“They’re all about you,” Sam said.
“No pressure.”
“Not for you. You get to just float along through life being Grace and I’m the one who has to run to keep up creatively and lyrically with the ways you change. You’re not a fixed target, you know.”
I frowned. I thought of myself as frustratingly unchangeable.
“I know what you’re thinking. But you’re right here, aren’t you?” Sam asked, using his free hand to point a finger into the fuzzy seat of the car. “You fought to be with me instead of letting yourself get grounded for a week. That’s the stuff entire albums are based on.”
He didn’t even know the half of it. I was awash with some multicolored emotion that was guilt and self-pity and uncertainty and nerves all rolled into one. I didn’t know what was worse: not telling him about still being grounded and the growing sickness inside me, or telling him. I did know this one thing: I wouldn’t be able to untell either thing. And I didn’t want to ruin this day for him. His one perfect birthday day. Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow.
I was more complex than I’d thought. I still didn’t see how it would be album fodder, though I appreciated the idea that I had, in fact, done something that impressed Sam, who knew me better than I did. I changed the subject, a little. “What will you name your album?”
“Well, I’m not doing an album today. I’m doing a demo.”
I waved off the clarification. “When you do an album, what will it be called?”
“Self-titled,” Sam said.
“I hate those.”
“Broken Toys.”
I shook my head. “That sounds like a band name.”
He pinched a tiny bit of my skin, just hard enough for me to squeal and say ow. “Chasing Grace.”
“Nothing with my name in it,” I said sternly.
“Well, you’re just making this impossible. Paper Memories?”
I considered. “Why? Oh, the birds. It seems weird that I never knew about those birds in your room.”
“I haven’t made any since I met you for real,” Sam reminded me. “The newest one is from the summer before last. All of my new cranes are at the store or in your room. That room is like a museum.”
“Not anymore,” I said, glancing over at him. He looked pale and wintery in this morning light. I changed lanes just to change lanes.
“True enough,” he admitted. He sat back from me, pulling his hand from behind my head; he ran his fingers along the plastic divider in the air vent in front of him instead. I had missed his fingers. He said, not looking at me, “What sort of guy do you think your parents expect you to marry? Someone better than me?”
I scoffed. “Who cares what they think?” I realized, too late, what he had said, and by then, I didn’t know what to say about it. I didn’t know if he really meant it, or what. It wasn’t like he’d actually asked me to marry him. It wasn’t the same thing. I didn’t know how it made me feel.
Sam swallowed and flicked the air vent open and shut, open and shut. “I wonder what would’ve happened if you hadn’t met me. If you went on to finish high school and got that scholarship to be a math whiz at wherever it is that math geniuses go. And met some extremely charming, successful, and funny brain major.”
Of all the things I found puzzling about Sam, this one was always the most puzzling: his sudden, self-deprecating mood swings. I’d heard Dad talk Mom out of her funks, though, and the content of them was similar enough to Sam’s for me to recognize them as the same species. Was this what it meant to be creative?
“Don’t be stupid,” I told him. “I don’t go around wondering what would’ve happened if you’d pulled some other girl out of the snow.”
“You don’t? That’s sort of relieving.” He turned up the heat and rested his wrists on the vents. The sun was already cooking both of us through the windshield, but Sam was like a cat — he was never too hot. “It’s hard to get used to this idea of being a boy forever. I actually get to grow up. It makes me think I should get another job.”
“Another one? You mean, other than the bookstore?”
“I don’t know exactly how the finances of the house work. I know there is some money in the bank, and I see that it’s making interest, and there are occasional payments into it from some fund or something, and the deductions come out for the bills, but I don’t really know the details. I don’t want to use up that money, so …”
“Why don’t you talk to someone at the bank? I’m sure they’d be able to look at the statements and work it all out with you.”
“I don’t want to talk to anybody about it until I’m sure that B —” Sam stopped. Not just a pause. A full stop, the sort of stop that is better than a period. He looked out the window.
It took me a minute to work out what he’d been about to say. Beck. He didn’t want to talk to anybody about it until he was sure that Beck was really not shifting back. Sam’s fingertips were white on the dashboard where he had them pressed above the vents, and his shoulders were drawn up stiffly by his ears.
“Sam,” I said, glancing at him as much as I dared while still keeping my eyes on the road. “Are you okay?”
Sam drew his hands into his lap, hard fists resting on top of each other. “Why did he have to make those new wolves, Grace?” he asked, finally. “It makes it that much harder. We were doing okay.”
“He couldn’t have known about you,” I said, glancing at him. He was running a slow finger down his nose from his forehead and back again. I looked for an exit; somewhere to pull over. “He thought that” — and now I was the one who couldn’t finish my sentence the way I’d meant to: it was your last year.
“But Cole — I don’t know what to do about Cole,” Sam confessed. “I just feel like there is something about him I should be getting, and I’m not. And if you saw his eyes, Grace. Oh, God, if you saw his eyes, you’d know there was something really wrong with him. There’s something broken in there. And the other two, and Olivia, and I want you to go to college, and I need to — someone has to — I don’t know what’s expected of me, but it feels so huge. I don’t know how much of it is what Beck would’ve wanted me to do and how much of it is what I expect myself to do. I’m just …” His voice faded off, and I didn’t know how to comfort him.
