastic grabbed me by my horns. “No, Roddy! Don’t do it! We don’t want you to go full demon!”

I stiffened, pulling back. That’s when I realized all the imps around us were screaming for me to have Thug killed. Make it look like an accident. Break his neck. Or, knives accidentally flying to stab him to death or