Satan's Slumber Party-Chapter 4


Five hours later, David Rossi nearly fell into the jury rigged bed in his study, if one could call an old leather sofa a bed. He realized he had no one but himself to blame for his sleeping accommodation; he was the one who had insisted on sleeping on the same floor of the house as his daughter and her seven friends, but after a night of video games (and subsequent injuries), more giggling than he'd ever heard in his life and constantly refreshing the junk food he put out for said girls, he was exhausted and he looked forward to sleep.

As he lay his head on his pillow, he realized he could hear the girls talking in the other room…he could hear them clearly, as in, everything they were saying. Knowing that Katie probably wouldn't want him to overhear some of the things they were discussing, he almost put his pillow over his head to block out their voices, but at the last minute he decided not to. With everything that had happened over the past few months; finding out Erin was her real mother, Erin being a bitch to her and then suddenly wanting to have a relationship with her, the bone marrow transplant and Hailey dying, he wasn't one hundred percent sure how well she was handling all of it and he knew this was the one opportunity he would have to really hear how well she was coping; not only with what life had thrown her, but with life in general. Was it sneaky? Sure, but he doubted there was a father alive who wouldn't take advantage of a similar situation.

He stared at the ceiling and listened to the girls chatter. They were playing a game of 'truth or dare' but none of them seemed to be too daring and it had pretty much turned into a game of truth. The first thing they discussed were their current crushes.

"You know the new kid, Jeremy," Katie asked her friends, somewhat shyly.

"The one who is in the advanced math class?" Her friend Ashley asked.

Katie nodded, "I think he's really cute, plus he's funny and smart and he's really nice."

"Is that why he's been sitting at our lunch table?" Maddie asked with a grin; while they had all admitted to having various crushes on boys in their class, Katie was the only one who had actually done something about hers.

"Yeah, he looked lonely on his first day so I invited him to sit with me and then…"

"And then you thought he was hot, so you kept inviting him," her best friend Kayla finished.

Katie just nodded. "You should totally ask him out," another friend, Amanda, said.

"Um, hello? I'm only thirteen," Katie responded.

"So?" Amanda asked.

"I'm sorry, have you met my father? The guy who is so protective, he's sleeping in a nearby room just in case anything happens? The man has at least two security systems wired to this house and he carries a gun, yet he wouldn't let us sleep down here alone," she pointed out. "There's no WAY he'll let me go out on a date right now. Heck, I'll be lucky to go on my first date before college!"

'She's got that right,' Dave thought from his position in the nearby room. Part of him was proud of his daughter for realizing that with her young age came certain restrictions but a bigger part of him was horrified that she felt as strongly as she did about a boy in her class. When the hell had THAT happened? Shouldn't she still be playing with dolls and watching cartoons? What happened to the days when she thought boys were yucky? What happened to the daddy's girl who wanted to marry him when she grew up?

He'd hoped to have more time before he had to even acknowledge his daughter's love life…at least until she was thirty, but here she was at thirteen making the moves on a guy. Sure, the moves were subtle, but they were still moves none the less! And he knew this was just the tip of the iceberg. Soon she would want to start dating in groups and then came the school dances and then finally she'd go off with a guy for god knew how log and he would only have a vague clue as to where she was. Nope, not gonna happen, not on his watch. There was no way in HELL that she would go on her first date, group or alone, before she was sixteen and if he had his way, it would be longer.

Before he could work himself into too much of a tizzy, he heard the girls change the topic in the living room. Now they were on to their most embarrassing stories. He heard trauma about boys and periods and siblings, but when it came to Katie's turn, he took a starring role in the story.

"Come on Rossi," Rachel said. "It's your turn."

"Really?" Katie asked sarcastically. "How can my story possibly compare to Missy's experience of getting her period full on while wearing white pants?"

"Yeah, we all know that's horrible, but I'm willing to bet you have one that can compare."

"Weeeellll," she hemmed and hawed as she turned bright red.

"You do!" Rachel insisted. "Now come on, we all told ours!"

"Okay," she agreed and then took a deep breath. "You know how my friend and pseudo-older sister Hailey died a few months ago?" She saw sympathetic nods from everyone. "Well, before school started, she was the one who took me out to get new bras and panties and stuff."

"Mmm hmm," Rachel encouraged when Katie seemed to stop her story.

The youngest Rossi took another breath and continued. "Anyway, a few weeks after she died, I had put a load of laundry in the washing machine but I hadn't started it yet, I wanted to wait until after I'd showered before starting it so the water pressure wouldn't be all messed up while I was washing up. As I was taking my shower, my dad started the washing machine and he accidentally put the water setting at hot/hot…and all four of my bras were in there."

"Did they shrink?" Amanda asked as she stretched out in her sleeping bag.

"Yup, your five year old sister could've worn them," Katie told her. "So I needed new ones but I didn't have a woman to take me shopping."

"What about your bio mom?" Maddie asked.

"She was still being a total bitch to me at that point," Katie said in a low voice; she knew her dad hated when she swore but there was no other word that would've described Erin's behavior at that time. "So after I stopped screaming about my ruined clothes, dad promised to take me shopping for new ones. When I told him that all of my bras were in the laundry load he'd ruined, he turned red, thought for a moment and told me he'd take me anyway."

"Oh God, I would die if my dad ever took me shopping for new bras!" Kayla said in a high pitched voice.

"It gets worse," Katie assured them and from his position in the study, Dave frowned. He thought he'd been pretty cool during that particular shopping trip. He'd tried to make it like any other outing to the mall, but apparently he'd screwed it up if she was recounting it as one of her most embarrassing moments. He listened as his daughter continued.

