Wicked Hungry

by Jacobs, Teddy

  Max meows at Josh softly, but keeps his distance, eyeing my friends and me.

  We leave my brother and his cat downstairs in the kitchen and let my mother work it out.

  Up in my room we check out some new comics Jonathan brought along while we listen to Enrique’s new mix CD.

  “Dude,” says Jonathan. “It’s a total disaster area in here.”

  “Yes,” Enrique says. “What do you call it? A minefield?”

  “Sorry,” I say. “I don’t clean up much.”

  “Well, it is your birthday,” Jonathan says. “You don’t have to clean up your room when it’s your birthday.”

  Enrique nods at this like Jonathan has just expressed some real wisdom. Jonathan is always saying wise things. Come to thing of it, he is kind of crafty like a fox.

  “Are we going to eat anytime soon?” Jonathan asks. “Because I’m starving. I eat like five times a day.”

  Enrique nods. “Me, too.”

  “Me three,” I say. “Good thing we’re teenagers, or I don’t know what people would think.”

  “My mother wants me to eat a lot,” Jonathan says. “But she still gets freaked out about how much I can put away.”

  “My mom doesn’t want me to eat meat,” I say. “But I can have as much of the vegetables as I want.”

  “And that fills you up?” Jonathan says, his eyebrow raised.

  “You’ve seen me snacking.”

  “Why don’t you just tell your mom?” Enrique asks. “She might understand.”

  I shake my head and Jonathan guffaws.

  “What?” Enrique asks. “What’s so funny?”

  “You think he should tell his mother?” Jonathan asks. “Dude, did you see how she was looking at us and sniffing? She would go ballistic.”

  “It was just an idea,” Enrique says.

  “It was an awful idea,” Jonathan says.

  “Let’s just drop it,” I say.

  From downstairs, I hear the bell ringing.

  I run down the stairs, jumping two at a time. And then I’m afraid to open the door.

  “Stanley?”

  My trembling hand grabs the handle, turns it, and pulls open the door.

  Karen is wearing a hoodie and shades, even though it’s already been full dark for at least fifteen minutes. Night comes quickly and early in New England.

  “Hi,” she says. “Are you going to invite me in?”

  I just stare at her for a moment.

  “I...I thought—”

  “Thought I wasn’t coming? I’m not happy with you, Stanley. I’m worried. But I haven’t meant to ignore you.”

  She stares at me waiting.

  “We missed you,” I say.

  “Yeah, long time no see,” Enrique says from behind me.

  Karen smiles a thin smile. In her arms is a baking sheet covered with aluminum foil. Cookies, if my nose does not deceive me, although I smell something else that is even more enticing. Maybe she’s just been to a restaurant, but I smell something meaty on her.

  “Can you see anything with those shades?” I ask her.

  She shrugs. “I guess I don’t need them now,” she says. “But better safe than sorry.”

  “Are you going to just stand there outside in the cold?” says Jonathan.

  “No one’s invited me in.”

  She stares at me expectantly.

  “Come on in,” I say.

  When Karen moves, she’s a blur. It’s amazing, and the transition is too fast to see. It’s as if suddenly she’s no longer on the step but inside, past us, without us even seeing her move. She’s gotten past me somehow without even touching me.

  She hands me the cookies and takes off the hoodie, revealing her long red hair. She pockets the shades. Did she always look this pale? There’s this burn on one cheek, and she must have caught me staring.

  “It’s nothing,” she says. “I got a little too much sun sitting in math class the other day.”

  “We haven’t seen you in school much,” says Jonathan.

  “They’re trying to fix my schedule so I have no classes with natural light. A whole schedule of classes without windows. Can you believe that?”

  We’re all quiet for a moment.

  But she breaks into a smile then, flashing white teeth. Her incisors look sharper and pointier than I remember. “Hey, this is a birthday party. Happy Birthday, Stanley.”

  And she bends down a little and kisses me.

  Her lips are cold; my face burns and tingles.

