Howl (Howl #1)

by Jody Morse

  “I had a really good time last night. I know that we said we would go out again really soon, but . . . now just isn’t the right time for me. Maybe in the future, though?” Luke asked, studying her face.

  “Oh, umm,” Samara searched for the right words, trying to hide her disappointment. “Yeah, okay.”

  “Thanks for being so cool about it,” Luke said apologetically. “I’ll see you around.” He gave her a small smile before walking away.

  Samara knew that she wasn’t going to cry over this. They had only gone on one date, and to be technical, it was barely even a date. Still, at the end of the night, he had kissed her. Why did he kiss her and suggest that they should go out again sometime soon if that wasn’t what he was really planning on doing? It made no sense.

  Maybe he had already met someone who he liked better since last night. Or maybe she had been wrong, and she hadn’t looked good enough for him. Maybe Luke wasn’t into curly hair. She probably should have let Emma use the flat iron to straighten it instead.

  Samara hadn’t expected this type of rejection to hurt so badly, but she really didn’t have much experience in the love department. In fact, Luke was the first guy who had ever taken her out on a date. Part of that was because her parents were so overprotective and didn’t want her dating until she was eighteen, but it was also because she hadn’t found a guy who she liked enough to bend the rules for. Luke had been the first – and when they had played beer bong together at Emma’s house on the night of the party, he had seemed really into her. He was even nice enough to drink for her whenever a ball made it into their cup – maybe that was part of the problem. She wasn’t a big drinker, unlike the other girls in their class.

  Samara wasn’t sure what had changed since last night that would make him not want to go out with her again. She wondered if their kiss had been bad enough to scare him away, even though it had seemed really good at the time.

  “Hey, do you want to go shopping tonight?” Emma asked from behind her.

  “Umm, no, that’s okay,” Samara replied. “I think I’m just going to go home. I have a lot of homework to do tonight.”

  “Suit yourself,” Emma shrugged. “Ashley and Brielle are also coming. You’ll be the only one who’s left out.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Samara replied, slamming her locker door shut louder than she meant to and began walking down the hallway. Shopping had never been Samara’s favorite afterschool hobby, but she usually tagged along because she had nothing else to do. It was a lot better than going home after school and listening to her family argue with each other.

  Tonight, she just didn’t feel like being around anyone. Samara knew that she was going to be a Debbie Downer, so she was better off staying at home. Besides, it would give her time to mope around – and that was really what she needed tonight. She wasn’t sure why it bothered her so much, but Luke had really hurt her.

  *

  As she walked home from school, just thinking about Emma got on her nerves. It seemed like her best friend wanted her to be unhappy just because she was unhappy. Sighing, she realized that they had a lot in common at the moment. Luke didn’t really like either of them.

  When she walked through the front door, Seth was sitting on the couch. He looked up at her when she came into the living room.

  “Seth,” Samara said, trying to compose herself. She wanted to yell at him for hitting their father, but she knew that would just make him even angrier and he’d either end up getting violent towards her or run away again for who knew how long. “Were you at school today? I didn’t see you.”

  Seth shook his head, staring at the widescreen TV in front of him. It was turned off. “No.”

  “Where have you been for the past few days?” Samara asked, realizing immediately, judging from the way Seth shifted in his seat, that she had chosen the wrong words. “I mean…I’m not trying to intrude or anything. I was just wondering who you were staying with while you weren’t here. We all worry about you while you’re gone, you know.”

  Seth stared down at his shoes. “Just places.”

  “Seth, is everything okay?” Samara asked. “If you’re having problems at school or if something’s bothering you, you can always talk to me . . . or mom and dad. We’re all here for you, even though you might not believe it. We all care about you.”

  “I’m fine,” Seth muttered. Before Samara could say another word, her brother leapt up from the couch and stormed out of the living room. Moments later, she heard his bedroom door slam shut and the sound of rock music by a band who she wasn’t able (and didn’t want to be able) to identify being turned on.

