Memoirs of a Girl Wolf

by Lawrence, Xandra

  “Why?” I asked. I was seriously confused what the appeal of Petoskey, Michigan could be. Besides a hot summer spot because of the lake and a great gelato café, we didn’t have much to offer.

  He stared forward, concentrating on the back of a black Civic Honda. His mouth from side to side. I realized I had maybe asked something too personal because of how quickly his demeanor changed toward me not aggressive, but withdrawn.

  “I wanted to know the place better,” he said, finally and then he warmed up again and turned toward, adding, “And Hemingway wrote a lot about here.”

  I rolled my eyes. The English teachers at school always assigned Hemingway reading for this very reason.

  “If you like Hemingway, there’s a bar in town where he used to eat at,” I said.

  “Cool, we’ll go sometime,” he said.

  We’ll?

  The palms of my hands started sweating and my throat itched, dry. The warm air from the vents went from comforting to suffocating. I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so immediately I started overthinking. Do I show excitement but not too much excitement or should I ignore he said anything? My tongue felt swollen and verbalizing words impossible, so I leaned forward and turned up Johnny Cash instead.

  12.

  After dinner and my evening cup of tea, I fell asleep on the couch in the attic watching Eric and Josh play video games.

  When I woke up, it was late morning and I was in bed, but still in my clothes from the night before. I felt groggy and hot. I called to Mom, but looking at the clock beside my bed I realized she was probably at work and I became a little worried because school had started hours before.

  I was slow to get out of bed. Stretching, and groaning a little, I raised myself into a sitting position and rubbed my eyes. I felt sore all over, but finally I found the motivation to get out of my comfortable bed. I walked barefoot out of my room and down the hall until I came to a stop in front of the twin’s room. The door was wide open, but the room was dark and empty. Their beds were carelessly made and their radio hummed softly.

  The rest of the house was bright made so by the natural light beaming through tall windows. I squinted my eyes a little as I adjusted to the light and walked down the stair case to the living room which was just as empty as the upstairs. Once in the kitchen, I expected to find some type of note from Mom explaining why I was not woken up this morning for school, but all I found was the coffee pot, still on, but the coffee was burnt which I discovered after pouring myself a cup in a cracked novelty mug.

  I jumped, nearly dropping the mug, when I heard a rustling echoing from Mom’s room down the hall. The hair on the back of my neck rose. Taking a butcher knife with me, I silently, slowly walked down the hall and pressed open Mom’s bedroom door to find Mom asleep in her bed. She must have heard me open the door because she sat right up, looked at me, and then fell back onto the bed. She placed her hands over her face and groaned a little.

  “I don’t want to get up,” she said.

  I set the knife on top of the dresser by the door and jumped onto her bed.

  “Why are we home?” I asked, concerned.

  She slid her hands down her face and looked at me. “I thought you were sick.”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “Oh, good.” She lifted the white goose feather comforter for me to get under.

  “How did I get to bed last night?” I asked as I tried to remember my night but nothing came to mind.

  “I carried you,” Mom said, yawning.

  “Oh,” I said, still slightly confused, but this confusion was becoming normal for me. The headaches, the fatigue the confusing lapses in time. Mom said it was normal and just growing pains but Web MD said I had a brain tumor. I wanted to bring this up with her but I couldn’t at the moment because she turned on her side away from me and went back to sleep.

  I pushed the comforter off of me and left the room. After placing the knife back in its drawer in the kitchen, I made myself a fresh pot of coffee and I thought only of how disappointed I was to not be at school and with Reign.

  It was a bright, sunny, warm afternoon. Mom was not feeling well and stayed in bed all day except to pick my brothers up from school so once they returned I took them out of the house so that mom could be alone.

  We decided to fish off of our dock. I didn’t want to fish so I brought my book with me and sat at the end of the dock with my bare feet hanging over the cold water while my brothers stood behind me casting their fishing poles into the water.

  “Mickey!”

  I looked up from the black print of my book and there he was standing across the water from me, waving.

  Once I waved back, he jumped a little into the water as if he was going to swim over to me, but as soon as he jumped in he jumped back out surprised by how cold the water was despite it being a semi warm day.

  I laughed.

  “Come over,” he said, motioning at me with his arm.

  “What are you doing?” I yelled back. My brothers turned from where they fished taking an interest in the conversation.

  “We’re moving in.” He pointed behind him at a U-Haul truck and a group of men in black t-shirts carrying furniture into the newly restored house.

  I nodded and gave him a thumbs up.

  “Come over,” he said, again.

  I shook my head. “I can’t.”

  “She’s grounded,” Josh yelled over my head.

  I glared at him as my face turned red, but it was the truth. “I can’t leave the perimeters.”

  “Grounded,” he said in a sad, flat tone as his shoulders sunk.

  A gruff, deep voice called to him from inside the house and a dog started barking. He looked over his shoulder as the man with the full beard and aggressive posture came out of the house and to a stop. He stared at Reign with his hands in fists on his hips. He called to Reign again, “Come on, boy; get moving.”

  Reign waved at the man, but before turning from where he stood near the water he raised his voice to me again and said, “What are the perimeters?”

