Bad Girl School

  Praise for BAD GIRL SCHOOL by YA novelist Red Q. Arthur

  “A laugh out loud, outrageously fun read … Reeno’s psychic friends add a colourful dynamic.”

  -LOST FOR WORDS

  “A cute, quick fantasy adventure that I would recommend for the younger readers … The adventurous plot is what kept me turning the pages.”

  -REX ROBOT REVIEWS

  “Red Q. Arthur—author of twenty adult mysteries, including New Orleans Mourning, which won the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Novel—delves into both the young adult and paranormal fiction worlds for the first time with [Bad Girl School] … the well-painted character of A.B. allows the reader to quickly lay aside disbelief and get behind this talking cat who has the most paramount of missions: saving the planet.”

  -FOREWORD REVIEWS

  BAD GIRL SCHOOL

  BY

  RED Q. ARTHUR

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  Bad Girl School

  Copyright © 2011 by Red Q. Arthur

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover by Kristen Ruth Smith

  eBook ISBN: 9781625173027

  Originally published by Bold Strokes Books.

  www.booksbnimble.com

  First booksBnimble electronic publication: November, 2013

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  CHAPTER ONE—FALL OF THE FINGERTON

  A.B. is a monster and a beast. Literally. He’s so self-important he actually calls himself the Alpha Beast. He’s meaner than Freddy Krueger and trickier than James Bond.

  He will do anything to get his way, and he gets away with it because he’s invisible. Sort of. Meaning you can see him, you just don’t notice him, which is why he’s so dangerous. “Who else,” he says (with glee, I might add), “has fangs and access to your neck at all times of the day and night?”

  Kind of chilling, isn’t it? And it’s true, LaRue. He can find you, he can get in your house, and he can take you out before you can spell c-a-t. He’ll enjoy it too. He’ll revel in it. He has neither mercy nor conscience.

  I ought to know. Despite his dirty tricks and snarky remarks, I count him among my dearest friends, which just shows you what a forgiving person I am. Besides, he’s the only assassin I’ve ever personally hung with.

  Before A.B., it was mostly burglars.

  This is because, before the beast destroyed my life on the night of my crew’s Big Hit, I was among the most accomplished teen-age burglars who ever lived.

  ***

  I remember confirming with Jace the night before the hit, the little flutter of excitement when I said, “Tomorrow. Seven sharp.”

  We were going in in twenty-two hours.

  Just as I clicked my cell phone shut, Mom poked her head in the laundry room, where I was folding clothes. “Forget it, Deb. Tomorrow’s a school night.”

  I played along. “Mom! It’s a study date. Jace and I have this big project due at the end of the week.”

  My sister’s voice floated through the open door. “Mom! Mom, my nose is bleeding.”

  Mom’s expression turned from irritated to frightened. I usually saw her as dirty ivory, but lately she’d been getting muddy, kind of grayish. I had no idea why I saw her that way, or why I saw colors around everyone, but I always had. Dad had once said something about “auras”, but not enough to make it make sense. Mostly what he’d wanted to convey was that I shouldn’t tell too many people I saw them.

  I noticed that whenever Haley bled, Mom’s gray deepened. That is, whenever she bled badly. The bleeding almost never stopped. Haley was nearly always leaking through her skin or bleeding internally, into her muscles and joints. She was only eighteen and had barely even been able to walk for two years.

  “I’m coming.” Mom blinked tears and headed for Haley’s room. Without a miracle, Haley was going to die soon. I was trying to make one happen for her.

  ***

  Tonight, Jace and Morgan and I were going to lift Michelle Zunger’s diamond studs and whatever else we found— cash, with any luck. All we ever took was cash and stuff like studs and gold chains, things lots of people had, that couldn’t be identified.

  We called this one the Big Hit, but for me, it was going to be a piece of cake. As it happens (she said modestly), I was, at a mere fifteen years of age, a near-professional.

  At seven sharp the next night, after I’d set the table and left a casserole in the oven for Mom and Dad and Haley, I heard a horn honking. Excellent. Perfect. My crew knew I demanded punctuality.

  I gave Curly a good-bye pat, told her I was sorry I couldn’t take her along, and ran down the driveway, dressed in black jeans and T-shirt, a cap in my backpack. This last bit was important, because my hair’s very distinctive.

  “Right on time,” I said. “Everything good?”

  Jace was sweating. “You really think we can unload those studs?”

  “Nervous, huh? You’re such a wimp!”

  Morgan said nothing, just drove.

  We parked in front of the Zunger house and waited for the family to leave. The school play was that night, and Michelle played the lead, so we knew they’d all be going. At seven-fifteen they came out, the four of them: Michelle, her sister, and their parents. Coast clear. We’d be counting our loot in ten minutes.

  The thing is, most burglaries take only about forty seconds— you could look it up. But this time, we could afford to take a little longer, because we knew they’d be gone awhile, and we knew for a fact there was no alarm on the house— Morgan had cased it on a sleepover.