We drove in silence for several long minutes, a bright guitar plucking rapid chords in the background while infinite white stripes flew by the car. Sam’s fingers were pressed against his upper lip as if he had amazed himself by admitting his uncertainty.
“Still waking up,” I said.
He looked at me.
“Your album. Still Waking Up.”
He looked at me, expression intense. Surprised, maybe, that I’d come close. “That’s exactly how it feels. That’s exactly it. One of these days, I’m going to get used to the idea that it’s morning and I’m going to be a guy for the rest of the day. For all the rest of all the days. But until then, I’m stumbling around.”
I darted a glance over at him, catching his eye. “Everybody does that, though. We all, one day, realize that we’re not going to be kids forever and we’re going to grow up. You just got to have that moment a little later than most people. You’ll figure it out.”
Sam’s slow smile was rueful but genuine. “You and Beck were totally cut from the same cloth.”
“Guess that’s why you love both of us,” I said.
Sam made the shape of a guitar chord on his seat belt and just nodded. A few moments later, he said, thoughtfully, “Still Waking Up. One day, Grace, I’m going to write a song for you and I’m going to call it that. And then I’ll name my album after it.”
“Because I am wise,” I said.
“Yes,” Sam said.
He looked out the window then, and I was glad, because it gave me time to dig in my pocket for a tissue without him seeing. My nose had started to bleed.
• ISABEL •
Every third step I ran, my breath exploded out of me all in a rush. One step to suck
in another cold lungful. One step to let it escape. One step of not breathing.
I hadn’t been running in way too long, and I hadn’t been running this far in even longer. I’d always liked jogging because it was a place to think, far away from the house and my parents. But after Jack died, I hadn’t wanted to think.
Now, that was changing.
And so I was running again, though it was far too cold to be comfortable and I was out of shape. Even with my new, buoyant running shoes, my shins were killing me.
I was running to Cole.
It was too long of a run from my house to Beck’s, even when I’d been running all the time, so I parked three miles away, warmed up in the transparent mist, and started.
Three miles gave me plenty of time to change my mind. But here I was, the house in sight, and I was still running. I probably looked like hell, but what did I care? If I was just there to talk, it didn’t matter what I looked like, right?
The driveway was empty; Sam was already gone. I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed. It meant, at least, that there was a good chance I’d find the house entirely empty, because Cole was probably a wolf.
Again, I couldn’t tell if I was relieved or disappointed.
A few hundred feet from the house, I slowed to a walk, holding the stitch in my side. I’d almost gotten my breath back by the time I got to the back door. I tried the knob, experimentally; it turned and the door fell open.
I stepped into the house and hesitated by the back door. I was about to shout hello, when I realized that it might not be just Cole who was human. So I stood there in the dark little corner by the back door looking into the brighter area of the kitchen, remembering sitting in this house and watching Jack die.
It was easy for Grace to say that it wasn’t my fault. Words like that didn’t mean anything at all.
A sudden thunderous noise made me jump. There was a long pause, and then another burst of crashing and slamming and commotion from somewhere in the house. It was like a voiceless argument. For a long moment, I stood there, trying to decide whether or not I should just slip back outside and run back to my car.
You already sat back and did nothing once in this house, I thought grimly.
So I stepped deeper inside, making my way through the kitchen. I hesitated at the hall, looking into the living room, not quite understanding what was in front of me. I saw … water. Ragged trails of water shimmered in thin, uneven patterns across the wood floor, almost icy-looking in their perfection.
I lifted my eyes to the rest of the living room. It was completely trashed. A lamp was knocked onto the sofa, the shade askew, and picture frames littered the floor. The rug from the kitchen was thrown up against the side of one of the end tables, slicked with water on one side, and one of the chairs keeled on its back like a bystander too shocked to stand. I stepped slowly into the living room, listening for more sounds, but the house had gone quiet.
The destruction was so bizarre that it had to be intentional — books lying facedown in smears of water, pages ripped out; dented cans of food rolled against the walls; an empty wine bottle stuck upside down in a potted plant; paint shredded off the walls.
And then I heard the sounds again, scrabbling and smashing, and before I could react, a wolf came staggering down the hall to my left, ricocheting off the wall as it headed toward me. It was starting to become clear how the living room had gotten to its current state.
“Holy —” I said, and stepped backward into the kitchen. But it didn’t seem like the wolf was interested in attack; water sheeted off its sides as it made its erratic way down the hall. It seemed oddly small in this context, its gray-brown fur soaked and slicked against its body, no scarier than a dog. The wolf got a few feet away and then looked up at me with insolent green eyes.
“Cole,” I breathed, my heart doing a double thump. “You crazy bastard.”
To my surprise, he flinched at the sound of my voice. It reminded me that he was, after all, only a wolf, and that his instincts must have been screaming about my presence between him and his exit.
I backed up, but before I could decide whether I should try to get the back door open for him, Cole began to twitch. By the time he was a few feet away from me, he was full-out convulsing and twisting and retching. I took a few steps back so he wouldn’t puke on my nice running shoes and crossed my arms over my chest to watch him shift.
