“What did they do to you?” I asked.
His mouth quirked into a smile completely without humor. “Gave me a bandage for a cut that has healed since they put it on. What did you tell her?” He glanced around for Mom.
“I told her about your parents and said that’s what was wrong with you. She believed me. It’s cool. Are you all right? Are you —” I wasn’t sure what I was asking. Finally, I said, “Dad said she was dead. Shelby. I guess she couldn’t heal like you did. It was too fast.”
Sam laid his palms on either side of my neck and kissed me. He pressed his forehead against mine so that we were staring at each other and it looked like he had only one eye. “I’m going to hell.”
“What?”
His one eye blinked. “Because I should be feeling bad about her being dead.”
I pulled back so I could see his expression; it was strangely empty. I wasn’t sure what to say in light of that information, but Sam saved me by taking my hands and squeezing them tightly. “I know I should be upset right now. But I just feel like I’ve dodged this huge missile. I didn’t change, you’re all right, and for the moment, she’s just one less thing for me to worry about. I just feel — I feel drunk.”
“Mom thinks you’re damaged goods,” I told him.
Sam kissed me again, closed his eyes for a moment, and then kissed me a third time, lightly. “I am. Do you want to run away?”
I didn’t know if he meant from the hospital, or from him.
“Mr. Roth?” a nurse appeared in the door. “You can stay in here, but you should sit down for this.”
Like me, Sam had to get a series of rabies shots — standard hospital procedure for unprovoked animal attacks. It wasn’t like we could tell the staff that Sam knew the animal personally and that said animal had been homicidal, not rabid. I shuffled over to make room for Sam, who sat beside me with an uneasy glance toward the syringe in the nurse’s hands.
“Don’t look at the needle,” the nurse advised as she pushed up his bloody sleeve with rubber-gloved hands. Sam looked away, to my face, but his eyes were distant and unfocused, his mind somewhere else as the nurse stuck the needle into his skin. As I watched her depress the syringe, I fantasized that it was a cure for Sam — liquid summer injected right into his veins.
There was a knock on the door and another nurse stuck her face in. “Brenda, are you done?” the second nurse asked. “I think they need you in 302. There’s a girl going crazy in there.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Brenda said, with deep sarcasm. “You two are done.” To me, she said, “I’ll get your paperwork to your mom when I’m done.”
“Thanks,” Sam said, and took my hand. Together we walked down the hall, and for a strange moment, it felt like the first night that we’d met, like no time at all had passed.
“Wait,” I said as we passed through the emergency room waiting area, and Sam let me pull him to a halt. I squinted across the busy room, but the woman I thought I’d seen was gone.
“Who are you looking for?”
“I thought I saw Olivia’s mom.” I squinted across the waiting room again, but there were only unfamiliar faces.
I saw Sam’s nostrils flare and his eyebrows draw a little closer to his eyes, but he didn’t say anything as we made our way to the glass hospital doors. Outside, Mom had already pulled the car up to the curb, not knowing what a favor she had done for Sam.
Beyond the car, tiny snowflakes swirled, the cold delicately embodied. Sam’s eyes were on the trees on the other side of the parking lot, barely visible in the streetlights. I wondered if he was thinking about the deadly chill that seeped through the cracks in the door, or about Shelby’s broken body that would never be human again, or if, like me, he was still thinking about that imaginary syringe full of liquid summer.
My patchwork life: quiet Sunday, coffee on Grace’s breath, the unfamiliar landscape of the lumpy new scar on my arm, the dangerous smell of snow in the air. Two different worlds circling each other, getting closer and closer, knotting together in ways I’d never imagined.
My near-change of the day before still hung over me, the dusky memory of wolf odor caught in my hair and on the tips of my fingers. It would’ve been so easy to give in. Even now, twenty-four hours later, I felt like my body was still fighting it.
I was so tired.