  We did what we always do. Jace and I got out of the car, and Morgan parked around the corner, all three of us with cell phones in hand. We were a well-oiled machine if ever there was one. Jace started walking immediately, hiding behind a tree. I slipped like a shadow into the back yard and skinked to the back door. There were lights on in the house, but I didn’t worry about it. People think lights keep burglars away, but that means amateurs, which is not us. We’d cased this place outside and in. Morgan had drawn us diagrams and floor plans. I knew exactly what to do.

  I reached in my pocket for the picks Jace had lifted from his dad, easing the door open in seconds. I’d done it
before, last Sunday night while they were at church. Hadn’t gone in, just made sure I could.

  Right away, something felt weird. Kind of alive. Like maybe this wasn’t an empty house after all. And yet we’d seen everyone leave, so it had to be. Maybe they had a pet.

  I sneaked up the stairs, headed straight for the parents’ room to look for money, fingertoned fifty bucks— good haul!— and then skinked into Michelle’s lair. It was all pink and flowered, such a happy room, so unlike the one I shared with Haley, cluttered with blood-stained pressure bandages and medicines that didn’t work. It reminded me of the way it used to be at our house. For a moment, everything got all blurry.

  When I’d blinked away the tears, I opened Michelle’s jewelry box, which was in plain sight right on her dresser, and fingertoned the earrings, which I slipped into my pocket along with the cash. Perfect.

  Nothing to do now but skink back downstairs and out the door. But, as I crossed the threshold, I tripped over something, something I knew hadn’t been there before. A big, ugly orange cat. Oh, yeah, the pet— the live thing I’d sensed when I came in. It produced a completely hideous and utterly deafening yowl.

  Me, I fell flat on my face.

  I looked up in amazement, just in time to see the thing leap onto the windowsill and jump out the second story window. My first thought was, Oh no, I hope I haven’t killed it— no cat could survive that! My second was, I knew there’s a reason I hate cats. Because by that time, a person was yowling too, and it wasn’t Jace.

  Someone else was in the house!

  An old lady, by the sound of her. “Is somebody here?” she yelled, and she sounded scared out of her skin. I thought of my grandmother, how awful this would be if it happened to her, how terrified she’d feel. I wanted to go down there and tell the old lady everything was okay, but you know how that would have gone over.

  “I’m calling nine-one-one,” she hollered. And then there was a lot of commotion, and I heard her talking, her voice coming in little puffs. “I think… (gasp, breathe)… I’m okay, but I think there’s someone in my house. Okay, I’m going. I’m not hanging up.” And the lights went on in the stairwell.

  I was on my feet now, standing in the hall. When the place lit up like City Hall, I jumped back into Michelle’s room. But too late— the old lady saw me.

  “Omigod!” she yelled at the phone. “Omigod, I saw him. Yes, I’m out now. I’m okay.” But I didn’t hear the door close.

  My cell phone vibrated. “Jace!” I barked into it. “Somebody’s here.”

  “No kidding. An old lady in a wheelchair, with something in her lap.”

  “With what in her lap? A gun?”

  “I… gosh, Reeno, it could be. I’m too far away to tell.” His breath sounded a lot like the old lady’s. He was as scared as she was, and I was right behind them. “She turned the chair around and she’s looking at the house. Watching the stairs like a hawk.”

  Pretty brave old lady, I thought. I could barrel down and run past her, but not if she had a gun. I’d have to try the window. But first I had to think of my crew. “Jace, listen to me. Get out of there. Go! Now. And don’t go past the old lady. Call Morgan and tell her to drive around the block and pick you up at the far corner— not the one where we’re supposed to meet her.”

  “Reeno, no! What about you?”

  “I’ll go out the window.”

  The cat had done it— maybe I could. When I got there, I saw how he’d worked it— there was a tree there that a cat could probably reach in a leap. But I knew I couldn’t. I was trapped.

  I looked again, just to be sure, and I could have sworn that, just for a split-second, I saw him hanging upside down by his tail. Like a monkey.

  And then I had some kind of weird auditory hallucination. “Tough luck, girl-face,” some guy said. I mean some guy’s weird, British-sounding voice. Or something in my head.

  Definitely not the cat. As soon as I blinked, the hallucination vanished. When I looked down at the ground, the beast was there, staring up at me with big nasty eyes. The light from the house glinted off them, creating an eerie effect that unnerved me more than the sirens that now reached my ears, faint at first, then louder and louder.

  Panicked, I tried to find a place to hide, finally deciding on a bathroom hamper. Eewwww! Stinkerama. It smelled kind of like rotten cheese. But you don’t get to be a crime queen by being a wuss. I climbed in and covered up with Michelle’s dirty underwear, realizing too late that the hamper was really only a canvas bag that slipped onto a metal frame. It was definitely not meant to hold a human.

