Lunatic Fringe

by Allison Moon

  Brian spoke louder than necessary, his words slurred. “Those your friends?” he asked, nodding his head toward the Pack.

  Lexie nodded, uncomfortable with the audience he commanded. Duane watched the game like he wasn’t paying attention, but Lexie could feel him training an ear on the conversation.

  “So, I guess you are a dyke, then,” Brian said, stirring chuckles from his assembled frat brothers. Lexie was stunned silent. “You gonna stop shaving your pits now or something? Get all hairy and gross?” Brian goaded. “I mean, you’re just so pretty. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Lexie turned to leave, but Brian grabbed her arm, his fingers tight on her bicep. “No, no. Don’t be mad. I’m just joshin’.” He gave her a grin that Lexie suspected he trotted out whenever he needed to charm himself out of being an asshole. In this circumstance, though, it just looked studied. His teeth were too white and straight, his eyes showed no kindness. His whole face was a plasticine figure of false conviction.

  Lexie tried to shake him free, but his grip was implacable, as though his hand was a student in the arts of grasping and holding, of squeezing and remaining steadfastly attached. She knew that such a hold should hurt, but instead of the dull pain she would expect to feel, her arm throbbed with hot blood, her own pulse fighting back against his grip.

  “Don’t go,” he said clumsily, less a threat than a plea. “It’s cool. I just . . .” he sighed. “I mean, you’re cool.” He clumsily pulled her closer, yanking her arm in its socket. His breath was sweet and stale, like moldy bread.

  She jumped up a step to keep from tripping over the bench that separated them, slamming her shin into the metal in the process. With Brian’s hand digging into her skin, Lexie stood off-balance in the center of the group of Brian’s brothers. All of the boys were at least a head taller than she was, casting her into a well of shadow.

  Brian lowered his voice to breathy slur, “Those girls are fucked up. Seriously. I’ve heard some shit.” His eyes struggled to focus on Lexie’s face, which he pulled mere inches from his own. “They want us all dead or castrated.”

  Oh is that right? Lexie thought, though her mouth stayed frustratingly shut.

  “You’re just so nice,” Brian continued. “And they’re--they’re not. I’m just looking after you. Don’t, like, go over the edge. Don’t turn into . . . I dunno.” His veneer of perfection was cracking beneath his own drunkenness.

  “Let me go,” Lexie finally managed, jerking her arm in his grasp. Duane dropped his pretense and glanced over at them.

  “No, no, you don’t get it,” Brian whimpered. Duane buried his face in his hands. Lexie steeled her jaw.

  “Lexie,” Brian continued, under the close watch of his peers. “Don’t be a dyke, okay? I just, I wanna . . .” He yanked her closer to him; she could smell the coconut-scented gel in his hair, the rubbing alcohol in the deodorant he wore, and the eggs that he had for breakfast. His man-handling skewed her balance, with her weight resting on her right foot and her left pinned awkwardly underneath the bench below her. Lexie teetered, her elbow digging into his rib cage. The trees of men surrounded her.

  Her blood pumped hotter with each pulse. The tiny hairs on the back of her neck stood erect, and her muscles twitched with the anticipation of movement. It was a simple feeling stirring a simple act. Her was arm bent at forty-five degrees in Brian’s clumsy grip. She rotated her arm down past her chest, dislodging Brian’s hand by torqueing his wrist, and threw her weight into his sternum.

  “Get OFF me!” she shouted as she pushed him away. Brian fell back, barely catching himself on his feet as he seized his chest and coughed, sucking in a great mouthful of air. He sputtered, but couldn’t catch his breath. Lexie untwisted her foot and bounded down the bleachers, not looking back to see if Duane reacted.

  The third quarter had begun uneventfully, and the girls were silent when Lexie returned to the blanket. She sat and poured herself a tall glass of orange juice, craving sugar and familiarity to calm her surging adrenaline.

  She breathed hard, as if she had just finished a run. She looked up to see the Pack’s grinning faces.

  She gulped her orange juice. “You saw that?”

  “You bet we did,” Blythe said.

  “That was awesome!” Sharmalee cheered.

  “I’m really proud of you,” Blythe said.

