Roommate from Hell: chaper 5 - Julie Steimle (speed reading book TXT) 📗

I was glad that nothing of consequence happened that evening, and when I awoke with the prospect of lunch with Hanz, I practically sprang from my bed.
I threw on my bathing suit with clothes for traveling over it, grabbed my surfboard, and ran into the hallway to at least give the pretense that I was going out like a normal human being. Mostly I did it because Star was awake, pretending to sleep, yet watching me through the cracks of her eyes. Imps did not shout things at people when they were truly asleep.
The moment I entered the elevator to go down I went invisible and immaterial, including the surfboard I was carrying. From there I flew out towards the beach. And since I had not spoken a word I was sure even Tabitha had not seen me.
So, when I returned from surfing, walking back up the steps as the elevator was full of people coming and going I had not expected much more than the usual groggy morning looks from anyone. Someone should have slapped me for being so stupid, since I should have known Tabitha would not have given up.
The second I walked from the showers, wrapped in a towel, I felt a cold finger swipe across my back in a circle, drawing something over my two birthmarks. It stung instantly as I heard the words, “seal and bind” in a command. The next second, I felt the heaviest, most painful, burning sensation that I have ever experienced in my life.
I cried out, jerking away from my attacker though whipping around to face her.
Tabitha stood there with a triumphant expression on her face. In her left hand was a caramel colored bottle of something. Her right hand was still balled up with her pointer finger out. “Demon. Take that.”
Take that? What a vindictive little—
The burn increased to searing hot.
I howled. The pain was too much. Reaching back to scrape off whatever she put on my back, I dug in with my fingernails—so much that I could smell my blood dripping from the gouges I made. But the burning would not stop.
“What did you do?” Shouting at Tabitha, one of the girls ran up to me.
Another pushed my fingers from my own back, dabbing the scratches with her washcloth.
I fell to my knees, watching the blood from my fingertips drop to the ground in a stupor of horror at what I had done to myself. I had practically used my claws.
Raising my eyes to Tabitha’s face, I clenched my teeth. Her smug thin-lipped grin was too much. She nodded, ignoring the others in the showers that shouted at her, jostling her with shoves and some with threats.
The pain seared back again. The water from the washcloth burned off, dried it out.
“Get it off! Get it off!” I yowled, arching my back to push against the pressure the binding spell Tabitha set there. By then I didn’t even care if my wings popped out if it got rid of the burning. However, my wings would not budge. I couldn’t get them out.
“It’s ok,” one of the girls said to me. “We can wash it off.”
All together, they dragged me into one of the shower stalls and turned on the water. Someone provided soap. Someone else scrubbed my back as I cried, feeling none of it ease the pain.
“Try cold water!” someone else shouted.
They turned off the hot. A freezing rain of water dumped over me. Steam rose on contact as the numbing shower cooled the burn.
“Oh my gosh, what did she put on you?”
“It looks like it must have been acid. Her skin is burned. Look at it.”
The cold water dribbled down my back and over my shoulders along my neck like a waterfall. I groaned, setting a hand to my head while staring through the strands of my hair at the girls who were helping me. They didn’t know me, and I didn’t know them really, but they stood around me like friends, shivering in the cold that I really could not feel except for the release from the searing hex mark.
They turned off the water and wrapped me in a towel while I just stared off into space. Already the burning sensation was returning, though slower while the cold water remained on my back. It was a witch’s spell. Tabitha had used a witch’s spell and cursed me, the idiot. No amount of water was going to cure it. I wondered if she knew she had dabbled in black magic.
“Are you ok?” someone asked me.
I looked up, shivering though it wasn’t from the cold. It was Lisa peering into my face, honest concern in her eyes as she peered at mine. My eyes must have been glazed because I certainly felt dazed and feverish.
“Oh my,” someone else said, though I couldn’t tell who. “She’s got orange eyes.”
Lisa sighed and looked around at the floor. “You lost a contact. I think it washed down the drain, Eve.”
“Orange eyes?” Tabitha echoed.
She was still there? What was her intent? To watch my demise? I balled my hands into fists, fighting the urge to scream at her.
“That proves she’s a demon! See? See?” I really hated her voice.