  Sighing, Samara kicked off her shoes. She hated that her brother had suddenly become so angry. It wasn’t even just because he was constantly fighting with their parents. Samara also was beginning to feel shut out of his life, and she hated it. Years ago, they had been really close. When she was little and obsessed with The Lion King, Seth would pretend that he was Pumba and she was Timon. As they got older, they found that they had common interests. They both enjoyed being outdoors, and Samara didn’t mind kicking around a soccer ball with him as long as he promised to swim in the lake with her. She feared that they would never be that close again.

  Her mom thought that Seth was going to grow out of this “phase” that he was in, but Samara feared that it was only going to get progressively worse as time went on.

  As she grabbed a container of strawberry banana yogurt from the refrigerator, Samara looked out the kitchen window, and that’s when she saw it. A gray fluffy tail. The wolf turned around and stared her in the eye before running into the wooded forest that separated the McKinley’s house from Starlight Lake.

  Chapter 6

  ****

  “So, you definitely missed out on one amazing shopping trip!” Emma said excitedly when Samara answered her iPhone.

  “Maybe for a shopaholic,” Samara said sarcastically, thinking about how Emma, Ashley, and Brielle all loved to shop. Having a Platinum card made their lives complete. Samara just didn’t understand the appeal of owning hundreds of pairs of shoes if you only ever wore one or two pairs on a regular basis.

  “What’s that?” Emma asked.

  “Nothing,” Samara replied, rolling over onto her side. “Look, I’m just not really in the mood to shop right now. I have other things on my mind.”

  Emma groaned loudly. “I think that you need to stop being so lame, Sam. You’re missing out on all of the fun things in life. Live it up a little. You’re only fifteen, ya know. There’s no reason you have to act like a grownup all the time.”

  Samara felt her annoyance rising. Emma had never given her a reason to believe that’s what she thought of her. Maybe their friendship had more problems than Samara had realized. “I just feel like I don’t have much in common with Ashley and Brielle,” Samara blurted. This was the first time she had admitted this to Emma or herself.

  “You never feel like you have much in common with any of the girls our age,” Emma snapped. “That’s why you have no friends.”

  Feeling the tears build up behind her eyes, Samara hit the end button on her cell phone. She didn’t need to deal with this, and between everything going on with Luke and her brother, she really didn’t want to right now. Samara needed a best friend who would be supportive of her, not criticize everything she does.

  Wrapping her white down comforter around her body and wiping away a lonely tear that skated its way down her cheek, Samara lost herself in her thoughts. At some point, she drifted off to sleep.

  *

  Samara felt her legs moving under her, carrying her faster than she had ever run before. She glanced around at her surroundings. She couldn’t tell where she was exactly, but it looked like somewhere tropical . . . maybe the rain forest or jungle.

  Samara heard a low roaring sound from behind her. Remembering that she had gotten attacked the last time she had heard a similar growling, Samara continued running.

  Even
as she ran as quickly as she could, the growling noise caught up with her.

  Samara wasn’t afraid anymore, though.

  Whirling around, she found herself standing face-to-face with an orange tiger, except it was browner than she had imagined one to be in real life. The tiger stared at her through its golden eyes, fluffing up its orange and black fur and licking its lips as it prepared for its attack.

  Before the tiger had the chance to come any closer to her, Samara reared on it, sinking her teeth into its wide neck. She watched as the blood poured from the wound she had caused, inhaling the scent of its flesh, as she devoured her prey.

  Samara jolted up in bed. Panting, she glanced around at the light purple walls and realized that she was still in her own bedroom. As real as the dream felt, she wasn’t in the jungle. Samara breathed a sigh of relief.

  She felt her stomach rumble. It was followed by a nauseating feeling that let her know that she was hungry. Glancing at the dolphin alarm clock on her nightstand, Samara realized that it was two o’clock in the morning. There was no way she was going to be able to hold off until she woke up for school at seven o’clock the next morning to eat breakfast.