  Lexie looked at them all askance. “For what?”

  “This is precisely how you have to handle these masculine threats,” Blythe said. “Men don’t understand words or rules. You have to be willing to take action.”

  Lexie shook her head. “He’s a jerk showing off for his frat brothers. That’s all,” she said, rubbing the red welt on her shin and noting how quickly it faded.

  “That’s not all,” Blythe said, dragging out the last word with a debutante’s lilt. “His behavior is a symptom of a much larger disease, Lexie. All men’s actions are contextualized by a history of violence. Brian and his brothers are constantly reinforcing an idea of ownership over women’s bodies when they grope you or overpower you.”

  Lexie sighed. “Whatever. I’m not exactly proud of what I just did.”

  Jenna smiled, handing her a fresh glass of champagne. “That’s fine. Just let us be proud for you, okay?”

  Lexie nodded, eager to move away from this conversation. Pride seemed like an inappropriate response to her own violence, though the Pack’s approval warmed her.

  “I think she’s ready,” Jenna said.

  Mitch nodded. “Yup, I agree.”

  “Ditto,” Corwin said.

  “Totally,” said Sharmalee.

  They all directed their eyes to Blythe, whose pink lips curved in a sly smile. “I hesitate to speak for Renee or Hazel, but I believe they’d be in agreement.”

  “Lexie,” she continued. “We’d like to share more of ourselves with you.”

  Lexie looked at the circle of eager faces, hoping to glean an explanation.

  “We perform an important service to the community,” Jenna whispered.

  “Renee could explain it best,” Sharmalee offered.

  “Excuse me?” Blythe said.

  “Whatever, Blythe. Just tell her,” Corwin said.

  “Lexie, we’ve enjoyed your company quite a lot the past couple of weeks. You’re bright, you’re clever, and you seem eager to learn more about us and our family,” Blythe said. “We’d like to share more of ourselves with you, if you’ll let us. Does that sound like something you’d appreciate?”

  Lexie smiled and shrugged, as flattered as she was confused.

  “We would like to take you on a hunt.” The sentence hung in the air as the stands erupted in cheers for yet another of Hazel’s killer shots.

  Lexie waited for more, but none came. “A hunt?” she asked. “For what?”

  “Wolves,” Blythe answered.

  Lexie looked at the faces of the other girls. Their shared eagerness confirmed Blythe’s story.

  “You mean like gray wolves? Or like the rare wolf wolves?”

  “Oh, we don’t hunt normal wolves,” Sharmalee said, shaking her head. “That would be terrible.”

  “Well yeah, I figured. But rares? You guys?” Lexie asked.

  “Um, yeah,” said Mitch. “What’s so weird about that?”

  “The rares take down at least two men a year. And those guys are usually heavily armed wilderness types. How would you do that? Why would you even try?”

  “Don’t you know the truth about them?” Sharmalee whispered.

  Lexie responded with confused silence.

  “They’re werewolves,” Mitch whispered.

  “What?”

  “The wolves that attack your classmates and neighbors are werewolves. Our Pack keeps them from overrunning everything,” Blythe said.

  “Barely,” Corwin muttered. Blythe shot her a stern look.

  “What, you mean like humans that change with the moon? Like ‘werewolf’ werewolves?” Lexie asked.

  The girls
nodded in unison.

  “And how do you do this?” Lexie asked, more amused than shocked, convinced that a punchline was coming soon.

  “Come to the house after sunset,” Blythe said. “Dress warm. Bring a weapon.”

  “I’ve lived in this area my whole life,” Lexie said, shaking her head.

  “Small towns keep the best secrets,” Blythe said, shrugging. “You don’t believe me, and I understand. It’s an unbelievable claim. But trust me, all the attacks you read about in the paper, all the girls that transfer or the boys that disappear, it’s all because of the wolves.”

  “Werewolves,” Lexie said, and Blythe nodded. “Who are they, then?”

  “Men from town, sired by an ancient pack of full-bloods.”

  Jenna shifted on her knees, “But they aren’t all townies.”

  “You’re saying the rare wolves are men, and the men are werewolves?” Lexie asked.

  Corwin nodded.

  “So then these ‘werewolves’ you’re hunting. You kill them?”

