✅3️⃣ Treating the Babysitter [Camp NaNoWriMo July 2023]

1. A New Job

This chapter is dedicated to Alice. Thank you! This chapter was also written in an hour and a half, since the start of July. So please let me know if there are any mistakes.

"She's been a little problematic lately," the words repeated over and over in Adam Exley's head as he walked down the road to the Cartwright house. That was all Mrs Cartwright had been willing to tell him, and they were the words that would fill any babysitter's mind with fear.

Of course, when the baby in question was Lorelei, there was more than enough fear to go around. After Adam finished high school, he had been the last in a long line of sitters to discover that the younger Cartwright sister was literally the child from hell. She would do anything she could to make adults' lives uncomfortable, simply because she hated acknowledging that anybody was bigger than her. And Mrs Cartwright had played right into her daughter's mischief by providing potential babysitters with various refreshments laced with St Jeremy's Root. That was something that almost nobody knew how to deal with in this day and age. Under the influence of drug traditionally known to only the most trusted of the indigenous elders, they found themselves unable to disobey or even question Mrs Cartwright's injunction to give Lorelei their full attention and to take the job seriously.

Adam had been the one to finally tell Mrs Cartwright that the drug made babysitters obey her baby's demands as well. Lorelei had used it to do everything from making strict babysitters spank themselves to having some of them act like babies so that Lorelei could pretend to be the big one. He would have thought that after the evidence he had managed to provide of previous babysitters being humiliated, and of just some of the things that Lorelei had done by using the herb on her big sister, the woman would have taken a lot more care. There was no way Lorelei could ever get her hands on the special refreshments now; and Mrs Cartwright now knew that her baby was no angel.

But...

He was back from college for the summer, and just a week after returning to his parents' house, Adam had received a desperate text message from Mrs Cartwright. She said that nobody else could do the job. She said that she was desperate. She offered more money than most students could earn in a month of working evenings and weekends around their studies. And she said, several times, that Adam was the only one she trusted to get Lorelei under control.

Adam took a deep breath as the house came into sight. Even without the drugs to make things more complicated, he dreaded the thought of another battle of wits against Lorelei. She was young, but she had a weird kind of cunning, and she could be cruel without any kind of inhibitions. Of course, he had done what Mrs Cartwright asked and planned out a list of punishments that he could use to show her the error of her ways. The girl's mother was sure that humiliating her as she had tortured others was the right choice to make sure that she actually changed her mind; but he was still worried. About half of his plan consisted of things he knew he could never bring himself to actually do. It was too extreme, and there was no way he could hurt a child that much, no matter how much she deserved it. He wanted to try to reason with the girl, or to convince her that what she was doing wasn't fair.

Mrs Cartwright had been very insistent, though. She wanted him to make a plan that would build up gradually, to the point that Lorelei was utterly humiliated. She wanted her daughter to suffer until she regretted some of the things she had done. Adam couldn't even imagine what kind of antics could have justified that response, but he had enough experience of Lorelei to knew that it had to be something pretty serious. It had to be a big deal before Mrs Cartwright would even acknowledge that her little angel was fallible instead of blaming the older teens who had failed to rein in those behaviours.

Adam thought about the money again. It was a lot of money, and that was a big motive. But the size of the payment just confirmed what a difficult situation he was getting himself into.