I tried to lose myself in a novel, curled in a squashy leather chair, half dozing. Ever since the evening temperatures had begun to pitch sharply downward in the last few days, we’d been spending our free time in her father’s largely unused study. Other than her bedroom, it was the warmest and least drafty place in the house. I liked the room. The walls were lined with dark-spined encyclopedias, too old to be useful, and stacked with dark wooden award plaques for marathon running, too old to be meaningful. The entire study was very small and brown, a rabbit hole made of dark leather, smoky-smelling wood, and manila folders: It was a place to be safe and productive.
Grace sat at the desk doing homework, her hair illuminated like an old painting by a couple of dull gold desk lamps. The way she sat, head bent in stubborn concentration, held my attention in the way that my book didn’t.
I realized that Grace’s pen hadn’t moved in a long while. I asked, “What are you thinking about?”
She spun the desk chair around to face me and tapped her pen on her lip; it was a charming gesture that made me want to kiss her. “Washer and dryer. I was thinking about how when I move out, I’ll either have to use the laundromat or buy a washer and dryer.”
I just looked at her, equal parts entranced and horrified by this strange look into the workings of her mind. “That was distracting you from your homework?”
“I was not distracted,” Grace said stiffly. “I was giving myself a break from reading this stupid short story for English.” She whirled back around and leaned back over the desk.
There was quiet for several long moments; she still didn’t put pen to paper. Finally, without lifting her head, she said, “Do you think there’s a cure?”
I closed my eyes and sighed. “Oh, Grace.”
Grace persisted, “Tell me, then. Is it science? Or is it magic? What you are?”
“Does it matter which?”
“Of course,” she said, and her voice was frustrated. “Magic would be intangible. Science has cures. Haven’t you ever wondered how it all started?”
I didn’t open my eyes. “One day a wolf bit a man and the man caught it. Magic or science, it’s all the same. The only thing magical about it is that we can’t explain it.”
Grace didn’t say anything more, but I could feel her disquiet. I sat there silently, hiding behind my book, knowing that she needed words from me — words I wasn’t willing to give. I wasn’t sure which of us was being more selfish — her, for wanting something that no one could promise, or me, for not promising her something that was too painfully impossible to want.
Before either of us could break the uneasy silence, the door to the study pushed open and her father came in, his wire frames fogged from the temperature change. He scanned the room, taking in the changes we’d made to it. The under-used guitar from her mother’s studio leaning against my chair. My pile of tattered paperbacks on the side table. The neat stack of sharpened pencils on his desk. His eyes lingered on the coffeemaker Grace had brought in to satisfy her caffeine cravings; he seemed as fascinated by it as I had been. A child-sized coffeemaker. For toddlers who needed a quick pick-me-up. “We’re home. Have you guys taken over my room?”
“It was being neglected,” Grace said, without looking up from her homework. “It was too useful to let it go to waste. And now you can’t have it back.”
“Obviously,” he observed. He looked at me, sunk into his chair. “What are you reading?”
I said, “Bel Canto.”
“I’ve never heard of it. What’s it about?”
He squinted at the cover; I held it out so that he could see it. “Opera singers and chopping onions. And guns.”
Grace turned around in the desk chair. “Dad, what did you do with the body?”
He blinked. “What?”
“After you shot it. What did you do with the body?”
“Oh. I put it on the deck.”
“And?”
“And what?”
Grace pushed away from the desk, exasperated. “And what did you do with it after that? I know you didn’t leave it to rot on the deck.”
A slow, sick feeling was beginning to knot in the bottom of my stomach.
“Grace, why is this such an issue? I’m sure Mom took care of it.”
Grace pressed her fingers into her forehead. “Dad, how can you think that Mom moved it? She was with us at the hospital!”
“I didn’t really think about it. I was going to call animal control to pick it up, but it was gone the next morning, so I thought one of you guys must’ve called them.”
Grace made a little strangled noise. “Dad! Mom can’t even call to order pizza! How would she call animal control?”
Her father shrugged and stirred his soup. “Stranger things have happened. It’s not worth getting worked up about, anyway. So it was dragged off the deck by a wild animal. I don’t think other animals can catch rabies from a dead animal.”