  The girls nodded.

  “Then you’re killing men, yeah?”

  “No way,” Corwin insisted. “These guys are monsters.”

  “But real monsters or just ‘bad guy’ monsters?” Lexie asked, glancing back to Brian and his frat buddies.

  “Is there a difference?” Mitch asked.

  “No difference,” Blythe said. “A monster is a monster, even if he’s wearing human skin. Or a varsity jacket,” she tipped her chin over to the bleachers, where the boys still whooped.

  “I don’t know. They may be nasty animals, but aside from eating a hunter every once in a while, they don’t seem to cause too much trouble,” Lexie shrugged.

  “Don’t be naive,” Blythe said. “The wolves may only kill a person or two every once in a while, but that doesn’t account for the runaways.”

  “This town sucks. That explains the runaways. I thought about it once or twice myself,” Lexie replied.

  “And those people whose names get buried in the back pages of the paper?” Jenna said.

  “Everyone knows meth’s a big problem around here,” Lexie shrugged.

  “Regardless of the maulings that get all the press, you have no idea what the werewolves are up to in human form,” Blythe asserted.

  “Like what?”

  The girls shifted quietly on the blanket and Blythe spoke. “Milton has the highest rates of rape, assault, and relationship violence out of all schools of comparable size. We have the highest transfer rate among women, as well as the second highest rate of expulsion of male students.”

  “You’re blaming werewolves for rape?”

  “You bet I am. Human males have a hard enough time controlling their primitive ids. Add a dose of the beast and they go feral. They need to be handled, and that’s where the Pack comes in.”

  “By killing them.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t know if I can support this.”

  “Well I suppose you don’t have to. But I thought more of you. I expected you to be capable of great things, of making great change. Renee said she saw it in you. I think we all did.”

  The girls nodded, and it was Lexie’s turn to shift uncomfortably.

  “It’s just hard to believe,” Lexie spoke, barely audible.

  Blythe nodded along with the rest of the Pack. “None of it seems real until it happens to you. Come hunting with us tonight. You’ll see how real it can be.”

  Lexie looked into the expectant faces of her friends. She wanted to believe them and didn’t want to in equal measure. She considered the local mythology of her hometown and whether her neighbors could have been so wrong for so long, or worse, hiding the menacing secrets themselves. None of it made sense, but Lexie was too intrigued to back down, and too concerned with how the Pack viewed her to say no. Biting her tongue so hard that the taste of salt filled her mouth, she looked into Blythe’s blue eyes and nodded.

  Chapter 11

  Lexie’s breath clouded in the light of the waxing moon as she walked to the Den. The girls gathered in the backyard, circled around a small fire burning in the pit. Fog accumulated beneath the young trees at the edge of the property and beaded every surface with wetness.

  Hazel wore black and carried a length of rope around her shoulder. Renee, too, looked like a cat-burglar as she lubricated the spring mechanism on a crossbow. Lexie liked the look of that weapon; she had always wanted to learn use one, but her father suggested it was less humane than the clean efficacy of bullets. Jenna adjusted her gloves, a bowie knife strapped to her belt. Corwin slipped brass knuckles onto her thick fingers, squeezing them, testing their weight. Mitch dug through a dark canvas bag, sorting its inventory. All the girls wore dark hand-knit hats, gifts from the crafty Jenna no doubt. Sharmalee was the only one in street clothes. Nobody carried guns.

  Noting Lexie’s confusion, Corwin whispered, “She’s the lookout,”

  “Lookout for what?”

  Blythe emerged from the house in an army-green turtleneck, black leggings and sneakers. She wore a ski-mask rolled up on her forehead, looking like the queen on a chess set.

  The whole scene looked like posse theater, and Lexie had a fleeting moment of sympathy with Brian when he suggested they were all crazy.

  At the behest of some silent signal, the women began to move, darting through backyards and cutting across less-trafficked areas of campus.

  Lexie’s fingers grazed the hilt of her knife, secured on her right hip. She traced the engravings on the handle. Even in the cool night air, it felt warm in her hand. She wondered, briefly, if she should’ve brought her gun instead.

  “Um, the forest is that way,” Lexie suggested.

