City of Beasts

by Corrie Wang

  “Ta-da!” he says. “What do you think?”

  Behind them is an enormous aboveground swimming pool that is filled to the brim with only slightly murky water. Liyan and Su are watching from lawn chairs set up next to it.

  “You got me a pool,” I say, blinking back tears.

  Sway nods. “Less bodies. More pools.”

  “It’s filled with filtered rainwater,” Mouse says, “so it’s okay if we swallow it.”

  “And we won’t drown because everyone is here,” Hercules says.

  Mouse and Hercules are both in water wings. Simultaneously, they look to Liyan. She nods at them as if they’ve been over this many, many times already. Fear. It’s what my little mees have been left with. And who can blame them? But we’re all working on it. More than Sway or Reason or Su or me, Liyan runs our pack.

  The night we returned to the steam station, when we were finally alone, I apologized for doubting her. She apologized for not realizing what Majesty was up to. And we promised each other that to the best of our ability we would try to make the decent and good parts of Grand’s mission stick. With all our pronoun confusions, she’s the one who decided we all might as well be mees. (“Yeah, otherwise, we’re a bunch of fales,” Motor snorted.)

  Sway now describes us all solely with the neutral Mandarin pronoun. Ta. It’ll take me some time to get used to saying, but I think it’s perfect. No more him. Her. His. Its. He. She. Just ta. We are all male and fee and something altogether different and new.

  We are our own fresh start.

  “Don’t you like it?” Reason asks as my smile leaves me again.

  My first thought on seeing the pool was that Grand would love this. I try to shake off my gloom. Looking at Motor’s pudgy belly makes it easier.

  “I do. I only feel bad for how soaked you’re about to get. Suze? Ready, aim, fire?”

  Su looks up from her book—she is never without a book now—and smiles brightly. “Oh bump yes,” she says, tossing her book aside.

  And then she and I run at the pool, spring up, and cannonball into it. The water is practically hot. I come up, gasping. My broken arm didn’t like that, but it’s worth it to hear the males squeal and see them dripping wet.

  Mouse and Hercules need no further convincing. Within seconds, they are up the ladder and flinging themselves into the water. They come up coughing. Hercules immediately paddles over to Su. They rub noses. Motor tentatively clings to the ladder, looking at the water with displeasure, but then carefully lowers himself in and stands clinging to the wall.

  “This is fun,” he says. “It’s like bathing in sweat.”

  Suddenly, he’s five feet in the air. Reason has slipped into the pool and now has Motor lifted above his head. Mastodon, Carrot, and Eggnog, along with Lucky and the rest of the pack, run around the outside barking.

  “Don’t do—” Motor shouts just as Reason dunks him beneath the water.

  Motor comes up sputtering, then lurches toward Reason. “Do it again!”

  Mouse swims over and clings to Reason’s back, not wanting to go underwater but not wanting to miss out on the action. Breaker, meanwhile, sits on the edge of the pool holding as many puppies as he can fit in his arms, one corner of his mouth upturned. Despite the fact I constantly tell him he can live out loud now, he remains the most reserved of my mees.

  “Feeling things here,” he’s said, putting a hand over his heart, “still just feels right.”

  But now he’s giggling with the rest of them, like children. Because they are.

  Declaring that he can’t get his stitches wet, Sway lies on the blanket with Liyan. In the last month, his hair has grown out. She puts it into a mini-topknot. Then kisses the side of his head. His smile is pure joy.

  “Oh bump no,” Comma says. “I am not about getting dunked. Auntie Liyan, scoot over.”

  “Don’t be such a goit,” I call out, splashing him with water.

  Then we’re all splashing Comma, until he gets angry and grabs his clothes and stomps away. His tiny tush makes me laugh. I shout after him, “Queue up season five.”

  He holds a thumbs-up above his head.

  “I love you, my mees,” I shout, only to immediately receive a faceful of water from multiple directions.

  Laughing, I look at all the paperclip necklaces on this noisy, boisterous, chaotic family of mine. And I can’t help thinking how right my grand was. Our power is our own. But when I repeat this to my pack every night after I read to them, kiss them, and wish them sweet dreams, I change it a little bit.

  Together our power is our own. Now go do something great with it.