The burning came back more sharply. I moaned.
“That proves nothing!” I heard Lisa shout back. “Eve has a rare form of albinism! She showed us the first day she got here.”
“Are you ok?” Someone whispered to me.
I tried to nod, but it burned worse so I shook my head. “No. Maybe some ice….”
That girl hopped out of the bathroom to get some.
“She lied!” Tabitha screamed back at Lisa. “She’s like the undead! Look at her teeth! She’s practically vampire!”
Lisa set her hands onto her hips and growled. “You are nothing more than an bigoted pig! Just because she looks different doesn’t make her a monster!”
“You really have orange eyes?” another girl whispered near my ear.
I nodded, about to respond, but the dorm mother marched into the showers, set her hands on her hips and screamed at the entire room.
“What is going on here? You girls do realize that hazing is not allowed on this campus.”
Everyone looked up at her.
“This isn’t a hazing,” Lisa said, walking over to the dorm mother as she cast dark looks at Tabitha. “Tabbit Raines attacked my roommate and put something on her back that has hurt her.”
Our dorm mother turned to look at me. That was when our eyes met and I figured my life was over. Especially when she took a step back and, “Oh my heavens. Eve McAllister,” burst out of her lips.
I rose up, clenching the soaked towel around me as my back just killed, my one brown eye and one orange eye fixed on the woman who could ruin everything for me. “Darla O’Bradey. You’re our dorm mother?”
She nodded jerkily, her neck stiff in the way she always had held it when she looked at me. Darla was from Cliffcoast. She had been a senior when I was freshman in high school. She had also won Miss Lucky Clover that same year, a gorgeous blonde that rivaled Dawn in attitude and looks. Dawn was Miss Lucky Clover last year.
I watched Darla take her eyes from me, look to Tabitha then return her gaze on my soaked and pain-tortured figure. I heard her imps shouting to call me names like she had when we were growing up, but she thankfully remained silent. She heaved long drawn out sigh then gestured to both Tabitha and me. “You two, in my office. Now.”
My heart relaxed some. She was going to keep this private.
But Tabitha cringed, casting Darla a glare as she pointed at me like a child tattle-telling. “You know her?”
Darla fixed her glare on Tabitha.
“Are you possessed too?” Tabitha’s face contorted into disgust.
I watched Darla roll her eyes, casting me a small glance as I shrugged then cringed from the burn that still seared into the skin of my back. Darla said, “The only one who seems possessed right now is you, Ms. Raines. Just so you all know, Eve is from my hometown and I know more about her than you do. Now, the both of you in my office, now.”
There was no arguing with that. I only glanced at the towel I was wrapped in wishing I had clothes on.
“I’ll get you a bathrobe,” Lisa said. She hurried off even as Darla walked into the hall, passing one another. Darla gestured again for Tabitha and me to follow.
I followed. There was no point in arguing.
Tabitha glared at us both, hesitating.
Darla’s eyes narrowed into slits at her. “I said—”
“I know!” Tabitha dragged her feet behind us. She took three steps before I saw the other girls gather and push her out of the dorm bathroom.

The trip downstairs to Darla’s office was one I could never forget. Embarrassing, walking in nothing but a bath towel (though Lisa soon caught up with us and I was at last able to put on a robe), people stared, several giggling. And with a torrent of imp temptations to boot that suggested several humiliating things to do to us both, I felt like crawling into a hole and never coming out again. Luckily, Darla was like a bodyguard, protecting us from any actual fulfillment of such pranks allowing us to enter her office unscathed.
Darla pointed to two chairs. I sat down first, though when Tabitha took her seat she scooted it far from mine so it was on the opposite end of the room. The moment we were seated I half expected Darla to lecture at us both like we were kids, but instead she just turned to face Tabitha.
“Look, I know Eve is not human, ok? I know she’s got wings, orange eyes, and freaky teeth,” she said. “But you have got to stop this chaos you are making.”
“But—” Tabitha rose up in her seat, glancing to me with a horror that she was being targeted, and more that Darla really was going to let me, a demon, live there.
I sat back in my seat, realizing that I was either being ignored, or quite possibly held in reserve for a different lecture. After