  “Our property,” Eric yelled.

  “Shut up,” I hissed.

  “Our house, woods and water,” Josh added.

  “We don’t own all the woods or water,” I told my brothers but when I turned back toward Reign to explain he was already gone retreated into his house.

  I sighed.

  “Is that your boyfriend?” my brothers asked in a sing song voice.

  “I’m gonna push you into the water,” I threatened before returning to my book, but reading was difficult because the sing song voice of my brothers echoed in my mind.

  For dinner, I grilled chicken and asparagus. Mom was feeling better and shuffled out of her room in a robe and slippers just as I finished setting the table. She sat down and sighed before reaching for the plate of grilled chicken and serving herself then my brothers.

  “Are you feeling better?” I asked, taking a seat across from her.

  She brushed strands of her blonde hair out of her face with her fingers and smiled a relaxed smile. “I’m feeling fine. I just didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”

  “Oh, why not?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Just didn’t.”

  I narrowed my eyes as I studied her frame. She was avoiding my eye contact and instead focused on cutting the chicken breast in front of her into little pieces. She then turned to my brothers and asked them some more about school. She was being so weird lately and it was really starting to annoy me.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” Mom asked me.

  Before I had a chance to answer Josh said, “She’s thinking about her boyfriend.”

  Mom paused in mid-bite. She raised her eyebrows and looked at me.

  “He’s not my . . .” I started saying.

  “Who is he?” Mom asked.

  “The kid who lives over there,” Eric said, pointing behind us. We could see the house out the window and the dog, Phoebe, jumping around the yard.


  “Who is he?” Mom asked, again. She tilted her head and waited for me to reply.

  “Reign. His name is Reign,” I mumbled. I picked at my chicken and then remembered what Reign had told me. “You actually know them probably. It’s the family that lived there before. Well, except for his mom . . .”

  “The Meyers?” Mom asked, coughing in surprise.

  “I guess.” I wasn’t sure what his last name was.

  Mom set her fork down and folded her hands under her chin. She stared hard out the window as she processed this.

  “What happened to Mrs. Meyer?” I asked the question Mom hated. This was ranked with asking questions about Viktor. Mom never wanted to talk about the past she always said we should only live in the moment and look to the future.

  She also hated when I snooped around in business that wasn’t mine. Although I disagreed with her about snooping around about Viktor, if he was my dad then he was my business.

  “Oh, she died. It’s sad. I don’t want to talk about it,” Mom said. She stood from the table and picked up her plate though none of us were done with dinner.

  I wasn’t satisfied. Now that I knew Reign I felt closer to the information and I wanted to know more, so I picked up my own plate and followed her into the kitchen where we set our plates in the sink.

  “But how?” I asked.

  “Hmmm?” she mumbled as she turned on the sink faucet and started scrapping the left over chicken off the plates and into the trash.

  “How did she die?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” Mom said, but when she replied she had closed her eyes and her jaw tensed. She was lying.

  “How?’ I tried again.

  She dropped the plate in the sink and turned off the faucet. “Mickey, stop. I told you I didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t know how she died, okay,” Mom snapped at me.

  I nodded. I had upset her, so I wasn’t going to push it anymore. I turned to leave, but she caught me by my elbow. She looked at me with gentle eyes and a smile which meant she felt bad for snapping.

  “Are you dating Reign?”

  She said his name with so much familiarity that I felt she had known him.

  “No,” I said. I leaned against the counter and crossed my arms.

  “I remember him,” Mom said. Her back was to me as she handed me dishes to place in the dish washer.

  “You do?” I perked up a little.

  “Sure, he was about three when they left.”

  “Was he that old when his mom died?” I asked.

  “Mickey,” Mom sighed.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled as I set the last dish in the dishwasher.

  Mom walked over to me. “Mickey.”

  “I said sorry,” I replied.

  “You stacked the dishwasher wrong,” Mom said as she bent over the dishwasher and started re-arranging the dishes.

  Rolling my eyes, I started walking away again, but right before I left the kitchen I heard Mom say, “Just be careful around them. The Meyer’s. Daddy never liked them.”

  My face scrunched into a confused look, but she didn’t notice she was too busy fixing the dishwasher to her liking. I left the kitchen without a further explanation. I knew with how secretive Mom was that she probably wouldn’t have given me one anyway.

  13.

  I spent most of my school days hoping to run into him at my locker, at lunch, or in the hallway, but it seemed that because I wanted to see him he was suddenly impossible to find. I would go all day at school looking for him. If I didn’t see him at school, I would spend my afternoons at the end of the dock reading, but really my attention was focused on the house across from me and even though it was fixed up and lived in, it felt almost more abandoned than ever.

  I decided I was putting too much pressure on myself and the universe to run into him again, so I willed myself to breathe deeply and stop thinking about him or running into him and although it was difficult at first, I slowly transitioned from thoughts about his warm smile or funny accent to thoughts about my paper over Jane Eyre and my Geometry test at the end of the week. This proved to work because on the first Friday in October I found a note from him in my locker.