  I stand there like an idiot until Jonathan clears his throat. “Dude, we are going to eat, right? My sushi is getting cold.”

  I turn to look at him. “Right,” I say.

  “Hello? Earth to Stanley?” he says. “That’s a joke. Sushi is already cold.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  I shut the door.

  “Karen! You brought cookies,” my mother says.

  “Don’t worry, Mom, they’re vegetarian,” I say.

  My mom gives me the look. It’s a good thing it’s my birthday.

  “Are you all ready to eat?” my mother says, breaking the silence, and I remember to exhale.

  “I’ve made my chili,” she adds.

  “Great,” says Jonathan. “I love chili.”

  Enrique nods. “Nice and spicy.”

  “It really hits the spot,” Karen says, “especially on a cold night.”

  Now my mom is beaming. Sure they’re laying it on a bit thick, but why can’t I make my mom feel like this?

  All I can do is carry the sheet of Karen’s cookies into the kitchen. At least it’s my birthday. And even if Karen is mad about the vitamins, she still brought a gift. And she kissed me. On the cheek, but still. She touched me.

  Soon we’re all eating in the kitchen. My dad comes in to be social and says hello to everyone and then my parents leave my friends and me to eat.

  Karen and Enrique pass me bean tacos with a secret beef center and a small hamburger that Karen had concealed in her hoodie. I wolf it all down.

  With my stomach full of forbidden flesh, it’s a lot easier to concentrate on my mom’s chili. My parents turn off the already-dimmed lights and come in with the birthday cake with its fifteen candles. My little brother Josh is singing at the top of his lungs, holding his terrified cat in his arms, and I’m so happy and sated that I’m only a little ashamed to tell you that as my parents and friends and little brother sing me happy birthday, Stanley the teen werewolf weeps.

  As I blow out the candles I wish for just one thing, and a microsecond later, it comes true.

  Her cold hand makes mine tingle. A strange pricking tingle that grows up my arm to my face, like a thorny climbing rose covered with cold, burning thorns. The pricking, tingling cold runs down my face to my chest, to my legs and feet. I burn as hot as a sun; my vision goes red, and I can’t smell the candles, can’t smell anything—

  Anything but the roses, gloriously red.

  Blood red.

  Chapter 15: BACK ON TRACK

  I meet Enrique after school at my locker. They’re having cross-country tryouts. He smiles at me. “How does it feel to be fifteen?”

  “It feels good,” I say. “I think. Are we running fast today?”

  He nods. “If your knee can handle it.”

  “My knee can handle it.”

  Enrique is so cool. I’m lucky to have him as a friend. I have this feeling if someone walked up with a gun in his hand he would just stare at him and keep on walking. He seems impossible to faze, kind of like my opposite, the anti-Stanley.

  We walk into the gym and into the locker room. People I knew years ago from cross-country stop and look at me. I ignore them. Me and Enrique go to our lockers.

  “How about you?” I ask him. “You sure about this?”

  He nods. “You have seen me training. I am ready.”

  Someone comes up to me. “How are the vitamins working out with you two?”

  I look at Enrique. You two?

  “
It was just for my skin,” Enrique whispers, his face red.

  “I didn’t notice until now,” I say. “But yeah, your face has cleared up.”

  “You see?” Zach says. “Another testimonial.”

  “Look, Zach,” I say. “We appreciate your concern. But we’re trying to get dressed.”

  “Yeah, what are you doing here?” Enrique asks him.

  “I’m trying out for the high school team, just like you two. You’ll see. The supplements make you fast.”

  “They’re just vitamins,” I say. “Right?”

  “Believe what you want,” he says. “I’ll see you out on the track.”

  He always sounds like he knows something that I don’t. But I try to forget about Zach. I’m full of nervous energy, anyhow. Is it my imagination, or do I feel fast today in gym shorts, a gym shirt and my sneaks?

  We walk outside and meet on the track. The coach tells us to warm up first with a slow jog for two laps, and then we will stretch a little, have one more slow jog, and then do four-hundred-meter sprints. My legs and arms are burning to run. How long has it been since my last time trial? A year, at least.