  The End-ish

  My first draft of City of Beasts was completed back in 2009. After reading a handful of articles about how we raise boys and girls differently and how that adversely affects us all later in life, I wondered what girls could and would be like if we were raised entirely separately. Daydreaming about how this might realistically happen—nuclear war, obviously—and I was off and running. Ten years later, with hundreds of revisions under my belt, plus my debut novel out in the world, City of Beasts came to fruition. They say writing a book is torture. They do not lie. And yet I am still reading articles about how girls are raised to be perfect instead of brave.

  First and foremost, thank you, Mom. You’ve read almost as many versions of this book as I’ve written, each time with great enthusiasm. I couldn’t have done this without your cheerleading. Eternal gratitude to my editor, Kieran Viola, who had the courage to say “How about one more round?” when she knew I was fried. I am incredibly proud of this book because you made me do the work. To my agent, Sarah Burnes, for saying “This is the one!” And to my Hollywood agent, Mary Pender, who, as Glori would say, is very everything and tough as nails besides. Thank you to my foreign publishers and my entire Disney team, especially Mary Mudd for the extra eyes, Vanessa Moody for the killer tagline and all the copy editors who made this book make sense.

  Thank you to Naoko Howard, Debbie Michiko Florence, and Debbie’s mama for checking my Japanese. Kelly Cycon for setting up my labs. To the MIT Review for all the inspiration. And again to my mom for all the research field trips and her last-minute eyes that caught so much.

  City of Beasts is my love letter to my hometown of Buffalo, New York. While it is now being picked as an optimal place to survive climate change, I’ve always thought Buffalo was the best place in the world to grow up. We are a hardy, proud, and friendly lot. I’m sorry I decimated 99 percent percent of your population. To my Charlestonian mob. All you Short Grain and Jackrabbit Filly supporters, plus our community of chefs, servers, managers, bartenders, dishwashers, farmers, vendors…my people. I am unbelievably lucky that there are too many of you to name. But your encouragement and your faces and the fact that so many of you bought my book, means the world to me. Let’s celebrate!

  Massive thanks to Jonathan Sanchez and everyone at Blue Bicycle Books for the prodigious support. Also, to the women of both the Itinerate Literate bookstore in Park Circle and Rust Belt Books in Buffalo, samesies.

  Broadly, thank you to the NYPL, the BPL, and the CCPL for keeping me so well read and to all the librarians, teachers, booksellers, and festival coordinators who have read my work and passed it along. Y’all are THE BEST. Much love to Notre Dame Preparatory School in Baltimore. Sometimes you form immediate connections with people—in this instance I bonded with an entire school. Many thanks to Emily McCaffery for making that happen.

  To Dhonielle Clayton, Britta Lundin, Danielle Paige, Sara Shepard, Kinsey Gidick, Jen Choi, and all the other writers who have made me feel human in such an extraterrestrial world. Special thanks to Ryan Graudin for her friendship and especially for that last-minute read.

  To everyone in my family, especially my sister Annie, who loved this book from draft one and made me keep that ending. To my dad Bill for making life punny. My sister Amanda for all the beauty she puts into the world. To my in-laws for having our backs, always. To my sister in life and i
n law, Natalie, a true king amongst us, thanks for keeping me in the know, bruh. For my stepdad, Jim, who passed away suddenly during the rewrites of this book. Thank you for a lifetime of support. You are missed. And because I truly can’t thank you enough, thanks Mama. You can do this.

  To my husband, Shuai. Thank you for enduring the sweeping highs of I finally did it to the frustrated tears of I’ll never get it right, especially when they were only hours apart. I will never know what I did to deserve you, but I am so very grateful you’re mine. Then. Now. Forever.

  And thanks to y’all, the readers. It’s such a privilege that I get to do this. I am eternally grateful.

  The future is fee, baby. Hear her roar.

  owns and operates Jackrabbit Filly, a friendly neighborhood restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina. She is passionate about libraries, recycling, and eating all the food, everywhere. Her previous novel,The Takedown, received much love from the New York Public Library and YALSA. She and her husband, Shuai, live in a cozy yellow house with their pups, Moose and Olive. You can find out very little about her at corriewang.com or on Instagram—if that’s even still a thing— @corrie_wang.