  Fortunately, it did, though— through a few minutes of calming the old lady, a thorough search of the downstairs, and a good gander at the parents’ and sister’s rooms. It held absolutely perfectly until the precise moment when heavy footsteps crossed into Michelle’s room, just across the hall from the bathroom.

  And all of a sudden, RRRRRIPPP. A sound like fabric tearing, really loud. And then a thud. Me hitting the floor. And then a soft “oof,” which I couldn’t contain.

  I could picture the cops looking at each other. A female voice said, “Dominick, I think we’ve found him,” and I abandoned hope. How many Dominicks could there be on the Santa Barbara police force?

  When he spoke, I knew it was the one I knew. “Put your hands up. Get them in plain sight.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, “I’ve got to get right side up first.” Once again, I pictured the officers, staring at each other in disbelief, thinking, a girl?

  “Officer Dominick, don’t shoot, okay? It’s just me, Deborah Dimond. I’m not armed, okay?”

  “Deborah?” I heard the amazement in his voice, and I felt kind of proud, thinking, How many tenth graders could have pulled this off? And then thinking, Uh… I didn’t pull it off. I am seriously busted.

  “Deborah, what on God’s green Earth are you doing here?” Frank Dominick was the same cop who’d popped me once before. Why do I have all the luck?

  I rose from the wrecked hamper like a cobra, thinking I must look pretty scary in my black cap and clothes (though of course I did have my hands up).

  But the female officer, far from shaking in her boots, was about to pop her bra she was laughing so hard. “Hey, Dominick, we got a fashion victim here.” To me, she said, “Honey-babe, check out your head.”

  I was seething over “honey-babe”, thinking how embarrassed she’d be if she knew her essence was baby blue, but I turned to the mirror anyway— and suffered the worst humiliation of my entire life. A pair of Michelle’s bikini panties had stuck to my baseball cap— pink ones! Oh. My. God.

  Dominick wasn’t even slightly amused. “Deborah, I am so disappointed I could cry.” Big six-foot cop with bags under his eyes and he’s talking about crying.

  I was the one who ended up actually doing it.

  But not right away. I did feel bad for Officer Dominick, and, well, for my parents. If this guy who wouldn’t even know me if he hadn’t arrested me could be disappointed, that was nothing to the way they were going to feel.

  Here’s the thing, though— it shouldn’t have happened. Just shouldn’t have. Wouldn’t have if it weren’t for that big orange furball (and a visiting grandma, but I couldn’t really blame the old lady). This is what went through my mind: Reeno the Crime Queen brought down by a stupid cat! Forced to hide in some sub-standard hamper with panties on her head. I was so mortified I lost my mind.

  I should have been devising a clever way to talk my way out of this. With fifty bucks, a pair of diamond studs, and a set of picks in my pocket, that was going to take some serious focus.

  But I was mainly furious at that ugly hairball. All I could say was, “Stupid cat got in my way.”

  “What cat?” the old lady said from downstairs, and for the first time I saw her sitting in her wheelchair, a great big soda bottle in her hand, full of Coke or something. That must have been what Jace thought was a gun. “We don’t have a cat.”

  “Big ugly orange one,�
�� I said. “Didn’t you hear him complain?”

  I saw the old lady shake her head, looking bewildered.

  “Deb,” said Dominick, “you are a piece of work, you know that?” And without another word, he handcuffed me and marched me out of there.

  Well, due to my parents’ position in the community, they were able to make a couple of phone calls and get me home by about midnight, but I might have been happier at Juvie. Mom was capital M mad. “Deborah Dimond,” she goes, “for God’s sake, what is wrong with you? You have everything you want and a family who loves you— why on Earth would you burglarize a house? I swear to God I don’t know what to do with a kid who acts like this. First that backpack thing, and then you come home with those horrible tattoos! I thought I’d never been so humiliated in my life, but that’s how much I knew.

  “Now this! Don’t you think this family already has enough trouble?”

  That hurt. We Dimonds had more than enough trouble; I was trying like hell to help, just in a slightly illegal way.

  Dad was like Dominick, all disappointed and down in the dumps.

  Mom wouldn’t stop. “I just can’t handle you any more. I’m going to have to find someone who can.”

  “Like who?”

  “You tell me. We tried therapy and that didn’t work. What do you think is next? What should we do with you?”

  Dad gave her this look like he knew but wouldn’t say, and I knew what he was thinking— that we’d be okay if we could just be normal, if Haley didn’t have a mysterious disease no one even knew how to diagnose, much less cure. If we didn’t live day and night with the threat of losing her.

  If Mom would agree to let her see some non-western doctors. If we had enough money to send her to this amazing hospital my dad found on the Internet. (Dad knew a lot about stuff like that— it was part of his job— and he was much more open to things than Mom.) The hospital was in Thailand, and they had specialists in oriental medicine as well as psychic practitioners and shamans, the very thought of which made Mom start yelling at the rest of us.