Grace just crossed her arms and glared at him, as if this comment was just too stupid to dignify with a response.
“Don’t sulk,” he said, and pushed the door farther open with his shoulder to leave. “It’s not becoming.”
Her voice was ice-cold. “I have to take care of everything myself.”
He smiled at her fondly, somehow reducing the value of her anger. “We’d be lost without you, obviously. Don’t stay up too late.”
The door softly clicked shut behind him, and Grace stared at the bookshelves, the desk, the closed door. Anything but my face.
I closed my novel without noting the page. “She’s not dead.”
“Mom might’ve called animal control,” Grace said to the desk.
“Your mom didn’t call animal control. Shelby’s alive.”
“Sam. Shut up. Please. We don’t know. One of the other wolves could’ve dragged her body off the deck. Don’t jump to conclusions.” She looked at me, finally, and I saw that Grace, despite her complete inability to read people, had puzzled out what Shelby was to me. My past clawing out at me, trying to steal me even before winter did.
I felt like things were getting away from me. I’d found heaven and grabbed it as tightly as I could, but it was unraveling, an insubstantial thread sliding between my fingers, too fine to hold.
And so I looked for them.
Every day that Grace was at school, I searched for them, the two wolves I didn’t trust, the ones who were supposed to be dead. Mercy Falls was small. Boundary Wood was — not as small, but more familiar, and maybe more willing to give up its secrets to me.
I would find Shelby and Jack and I’d confront them on my own terms.
But Shelby had left no trail off the deck, so maybe she really was gone. And Jack, too, was nowhere — a dead, cold trail. A ghost that left no corpse behind. I felt like I had combed the entire county for signs of him.
I thought — vaguely hoped — that he’d died, too, and ceased to be a problem. Been hit by some Department of Transportation vehicle and scooped into a dump somewhere. But there were no tracks leading to roads, no trees marked, no scent of a new-made wolf lingering at the school parking lot. He had disappeared as completely as snow in summer.
I should’ve been glad. Disappearing meant discreet. Disappearing meant he wasn’t my problem anymore.
But I just couldn’t accept it. We wolves did many things: change, hide, sing underneath a pale, lonely moon — but we never disappeared entirely. Humans disappeared. Humans made monsters out of us.
Sam and I were like horses on a merry-go-round. We followed the same track again and again — home, school, home, school, bookstore, home, school, home, etc. — but really, we were circling the big issue without ever getting any closer to it. The real heart of it: Winter. Cold. Loss.
We didn’t talk about the looming possibility, but I felt I could always sense the chill of the shadow it cast over us. I’d read a story once, in a really dire collection of Greek myths, about a man called Damocles who had a sword dangling over his throne, hung by a single hair. That was us — Sam’s humanity dangling by a tight thread.
On Monday, as per the merry-go-round, it was back to school as usual. Although it had only been two days since Shelby attacked me, even the bruising had disappeared. It seemed I had a little bit of the werewolf healing in me after all.
I was surprised to find Olivia absent. Last year, she’d never missed a single day.
I kept waiting and waiting for her to walk into one of the two classes we shared before lunch, but she didn’t. I kept looking at her empty desk in class. She could’ve been just sick, but a part of me that I was trying to ignore said it was more. In fourth period, I slid into my usual seat behind Rachel. “Rachel, hey, have you seen Olivia?”
Rachel turned to face me. “Huh?”
“Olivia. Doesn’t she have Science with you?”
She shrugged. “I haven’t heard from her since Friday. I tried calling her and her mom said she was sick. But what about you, buttercup? Where were you this weekend? You never call, you never write.”
“I got bitten by a raccoon,” I said. “I had to get rabies shots and I took Sunday to sleep it off. To make sure I didn’t start foaming at the mouth and savaging people.”
“Gross. Where did it bite you?”
I gestured toward my jeans. “Ankle. It doesn’t look like much. I’m worried about Olive, though. I haven’t been able to get her on the phone.”