  I didn’t notice the folded piece of college ruled notebook paper until it fell out of my open locker and onto the scuffed linoleum floor. I left it at my feet for a few minutes thinking it fell from one of my folders and was only a scrap piece of paper or notes from one of my classes, but after I finished packing my bag for the weekend I bent down and picked up the paper and unfolded it. Right away, I read his name at the bottom of the paper. Holding the note to my chest, I looked up and down the hallway half expecting to see him, but all I saw were groups of students walking toward the glass doors with excitement that it was the weekend.

  I took a deep breath to calm my racing heart, and read his chicken scratch hand writing:

  If you still can’t leave the perimeters then meet me for lunch tomorrow at noon.

  Reign

  He had drawn a map of our houses and the woods. A big red X was marked in between our houses--a little closer to my log cabin about the place I had stopped with Max a couple months previous and leaned against the hemlock tree thinking he was going to kiss me.

  I hadn’t been in the woods since that night. Although I was excited about meeting Reign the next day and seeing what he had planned, I still became a little anxious and sweaty at the thought of going back into the woods. I couldn’t help but feel a little fear and in my mind I kept seeing myself jumped on by a ferocious animal. I rubbed my upper thigh where I thought I had been grotesquely bitten, but there was no scar or indication that anything had happened and the more I thought about that night the more I felt like maybe it was imagined. Maybe I just hit my head, but that fear I felt that night was a fear I still experienced when thinking back on the basement of Reign’s house, the skeleton of the animal, and the dark woods, but then I also thought about being carried home by the stranger and how safe I felt in the arms of the mystery man and the fear was soon replaced with a warm peaceful, comfort.

  Besides, I grew up in those woods. I was familiar with all the trails and the trees. I often played hide in seek with my brothers in the woods or went on long walks with Mom and as a family we would go cross country skiing, so I couldn’t avoid them forever. They were only a few feet from my house anyway. I had to “get back on the horse” as Mom always said and venturing into the woods in order to see Reign seemed like the perfect way to do it.

  When I walked out the doors of the school, I saw the Toyota waiting for me with Mom waving from the front seat. My brothers made faces at me from where they sat in the back Josh pressed his face against the window and stuck out his tongue. I bowed my head worried others could see how embarrassing my family was. I didn’t want to claim them as mine, but seeing the cheerleaders huddled together holding on to their pompoms as they waited to board a yellow bus to take them to Mackinaw City for a football game that night, I realized I didn’t care anymore. Didn’t care at all. I was done letting them have so much power over my feelings. All I needed was myself, my books, and at least one friend, Reign. I raised my head and proudly walked over to the Toyota. Before getting into the car, I tapped on the window and stuck my tongue out at my brothers. They laughed while Mom shook her head, disapprovingly.

  As soon I slid into the passenger seat and dropped my bag to the floor, Mom started asking how my day was and when I didn’t bother expanding past, “fine” she started telling us how her day was. She spoke fast and with some excitement although we found her day to be completely boring, so I didn’t pay attention and instead I made note to scan the student parking lot as we drove past it for Reign’s red truck, but I didn’t see it. He hadn’t offered me a ride again since that rainy day.

  When we got home, I helped Mom carry in some groceries and put them away. My brothers wanted to be entertained and Mom suggested I be the one to entertain them while she prepped dinner, so I found a deck of Phase 10 and we took a couple flee
ce blankets with us and sprawled out on the back deck.

  It was a clear, crisp, sunny fall afternoon. The autumn leaves were alive with color and lit up the woods in a blaze. I breathed in deep gulps of fresh air and listened to the methodic lapping of the waves of the pond and smiled.

  “What are you so happy about?” Josh asked.

  I shrugged, but every so often my attention moved from the card game to the white house across the pond. Almost all the lights of the house were out, except one. The upstairs right window emitted a yellow light. I wondered if that was his room. From where I sat on my deck, I could see the side profile of the house and I noticed that the man, Reign’s father, was sitting on the front porch cleaning a gun with a soiled black rag and then just like he had done before he turned his head from the gun in his lap and looked right at me. Right into my eyes causing me to become paralyzed with fear and shame for being caught staring and it took me a delayed second to avert my eyes. I dipped my head and allowed for my red hair to fall over my face shielding me from his glare.

  “How does he keep doing that?” I mumbled.

  Eric heard me and said, “I’m better than you,” as he laid down the phase of his cards before him with a smile.

  Mom called to us from inside which prompted my brothers to run into the house leaving me to pick up the card game and fleece blankets. As I gathered the cards, I looked back over at the house, quickly, and I noticed the man no longer on the porch and the upstairs light extinguished. Although the white house looked beautiful now, I was still trembling with fright when I left my back deck and entered the comfort of my own home with three blankets wrapped around me.

  Mom walked up to me and closed the back door behind me. She took the blankets from my shoulders and dropped them on the couch before putting an arm around me and commenting on how I felt cold. Her solution was to offer me a cup of tea.

  “I don’t want any more tea,” I said, pushing the steaming mug away from me.

  “No tea? You’ll like this one. It’s sweet,” she said.