Basil Instinct by Shelley Costa Read Free Book Online

whole quarterback thing.
    She stared at me and said she didn’t do it. I was about to have the blonde move on, when Renay added that she was sick of the crap from Mitchell and Slash and when were they going to grow the fuck up anyhow. At that, she yanked a toaster out of its socket and hurled it at a smirker with dreadlocks down to his scrawny ass who was perched three seats over from her—presumably Mitchell or Slash.
    In the next ten minutes, certain things became clear. Frederick Faust, Georgia Payne (the little blonde), Will Jaworski, and L’Shondra Washington were actual students at the Quaker Hills Career Center. Aspiring chefs, even , announced L’Shondra in her white caftan and bright blue headband, not like these CRIBS nut-job slackers . At which Frederick, Will, and L’Shondra all glared at the nut-job slackers.
    Georgia just stroked her neck ruminatively and gave me a look that said, Cribs will be Cribs . Which was when the fourth girl, a six-foot tall, 225-pound monument to late adolescence, what with her short dyed red hair separated into about a dozen ponytails sporting rubber bands with little grinning skulls, got to her size-12 feet.
    This was Corabeth Potts, and she was wearing a silver tube top that could gift-wrap a Michelin man, and short plaid shorts. As she turned to head over to the fallen toaster, it became clear the shorts were not doing the job, assuming the job was to cover the flesh. With high-cut legs, a good deal of Cora was open to inspection.
    And what was on view was a tattoo across her entire backside that looked like a very detailed inking of an action scene featuring Death Eaters from one of the later Harry Potter books. Only Corabeth must have had it done when she weighed considerably less, because now the Death Eaters and wizard kids all seemed to be sloping off the mountain of flesh in a kind of group disaster and disappearing toward the thighs.
    When I questioned Mitchell (dreadlocked smirker) and Slash (frighteningly normal-looking lad with buzzed brown hair and a T-shirt that declared I’m a Mess ), we settled the matter of the flung and fiery matches—them—and the definition of CRIBS, which apparently my cousin Choo Choo already knew. CRIBS stood for the Callowhill Residential Institute for Behavioral Success. Which obviously meant the Callowhill Residential Institute for Behavior Problems. Only the acronym for that wasn’t as good. The place had an “understanding” with Quaker Hills Career Center that resulted in the oldest CRIBS students being able to take some classes in exchange, I’d guess, for not burning the building down. Oh, they were going to burn the building down anyway; now, at least, maybe they’d land jobs in the prison kitchens.
    While I pondered punishment, while I pondered consequences, I tossed beautiful red, ripe tomatoes—the best of Kayla—to each of them and discovered a new problem. How would I ever teach this wild and sketchy group to slice a tomato properly if I wasn’t going to let them use knives?
    *   *   *
    When Landon had said in a sepulchral voice that No good can come of it , he might as well have been talking about my Basic Cooking Skills gig. But in just the first session with these seventeen-year-old sociopaths, I actually discovered the solution to the problem of additional help for Nonna’s big spread for the other set of maniacs presently in our lives.
    Georgia Payne actually knew how to wielda knife in no way that involved a felony in fifty states, and Corabeth Potts was surprisingly quick and graceful and seemed to pick up the rhythm of the kitchen. Slash and Mitchell failed tomato slicing—granted they were handicapped by the cheap plastic knives I dug out of a drawer for the two of them. I didn’t care.
    I was undecided on my approach to these two.
    I could Mother Teresa them. It might be the high road, but the high road was as littered with saps as the low road was littered with less likable saps.
    I could outtough