Rachel frowned and crossed her legs; she was, as ever, wearing stripes, this time, striped tights. She said, “Me, neither. Do you think she’s avoiding us? Is she still mad at you?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
Rachel made a face. “We’re okay, though, right? I mean, we haven’t really been talking. About stuff, I mean. Stuff’s been happening. But we haven’t been, you know, talking. Or over at each other’s houses. Or whatever.”
“We’re okay,” I said firmly.
She scratched her rainbow tights and bit her lip before saying, “Do you think we should, you know, go over to her house and see if we can catch her?”
I didn’t answer right away, and she didn’t push it. This was unfamiliar territory for both of us: We’d never had to really work to make our trio stick together. I didn’t know if tracking Olivia down was the right thing or not. It seemed kind of drastic, but how long had it been since we’d seen her or talked to her, really? I said, slowly, “How about we wait until the end of the week? If we haven’t heard from her by then, then we … ?”
Rachel nodded, looking relieved. “Coolio.”
She turned back around in her seat as Mr. Rink, at the front of the classroom, cleared his throat to get our attention. He said, “Okay, you guys will probably hear this several times today from the teachers, but don’t go around licking the water fountains or kissing perfect strangers, okay? Because the Health Department has reported a couple of cases of meningitis in this part of the state. And you get that from — anyone? Snot! Mucus! Kissing and licking! Don’t do it!”
There was appreciative hooting in the back of the classroom.
“Since you can’t do any of that, we’ll do something almost as good. Social studies! Open up your books to page one hundred and twelve.”
I glanced at the doorway again for the thousandth time, hoping to see Olivia come through it, and opened my book.
When classes broke for lunch, I snuck into the hall and phoned Olivia’s house. It rang twelve times and went to voicemail. I didn’t leave a message; if she was cutting class for a reason other than sickness,
I didn’t want her mother to get a message asking where she was during the school day. I was about to shut my locker when I noticed that the smallest pouch of my backpack was partially unzipped. A piece of paper jutted out with my name written on it. I unfolded it, my cheeks warming unexpectedly when I recognized Sam’s messy, ropy handwriting.
‘AGAIN AND AGAIN, HOWEVER, WE KNOW THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE, AND THE LITTLE CHURCHYARD WITH ITS LAMENTING NAMES AND THE STAGGERINGLY SECRET ABYSS IN WHICH OTHERS FIND THEIR END: AGAIN AND AGAIN THE TWO OF US GO OUT UNDER THE ANCIENT TREES, MAKE OUR BED AGAIN AND AGAIN BETWEEN THE FLOWERS, FACE TO FACE WITH THE SKIES.’
THIS IS RILKE. I WISH I HAD WRITTEN IT FOR YOU.
I didn’t understand it entirely, but, thinking of Sam, I read it out loud, whispering the words to myself. In my mouth, the shapes of the words became beautiful. I felt a smile on my face, even with no one around to see it. My worries were still there, but for the moment, I floated above them, warm with the memory of Sam.
I didn’t want to dispel my quiet, buoyant feelings in the noisy cafeteria, so I retreated back to my next period’s empty classroom and took a seat. Dropping my English text on the desk, I flattened the note on my desk to read it again.
Sitting in the empty classroom and listening to the faraway sounds of noisy students in the cafeteria, I was reminded of feeling sick in class and being sent to the school nurse. The nurse’s office had that same muffled sense of distance, like a satellite to the loud planet that was the school. I had spent a lot of time there after the wolves attacked me, suffering from that flu that probably hadn’t really been a flu.
For a measureless amount of time, I stared at the open cell phone, thinking about getting bitten. About getting sick from it. About getting better. Why was I the only one who had?
“Have you changed your mind?”
My chin jerked up at the sound of the voice, and I found myself facing Isabel at the desk next to mine. To my surprise, she didn’t look quite as perfect as usual; she had bags under her eyes that were only partially hidden by makeup, and there was nothing to disguise her bloodshot eyes. “Excuse me?”
Shiver Trilogy (Shiver, Linger, Forever) Page 19