"The next day dad picked me up after school and took me to the mall. We went to the usual stores like the Gap, Forever 21 and Old Navy to replace the clothes he'd shrunk and then, instead of going to Victoria's Secret, he dragged me to Nordstrom's, where the shoppers were about seventy years old and the salespeople were eighty! We went up to the lingerie department and he beelined it to one of the elderly sales associates and told her that I needed a bunch of new bras. Well the saleslady asked me my size and I told her but she looked at me and told me that I was wearing the wrong size. Then she pulled out a measuring tape and proceeded to measure my bra size, right there in front of my dad, God and anyone else who happened to be around."

"No she didn't!" Three of the girls exclaimed loudly and then clapped their hands to their mouth. All of the girls waited a moment to see if their loudness would bring Dave into the room, but after a minute they figured he was still asleep.

"Yeah, she did," Katie continued. "After that, the saleswoman was okay; she asked me what colors I liked and helped me pick out a bunch of bras to try on, but my dad wouldn't shut up! He was right there with me while the lady was bringing over different kinds of bras and he would comment on them like he was helping me pick out a pair of jeans or something! I wanted to yell at him to back off, that I could do this part of the shopping trip on my own, but I was too embarrassed…I just wanted it to be over with. So I finally grabbed the bras she gave me and made my way to the fitting room. I thought that would be the end of it, but no, dad kept calling out from the doorway to the fitting room, asking me if they fit okay and if I needed a different cup size!"

"Good God," another girl, Jane, said with a shudder.

"I know! I wanted to die! I actually prayed for the ground to open up and swallow me whole! Anyway, I tried all of them on quickly, chose the most comfortable one and got a few in a couple of different colors. After that, dad paid for them and we finally left. He walked through the mall like nothing was wrong…like he hadn't just freaking traumatized me! My only saving grace was that no one I know shops at Nordstrom's, so I could still show my face at school."

"Still," Rachel said, shaking her head in horror. "That was rough! Even when I go shopping for bras and underpants with my mom, she makes it a discrete trip."

"I think my dad was trying to show me that shopping for girl stuff with him is no big deal," Katie told them, "But all he did was make it a million times worse."

From his position in the study, Dave shook his head in dismay as he listened to his daughter finish the bra shopping story; she was exactly right, he had tried to be 'cool' during that trip, he wanted her to know that just because she was a girl she didn't have to be ashamed or embarrassed about buying 'girl things.' He'd wanted her to feel like she could come to him about anything; that just because she didn't have a mother it didn't mean that they couldn't acknowledge the parts of her life that were unique because she was a girl. He'd obviously failed at that part.

He remembered that she'd been largely silent on the trip home that evening but when he asked her if anything was wrong, she'd just shaken her head and claimed a headache. Now he knew; now he knew that she'd been quiet because she'd been embarrassed. He wondered, with some unease, how many other times he'd scarred her psyche. As much as he wanted to be the cool…the nonchalant dad, he was going to talk to Garcia in the near future about taking over as the female mentor for his daughter. He would have sat in a guilty silence longer, but he heard the girls talking again and decided to pay attention.

"Jeez Katie, if he was like that about buying some bras, what was he like when you got your period?" Rachel asked.

Dave shuddered as he waited for her reply; God only knew how he might have screwed that up. To his surprise, he heard Katie say, "He was actually pretty cool about that." He gave a sigh of relief as he listened to her tell that story.

"I got it for the first time on a Thursday night; thankfully, before she died, Hailey had the 'becoming a woman' talk with me and she'd gotten me a supply of pads. All night I wondered whether I should tell him or not because, you know, it's not something you exactly broadcast, but I finally decided to let him in on it. The next day, after breakfast I told him and his reaction was…calm. He stared at the table for a minute and then looked up at me and said, 'atta girl!' Like he was congratulating me on some big achievement." Her friends all giggled at that and she continued. "Then he asked if I wanted to have a party to celebrate. I told him no, I definitely did not need a party to celebrate the occasion. I wondered where he got that from, but then I saw an article about those horrible 'period parties' moms sometimes throw for their daughters in one of my magazines and I assumed he'd thumbed through it and caught the same article."

Dave smiled from his room; that's exactly what had happened and, while it had sounded strange to him, he hadn't wanted to deny her a rite of passage.

"I thought it was all behind us after that but when I got home from school that day, I found a basket on my bed and in it was Midol, a heating pad and a bunch of candy bars."

"Awwww, that's so sweet!" Kayla said and the rest of the girls nodded their agreement.

"Do you ever miss having a mom?" Jane asked drowsily as she curled up in her sleeping bag.

Katie thought about that for a minute, and Dave anxiously awaited her response in his room. "No," she finally said. "I mean, I miss my mom, we were really close, but I don't miss just having a mom. Dad and I were close before my mom died and we got even closer after her death. Even with all of the hours he works and all of the times he goes out of town, I know I can go to him for anything; he's never let me down. Even after the whole 'bra buying' incident, I still love the big goof."

As soon as he heard his daughter say those words, a large grin stretched across Dave's face. All he had ever wanted her to know was that he would always be there for her, that she could come to him with anything and he would help her, no matter what and it seemed like she had learned that lesson. As he lay back down on his makeshift bed, he shoved the pillow over his head so he wouldn't hear any more of the girl talk in the other room; morning would come early and he knew he would have eight hungry teens clamoring for breakfast when it did.