Free Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go by Dale E. Basye

pushed her gaping chest out.
    â€œNow, lasses, do any of ya know how a demon becomes a demon?”
    The girls looked at one another blankly. Marlo shrugged her shoulders as she stood beside her cleft teacher. A pudgy, cruel-looking girl with hairy knuckles answered. “Doing something really, really bad?”
    â€œWell, that’s a given,” Ms. Mallon replied. “Here, let me show you something.”
    Ms. Mallon carefully spread the opening in her chest wider, producing a few pops and tears. She reached her claws deep into her chest cavity, pried apart her withered lungs, shifted her prunelike heart, and revealed something so startling that even Marlo stifled a squeal. Inside Ms. Mallon was…a miniature Ms. Mallon. Not a wrinkled, demon shell…but a plain, plump human, with reddish-brown hair, ruddy cheeks, and a thin-lipped smirk. The miniature Ms. Mallon was like an extra internal organ, living just behind the withered heart, mostly just a head with a wasted, freakishly small body. All Marlo could do was chuckle. Her teacher was a huge, terrible candy bar with a living, nougatty center.
    â€œThat is, like,
so wrong,
” commented Bordeaux.
    â€œI assure you, broomstick, ’sno more wrong than havin’ liposuction on yer twelfth birthday,” the demon teacher replied. “What happens is, once yer down here long enough, yer body ‘forgets.’ Its mem’ry, which is all it really
is
at this point, fades away, slowly like, becomin’ less distinct, as if it were lost in a Londonderry fog. And so it begins to lose its struggle.”
    â€œWhat do you mean by ‘struggle’?” Marlo asked.
    â€œThe struggle between our inner and outer identities, luv,” Ms. Mallon replied. “The tension between who we are inside, and who we are on the outside. A demon isn’t some random, bloomin’ monster dreamed up by the Big Guy Downstairs. We’re simply people—granted, wicked
diabhals
sent to
ifreann
—turned inside out.”
    Lyon’s collagen-fattened lips gaped like a bigmouth bass out of water. “You’re telling me that, like…you were a person?”
    Ms. Mallon—both outwardly and inwardly—sneered. “Yes, wretched child. I was not unlike you, so very long ago.”
    Bordeaux snorted. “I
so
don’t think so.”
    â€œWell, I may ’a been a touch more…full-bodied than you—yer thinner than a French fry in a potato famine—but I had quite an infectious personality.”
    Bordeaux absentmindedly scratched several small red blotches that had just appeared on her lower neck.
    â€œYou can only conceal what’s in ya fer so long before all that was in is hangin’ out,” Ms. Mallon said.
    Lyon shook her carefully maintained mop of blond hair. “You sound like a bad fortune cookie. Look, I’m sorry you’re, like, a big, dried-up piece of rotten meat or whatever with a lady stuck inside, but whatever happened to you isn’t going to happen to me.” She sucked in her cheeks and put her bony hands on her nonexistent hips. “Besides, my daddy will get me out of here. He’s, like,
so
rich. He probably owns this place.”
    The teacher laughed, which made her useless internal organs jiggle disturbingly, then sat up stiffly.
    â€œMiss Fauster, would ya do me the honor of stitchin’ me back up? This is most uncomfortable, and yer the only one present I would trust with such a procedure.”
    Marlo looked around uncomfortably. “Um…sure.”
    As Marlo stepped up and took the needle from Ms. Mallon, she heard Lyon whisper to the rest of the girls. “Ooh, looks like Elvira is teacher’s gross new pet.”
    There’s something about a girl’s whisper that manages to slice through the air like a knife, arriving louder and sharper than a scream. Marlo had never, ever been considered anything remotely petlike in relation to