  Clumsily climbing out of bed, Samara went downstairs and into the kitchen. She glanced into the fridge. There were leftover slices of extra cheese pizza, a tub of garlic hummus, and blocks of cheddar cheese that Samara liked to eat with crackers. Then, she spotted what she really wanted.

  Samara unsealed the plastic bag that the deli packed the roast beef in and began shoving slices into her mouth. The rich flavor of the juicy meat satisfied her palate, encouraging her to continue eating the roast beef until there was nothing left besides the plastic baggie.

  When there was no more roast beef left, she opened the refrigerator door again and pulled out another package. She stuffed piles of the round slices of pepperoni into her mouth until that, too, was gone.

  Tossing the empty deli packages into the garbage, Samara licked her fingers clean and thought about what she had just done. She had eaten an entire pound of roast beef and probably a few ounces of pepperoni.

  Just thinking about the food that she had practically inhaled made her feel sick to her stomach.

  Samara had been a vegetarian for as long as she could remember. She was only a child when she had decided that she didn’t want to eat meat. Samara loved animals and after she saw Bambi, she knew that she didn’t want to be a meat eater. Ever since then, just the idea of eating meat sickened her.

  So, what was she doing? What had compelled her to come downstairs in the middle of the night and eat all of that meat? More importantly, why did she suddenly like – no, not like, love – the way it tasted?

  Samara didn’t know what was happening to her, but something strange was definitely going on. Something that really scared her.

  *

  Samara got up and changed into a pair of dark wash skinny jeans and a burgundy hooded sweatshirt for school the next morning. It was October in Pennsylvania and, although the air was crisp, it wasn’t cold enough for her to wear the blue plaid peacoat that she had bought on a recent shopping trip with Emma just yet.

  Thinking about Emma, Samara sighed. She knew that she was going to have to see her best friend in biology and literature today, and she really wasn’t looking forward to it. Emma was probably really angry that Samara had hung up on her, but Samara didn’t care. She wasn’t going to let Emma walk all over her when she had bigger things to deal with right now, things that she didn’t even fully understand herself.

  As she was getting ready to start walking to school, Samara glanced into her brother’s open bedroom door. Seth was still sleeping, which meant that he probably wasn’t going to school today. Samara wanted to open the door and tell him that if he kept missing days of school, there was no way he was going to graduate this year, but she knew that would just make him angry at her again. She wanted to tell her mom, too, but Mrs. McKinley obviously didn’t want to face Seth’s problems head on or she would have him see a counselor to help him cope with his anger problems.

  When Samara got to school, she didn’t head to her locker right away like she normally did. Instead, she ventured into the school’s cafeteria. She normally didn’t eat breakfast at school, though there were a few times she’d bought from the bagel cart when Emma thought it was the “cool” thing to do. Today, though, the aroma of the cafeteria filled her nostrils and she knew that she had to have breakfast.

  As she stood in the cafeteria line, Samara noticed the mess of brown hair in front of her.

  “Josh, hi!” Samara said. “I haven’t seen you in awhile.”

  “Hi, Sam,” Josh replied, looking up at her. She noticed that his eyes were bloodshot, as though he had been crying.

  “Is everything okay?” Samara asked. She felt tempted to ask him about Lilly, but it seemed like a really bad idea. Samara and Josh had known each other for a long time and she knew a lot about him, but they weren’t that close lately. She wasn’t even sure if she could consider him an acquaintance right now. Samara still hadn’t hung out with Kyle lately, so she hadn’t really had the opportunity to see Josh except for around school and at parties.

  Josh shrugged and looked around nervously. Samara immediately understood why. She could feel everyone’s eyes on him, judging him. They were probably whispering about how he was involved with Samara while his girlfriend was missing at the moment. “I guess . . . I’m just waiting for a cop to walk through this door any moment now and arrest me,” Josh replied.