  “Someone grew some sass,” Renee replied, the first thing she said since Lexie’s arrival. Lexie bit her tongue.

  Blythe strode alongside them both. “Lexie, I’m going to need you to keep quiet and just watch for now, okay?”

  At the eastern edge of campus, the Pack hung a left and scurried up Moosejaw Avenue. The quiet street ended at a sad, neon “Open” sign clinging tenuously to the eaves of the Mill Tavern. Never patronized by students, it was a townie haunt. Tonight, though, it looked merely haunted. The gravel parking lot held two trucks, one of which didn’t look particularly eager to go anywhere, its tires buried in muddy divots.

  “Shit,” Blythe said, seemingly apropos of nothing. “We’re late.”

  “I’m on it,” Sharmalee said, removing her sweatshirt and handing it to Corwin. Blythe frowned.

  Corwin placed her open hand on Blythe’s shoulder, “We need a win, Blythe.”

  Renee hefted her crossbow, and Blythe sighed.

  Sharmalee kissed Corwin’s cheek and waved at the group. “Be right back.”

  ‘Right back’ ticked by, minute after tense minute. The women hid around the back of the tavern, while Lexie crouched with Renee in the shadows of the woods beyond. The tavern’s screen door swung open with a rusty squeal, and Sharmalee fell out of the bar with a huge man draped around her.

  “Always did prefer dots to feathers, if you know what I mean,” he said with the timbre of a grizzly bear. They laughed together: hers false, his oblivious. His heavy footsteps sounded across the planked porch and around the back of the tavern. The Pack waited.

  Lexie whispered to Renee, “What’s going on?”

  Renee brought his fingers to her lips, her eyes trained on the man and Sharmalee as they approached the corner around which the women hid. Before they got there, though, he threw his weight against Sharmalee, pushing her against the wall. The air escaped Sharmalee’s lungs with a muffled ‘ugh’ as he rammed his body onto hers. Sharmalee forced out a breathless “no.”

  On the echo of that denial, Renee barreled out of the woods. She leapt, her airborne body traversing a distance of at least twenty feet, landing heavily his shoulders. The man’s bulk collapsed beneath Renee’s like an empty aluminum can. The rest of the Pack ran from behind the tavern and set upo
n the downed man. Blythe drew back her leg and kicked him across the jaw, unleashing a stream blood from his mouth and nose. He growled and gurgled, drunk on booze and pain. Sharmalee leapt from the wall and dug her foot into the small of his back, holding him to the ground. The women worked fast. Jenna threw a black hood over his head while Hazel knotted the rope around his wrists. He tried to wrestle against his attackers, but the combination of pummeling and the hood reduced his struggles to flailing.

  Lexie ran to the Pack, but as she watched the girls beat the man bloody, she started to retreat. She stood in the yard, frozen in uncertainty. Her brain screamed, but her throat refused to follow suit. She was able only to watch the scene unfold as if in a dark dream.

  Blythe pulled the man to his feet. Hazel tied a rope lead around his neck, and Blythe yanked him into the forest like a reluctant dog. The Pack walked through the woods, pulling the man behind them and kicking him in the stomach every time he stumbled to his knees. He coughed and cried but did not speak.

  Lexie caught up with them, trailing Mitch.

  “Mitch,” she pleaded in a whisper. “What are we doing?”

  “Shh,” Mitch whispered back. “He can hear everything.”

  “But--”

  Mitch just shook his head. “Trust us.”

  The Pack stopped in the desolate north woods, not far from the Den’s backyard. The gibbous moon shone grey light on forest floor, casting long shadows against a cave, upon which stood a rusty iron door. Corwin opened the door, which protested with an ear-searing creak. Blythe pushed the bound man inside. The cave stank of urine, sweat, and blood. Lexie gagged as the odor hit her. The women filed in and Hazel lit a lantern. Blythe kicked the man in the stomach and he fell to his knees. The hood over his face puckered as his sucked in breath. He coughed and sputtered, gasping at the word “Please.”

  Lexie stood with her back pressed against the steel door, her knife’s sheathe digging into her hipbone. She wiped her sweaty hands on her jeans, watching the women’s faces.