“Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” I was smug, my arms crossed.
“Yes it does. But you don’t leave your friends hanging. Everyone else left her. That wasn’t cool.”
“Marty, haven’t you noticed Coral has been using everyone else to hurt people?” What I really meant by that was me, but Marty didn’t need to hear that.
Marty stared at me. “Yeah. But everyone else isn’t worried about what other people think of her. Coral isn’t as sturdy. Coral needs friends.”
“Oh come on, Marty!” I wanted my friend back on my side. “You know, she likes Vince.” A low blow, using the Vince card, but I was angry.
Mr. Jackson walked back into the room without Coral. Marty leaned across the table and whispered, “I don’t care. Abby, you have nothing to fear from Coral.”
Marty was either super stupid, or super cool. She could be the ultimate dupe, or full of insight. I’d think that over.
There was some yelling outside. “I have to count them all!”
Mr. Jackson closed the door.
Viva la bloodless revolution.
Coral got detention.
Getting detention did not help her reputation with the law-abiding Wolcroft crowd. By the end of rice counting day, she had no minions. Students hate nothing more than extreme weird. Whether we admit it or not, we all worry about being too weird.
Teachers hate nothing more than students fighting authority. I started getting approving smiles from the teachers again, and students stopped pretending I was gum under the desks.
Before her detention began, Coral returned to the lunchroom to count more grains of rice before the teachers noticed. Most of the rice had been swept up, and she was insistent that they give it to her in a Ziploc bag, but she knew there was some behind the pop machine, and she’d pulled it away from the wall. Her eyes were red, her nose was raw, and she was jumpy, like she’d had too much coffee. She’d been in the office, and she was supposed to go to the library to serve her time, but she couldn’t stop counting rice.
I would have felt sorry for her if she had been the least bit nice to me this week. Marty’s words aside, I was not a dupe. “No hard feelings, Coral?”
“I hate you!”
“Come on,” I said, “I’m not going to roll over when you try to make my life a personal heck. If you throw down the gauntlet, I’m going to pick it up.” I had done it, solved the problem with no major violence and I had made Coral look like a whack job.
Coral turned her back on me and muttered numbers under her breath.
“You can’t come in here and make everyone do what you want. How did you do it anyway? To influence so many people, you’d have to use your…” Another aha moment in the life of Abigail Rath, monster hunter. I wandered around to face her and knelt beside her, counted ten grains of rice, and handed them to her. “Did you influence everyone with your blood?”
“Go away!”
“Chili day would have been perfect. Camouflage.”
Coral glared at me. “Stop it! If you know, why are you bothering me?”
So, Coral hypnotized a lunch lady, and then tampered with lunch. Eeuw. Where’s the Food and Drug Administration when you need them? “I’ll let you alone when you let Vince and Marty go,” I said.
Coral stood up, which cost her some effort. “For your information,” she said in a shaky voice, “Vince isn’t under my mind control.”
“Like you expect me to believe that.”
“Why don’t you ask William about Vince?” Coral crouched back down to the rice.
“No kidding?” I pinched up a grain of rice in my thumb and forefinger. It was a possibility. But William seemed like the nice sibling. One thing was certain, he sure didn’t like Vince. “We’ve got a movie tonight. I’ll check that out.”
“You stay away from my brother and my family.” Coral’s face was masked behind a curtain of her red hair. “I don’t think you should go on that date.”
“You wouldn’t, would you? And it’s not a date.”
Coral turned away from me. “Fine. I don’t care what happens to you. Go ahead and go.”
Was Coral trying to warn me? I was puzzled. “You know, Marty thinks you’re okay. Are you?”
Coral started crying in earnest, tiny ruby drops. “Don’t count my rice.”
I dropped the grain onto the floor and handed her a Kleenex from my backpack. “It’s all yours.”
Victory, I thought as I stepped out into the Friday sun, was supposed to feel sweeter than this.
CHAPTER TEN
The Green Eyed Monster
Mom and Dad thought we should still take William to the movies. We didn’t know what was up with William. It was a good opportunity to find out what his motivations were, and if Coral was telling the truth about William controlling Vince. Besides, William was kind of cute, and I’d been looking forward to this.
When the doorbell rang, I opened the door, and there he was. William didn’t have to try hard to look good, but he’d put on a tie, and had worked hard at making his hair look like he hadn’t worked hard on it. “Hi.”
“Good evening.” I tried to say it as much like Count Chocula as I could.
I looked behind him into the street. There were no extra cars in the shadows. “How did you get here?”
“I flew.”
Sure he did.
“Mom dropped me off, since your dad was driving.”
“Are you coming in?”
“Are you asking me in?”
Oookay, here was a good vampire test moment. “Nope.”
William laughed. “This is a monster movie thing, isn’t it?”
“Nope. This is the monster hunting thing.”
William stepped across the threshold. “So,” William rubbed his hands, “do I get to
