wall.
“I’m waiting,” Jayden said.
“For?” Tiffany hissed.
“Think about it,” Jayden answered. “You’ve got five seconds.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tiffany finally whispered as she looked down at the legs of her pants. “Are you really going to make me wear these pants all day?”
“I am, and you can deal with your teammates when they get done cleaning up your mess.” Jayden turned around to find the other two members of her team giving Tiffany the stink eye. “The three of you are responsible for each other’s actions as well as your own. You are a team for the next eight weeks. If you don’t want to clean up after each other, I suggest you make sure that your teammates don’t make messes.”
If Elijah had ever had a doubt in his mind about Jayden, he didn’t anymore. He’d seen female drill sergeants who didn’t have that kind of spunk. When she sat back down, he leaned over and said, “Good job, there. You want my job?”
“No, thank you.” She nodded and went back to eating as if nothing had happened, but when the other two Daydream girls started trying to clean up the mess, she tapped her metal tray with a fork. “No!” she yelled across the room. “I said when everyone else has finished eating, you may clean that up. It will lay right there, leaving greasy spots and red stains until the dining room is cleared out. Then you may begin your job, and there will not be even the slightest sign of a stain when you are finished. Mary will give you some cleaning supplies, and when Tiffany and I finish feeding the hogs and washing out the bucket, she will drop down on her knees and help you.”
Carmella and Ashlyn sat back down.
“I’m waiting,” Jayden said.
“Yes, ma’am,” they said in unison.
Novalene chuckled under her breath. “Thank you. That set the precedent for all of us. I bet there’s not a girl in the place who doesn’t know to say yes, ma’am now.”
“Good job, Jayden,” Elijah whispered.
“Respect is the first thing they should learn, and they’ll be glad they did,” Jayden said out of the side of her mouth.
“I agree wholeheartedly.” Elijah finished off his dinner, picked up his tray, and made a wide sweep around all the food on the floor. He went outside and leaned against the porch post, like he always did on the first day of camp.
When Diana brought her girls out, she stopped and nodded to them. “Would you please introduce yourselves to Elijah, our drill instructor, so he can put faces with names?”
“Quinley McAdams.” A short girl took a step forward. She had dark curly hair that lay in ringlets to her shoulders and a tattoo on her shoulder of a sword with a rose on the end of the blade. According to what Elijah had read in the report, she was half-black. Her eyes were green with yellow flecks in them.
“Rita Standish.” She looked like she might be part Latina with dark-brown hair and dark-brown eyes that were nearly black. Too bad she couldn’t use that cold tone to cool the cabin she would be living in.
“Violet O’Hare,” the last one said. A skinny little white girl with stringy strawberry blonde hair and hazel eyes, she was the one who had been abused by her boyfriend and who had put him in the hospital when she got tired of it.
They were halfway across the lawn when Novalene brought her girls outside. She stopped on the porch just like Diana and said, “Step up here one at a time, and tell Elijah your name.”
“Bailey Morse.” She was almost as tall as Jayden. She tilted her chin up and looked down her nose at Elijah. The striking things about her were blue eyes the color of the summer sky and a round face full of freckles. Elijah would guess she had some Irish in her DNA. He also would put her at about twenty pounds overweight, which probably meant that she was cooking meth to sell, not use.
“Keelan Johnson.” Her pert little nose twitched like she really didn’t like what she smelled. Her dark hair was cut short. Like Bailey, she was multiracial, but in her case, she was half-Latina and half-black.
Elijah had studied the girls’ names and their crimes. Keelan also peddled drugs, but like with Bailey, he doubted that she used them.
“Lauren Fielding, and I already hate this place.” Her brown eyes locked with Elijah’s and a cold chill chased up his spine. He’d never