Cole scraped some new claw marks into the wall — Sam was going to love that so much — as he jerked on his side. Then, his body did magic. His skin bubbled and stretched, and I saw his long wolf mouth open wide in pain. He rolled onto his back, panting.
Newly human, he lay stretched on the floor, like a whale washed up on shore, arms marked up with faint pink memories of wounds. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me.
My stomach jerked. Cole had his face back again, but his eyes were still feral, lost in his wolf thoughts. Finally, he blinked, and his eyebrows ordered themselves in a way that told me he was really seeing me.
“Cool trick, right?” he said, his voice a little thick.
“I’ve seen better,” I said coolly. “What are you doing?”
Cole didn’t move, except to unfist his hands and stretch out his fingers. “Science experiments. On myself. Long, distinguished history of that.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Possibly,” Cole allowed, with a lazy smile. “I’m not sure if shifting metabolizes some of my blood alcohol. I don’t feel too bad, though. Why are you here?”
I pressed my lips together. “I’m not. I mean, I was just going.”
Cole stretched his arm in my direction. “Don’t go.”
“Because this looks like such a great time,” I said.
“Help me figure it out,” he said. “Help me figure out how to stay a wolf.”
In my mind, I was sitting again at the foot of my brother’s bed, my brother who had risked everything to stay human. I was watching him lose sensation in his fingers and his toes and whimper with the pain of his brain exploding. I didn’t have words to describe my disgust for Cole at that moment.
“Figure it out yourself,” I said.
“I can’t,” Cole told me, still lying on his back, looking at me upside down. “I can only get myself to shift, but it doesn’t stick. The cold’s a trigger, but so’s adrenaline, I think. I tried an ice bath, but that didn’t work until I cut myself, too, for the adrenaline. But it won’t stick. I keep changing back.”
“Boo hoo,” I said. “Sam’s going to be pissed when he sees what you’ve done to his house.” I turned to go.
“Isabel, please.” Cole’s voice followed me, even if his body didn’t. “If I can’t make myself a wolf, I’m going to kill myself.”
I stopped. Didn’t turn around.
“I’m not trying to say it to manipulate you, okay? It’s just the truth.” He hesitated. “I’ve got to get out, somehow, and it’s one or the other. I just can’t — I need to figure this out, Isabel. You know more about the wolves. Please just help me with this.”
I turned around. He was still lying on the floor, one hand over his chest, the other hand outstretched, reaching for me. I said, “All you’re doing is asking me to help you kill yourself. Don’t pretend it’s anything else. What do you think it really is if you become a wolf forever?”
Cole closed his eyes. “Then help me do that.”
I laughed. I heard how cruel my laugh sounded, but I didn’t soften it. “Let me tell you something, Cole. I sat in this house, this very house” — I pointed to the floor as he opened his eyes — “in that room and I watched my brother die. I didn’t do anything about it. You know how he died? He was bitten, and he was trying to keep from turning into a werewolf. I arranged for him to be injected with bacterial meningitis, which proceeded to give him a fever off the charts, basically set his brain on fire, destroyed his fingers and toes, and finally killed him. I didn’t take him to the hospital because I knew that he would rather die than be a werewolf.
And in the end, he got that wish.”
Cole stared at me. That same dead look he’d given me before. I expected him to have a reaction, but there was nothing. His eyes were dull. Empty.
“I’m only telling you this so you know that I have wanted to escape about a hundred thousand times since then. I’ve thought about drinking — hey, it works for my mom — or drugs — hey, it works for my mom — and I’ve thought about taking one of my dad’s eight million guns and putting it to my head and blowing my brains out. Sad part? Not even because I miss Jack. I mean, I do, but that’s not why I want to do it. It’s because I feel so damn guilty about how I killed him. I killed him. And some days I just can’t live with that. But I do. Because that’s life, Cole. Life’s pain. You just have to get over as much of it as you can.”
Cole said, simply, “I don’t want to.”
It seemed like he always sprang honesty on me when I least expected it. I knew it was making me empathize with him, even when I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it any more than I could help kissing him before. I crossed my arms again; I felt like he was trying to pull a confession out of me. And I didn’t know if I had any more to confess.
• COLE •
I was lying here, ruined, on the floor, and I had been so certain that today was the day I’d finally get up the nerve to end it.
And then it wasn’t. Because somehow, watching her face when she talked about her brother, I just didn’t feel the urgency anymore. I felt like I had been a balloon getting larger and larger, waiting to pop, and she had come in and burst herself first. And somehow that had let the air out of both of us.
It felt like everyone in this house had a reason to escape, and I was the only one trying to. I was so tired.
“I didn’t realize you were actually human,” I said. “As in, with actual emotions.”
“Unfortunately.”
I stared at the ceiling. I wasn’t sure where I went from here.
She said, “You know what I don’t want to do anymore? Watch you lying there naked.” I rolled my eyes toward her and she added, “It’s like you never wear clothes. You’re always naked when I see you. Are you really stuck as a human?”
Shiver Trilogy (Shiver, Linger, Forever) Page 48