  It’s hard to tell if anyone is looking at us now, because I focus on running smoothly, trying to loosen up my upper body as well, which tends to tense up. Enrique tells me about his weekend as we run the first lap.

  His father is having him rebuild this classic Ford, a ’65 Mustang convertible. Quite a sweet ride, although it will be a while before anyone will be driving it.

  We are now running the second lap, and Coach Gutierrez tells us to run a little sprint or two if we want. “Just a short one, okay?”

  We see some people pumping their arms, kicking high, basically breaking a sweat and making an effort to run fast. There are some out here who I remember running with in middle school, but there no track stars running fast and making it all look easy. Those people? They are all already on the team. Enrique and I run in stride, and I feel a pleasant burn in my legs, feel my breath go in and out. It feels so good, it’s almost enough to forget the hunger and the pills that are letting me run.

  Suddenly Enrique starts sprinting.

  There’s a strange disconnect, like the world around me is lit with moonlight, and I run like the wind.

  Together we pass ten people.

  We slow down and the light goes back to normal. We let the momentum carry us around the turn, then slow down to a jog until we get to the coach. He looks at us like he’s never seen us before.

  “Do I know you?” he asks.

  “Stanley Hoff,” I say. “And this is Enrique.”

  Enrique nods. “I have been running all summer.”

  He looks at the clipboard again. “Enrique Ramirez Gonzalez?”

  Enrique nods.

  “Great,” the coach says. “We’ll see how you all do in the four hundred.”

  I notice he has some senior with a clipboard there to record people’s times. “For right now stretch out slowly, nothing dramatic okay? It’s not a flexibility competition—that’s how people rip tendons.”

  So we stretch. Enrique appears to have his own routine, which I follow. It’s pretty elaborate, actually. We are stretching parts of our body I didn’t know I could reach or feel. People look at us again, but I feel great. Not only pain-free, but warmed up and loose for once.

  It’s our turn finally. Me and Enrique are all warmed up, and I feel like a spring, flexible but ready to explode. The coaches have been really eyeing Enrique. I bet they don’t know what to make of him. A Mohawk-wearing Mexican doing his own stretching and calisthenics routine.

  There are ten of us in our heat. Seven girls and three guys. The girls look pretty fast though. I know one of them, Jennifer Martinez. She was in my seventh grade language arts class. She smiles at me and I smile back. Then the coach whistles, and we run.

  Enrique and I pull out ahead in the first hundred meters. When I was in middle school cross-country, I used to run longer distances but this is just one lap so I pull out everything I’ve got. Again, the light goes funny around me and I feel an itching in the backs of my hands, around my knuckles. Enrique matches me stride for stride, and I have this strange urge to bite him.

  But that’s not the only problem.

  Zach is in our heat. And he’s right behind us. Then he pulls up even with us.

  “You know, Stanley,” Zach says, matching me stride for stride, “meat is murder.”

  I don’t know where he finds the breath. I pull my legs along fluidly, trying not to waste a movement, my arms pumping smoothly as well. We aren’t slowing down, and the light stays silver.

  My legs burn; my heart thunders in my ears. We come into the final turn and Zach somehow pulls ahead.

  Then there are just a hundred meters or so left, and I want to let my body fall into a jog, want to jump off the streetcar and slow down. But we keep running. Start sprinting, actually, running on the balls of our feet. And I feel like I’m making progress, running faster still, but I can’t even look at Enrique. I just try to blot out the pain and keep running forward. People jump out of the way ahead of Zach, who hits the line at forty-eight point one; Enrique and I come in together at forty-eight point seven.

  The coach behind us yells, “Jog it off, you three.”

  So we keep jogging around the track. I stay close to Enrique, and Zach tags along.

  “My body is my temple,” Zach says.

  “Take your temple somewhere else,” Enrique says.

  “As you like it,” Zach says, and speeds up ahead of us. He doesn’t even seem winded.