  “Why?” Samara gasped, deciding to pretend that she hadn’t already heard that it could happen.

  “I’m sure that you’ve heard about what happened to Lilly,” Josh replied. “Well, not that anyone really knows what happened yet . . . just that she’s gone.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Samara replied, a sympathetic tone in her voice. “So, you think you’re going to get arrested? Did you do anything?” she asked, trying to get him to open up about it. Samara knew that he wasn’t guilty. If he were to break down and admit right now that he was responsible for whatever happened, she would be really surprised.

  Josh looked up at her and glared. “Of course I didn’t do it. She was my girlfriend. I love her. It pisses me off . . . it pisses me off that people would even think that I could do something like – like that to her,” he stuttered, his voice cracking. “I say I love her because I know she’s still alive . . . somewhere.”

  “Well, what happened that night? Did Lilly say anything that might help the police figure out where she could be?” Samara asked.

  “No, she didn’t say anything weird. We just spent the night together, and I dropped her off at her house. I waited until she went inside before I pulled out of the driveway. Whatever happened, it must have been later that night,” Josh replied.

  Samara followed him, grabbing a tray for herself. “I wonder what happened.”

  “You’re telling me,” Josh muttered, grabbing his tray of food from the lunch lady and placing it in front of the cashier to pay. “Thanks for talking to me. Everyone’s been pointing fingers at me all day.”

  “No problem,” Samara replied, beaming a smile at him. “See ya around, Josh.” She turned to the lunch lady who was impatiently waiting for her to tell her what she wanted.

  “I’ll have French toast and a side order of bacon. Actually, make that extra bacon,” Samara said. She realized that she hadn’t even thought about what she was ordering; it had just come naturally to her.

  As Samara took the tray and paid for her food, she decided that she wasn’t even going to try to pretend that she was a vegetarian anymore. Instead of throwing the bacon away like she normally would have done if it had accidentally ended up on her tray, she resisted the urge to start eating it as she paid. The bacon actually looked good, and Samara was really hungry. In fact, she couldn’t remember a time when she had ever been this hungry. Just the scent of the bacon made her mouth water.

  As she sat down at one of the cafeteria ta
bles, Samara spotted Emma’s blonde hair as she walked towards her.

  “Sam!” Emma sat down at the table. Immediately, she wrinkled her freckled nose. “Why are you eating cafeteria food?”

  “I was hungry,” Samara replied, shrugging.

  “Then why didn’t you just get a bagel?” Emma asked. “Bacon? Since when do you eat bacon?”

  Samara shrugged. “I don’t know, I need a change,” she replied, crunching on a piece of bacon. After tasting this bacon, Samara wasn’t sure how she had ever been satisfied eating vegetarian bacon all of these years. It didn’t have the same delicious meaty texture or the same bacony flavor that she was devouring right now. Vegetarian bacon tasted like carrots, but real bacon . . . real bacon tasted delicious. The old Samara might have hated it, but the new Samara loved it.

  “Samara, are you listening to me?” Emma snapped.

  “What?” Samara realized that she had been so hypnotized by the bacon that she had stopped paying attention to what Emma was saying.

  “What’s with you today?” Emma asked. “I wanted to know if you’re planning to come over to my house on Saturday night. My parents are going out of town, so I figured we would invite some people over.”

  Samara nodded. “I’ll come.” After she said it, she wondered why she had. Was she really in the mood to be around Emma? It didn’t really matter now that she had already said yes, though. Emma would never let her go back on her answer.

  “Luke’s coming to the party, by the way,” Emma said. “Just no making out in my bed, okay? I think it’s really creepy when everyone does that, so I always keep my door locked during parties, but you know where the key is.”

  Samara scoffed. “You don’t have to worry about that happening. I have a feeling it’s going to be really awkward for me and Luke to be in the same room with each other, let alone making out anywhere.”