  My knee is warm but painless. Part of me wants to run off the track, pull off my sneaks, and run barefoot into the woods. Another part of me is asking if we’re on the team now, and what was the price? What was in those bitter pills?

  But Enrique slaps me on the back as we slow down to a walk. “Stanley, you’re a beast.”

  “You too, Enrique,” I say, catching my breath. “You too.”

  Chapter 16: THE FUNKY MUMMY AND THE HOT POTATO

  I arrive home to find my mother leaping around half-naked, chanting incantations and burning a small bundle of sage, filling the house with sweet smoke. From past experience I know that she’s trying to cleanse the house of evil spiritual influences. Good luck.

  The problem is that the burning sage smells like marijuana. The last time my mother and her friends did a sage-burning ritual with a big bundle at the elementary school, the boy scouts were in the building, too. The scout leader called the police. It took a while for them to sort that out, including a call to my mother’s Unitarian minister for a character reference.

  Lately my little brother Josh has been giving me meaningful, searching looks. He doesn’t seem to trust me even after our pinky promise. This may have something to do with the fact that his cat Max still hisses at me almost every time I get near him. Or that my mouth waters, that I want to growl at Max and chase him. Josh may be little, but I think he can tell something is wrong with me. But he either doesn’t want to talk to me about it, or he’s afraid to. So it’s all I can do to get him to agree to play a game of Connect Four, but he drives a hard bargain. We have to listen to Raffi while we play. Max, though, isn’t soothed by Josh’s music, or our gaming. In fact, he’s nowhere to be found. My brother may be willing to play, but Max is keeping his distance.

  The cat knows I haven’t become some animal-loving tree hugger. I don’t like it, but inside me there’s a predator who wants out. These days, dogs bark at me; cats, squirrels and chipmunks run away.

  But I’m not thinking about prey. I’m not thinking about the pills. Instead, I’m asking myself: Should I go to Carolina’s party?

  Am I afraid that Karen will be angry? No, that’s ridiculous. She’s made no effort to see me. What would she care? But maybe people will laugh at me. Or I’ll bite someone.

  Maybe I’m just scared out of my wits.

  At least it’s a costume party, and my costume is wicked funny. I’m a mummy. And not
one of those cheap ones covered with toilet paper either. My mother bought me like forty dollars’ worth of athletic bandage.

  So I go. Alone. I’m one more mummy on the cold street, walking the ten blocks to Carolina’s party. Her house is just past the cemetery, on the way to the building site of the new mall.

  I tried to get Jonathan to come with me, but he told me had three new anime films he just got through Netflix. I called up Enrique, too, but he told me he had to help his parents at the restaurant. And I don’t think Karen would fit in, even if it’s after dark. Even if she wasn’t avoiding me again.

  As I arrive in front of Carolina’s house, I hope Karen isn’t mad at me.

  From inside come the muted sounds of music and laughter. It’s the night before Halloween, so I don’t think anyone is going to mistake me for a trick-or-treater.

  I need to walk inside now.

  I walk up to the door and just stand there for a moment.

  Maybe it would be better to go home. If only Enrique had been able to come, or even Jonathan. Anything beats being alone.

  Then suddenly, the door opens. Too late. Meredith is standing in the door. And she’s a baked potato.

  Either that, or an egg covered in aluminum foil.

  “Hi! Wow! A mummy!” she says. “Come on in, it’s one big party in here!”

  It slipped my mind that dressed as a mummy, I’d be just another guy to her, anonymous.

  The laughter and music from inside is louder now. Some booming bass line makes the glass in the screen door vibrate.

  The music vibrates through me and I feel like one funky mummy. For a moment the hunger, the thirst, the fear—all is forgotten. Look out world, I’m ready to party.

  Meredith steps aside to let me inside, but it’s hard to squeeze by her costume. We get stuck next to each other for a moment in the doorway.

  “This costume is driving me nuts,” she says. “Who are you, anyway? You have nice eyes.”