by C. D. Bell
Only the lingering sense of urgency gave Nessa the courage to ask if he knew where Chayton was.
“Nope,” Mike said, over-enunciating. “And I don’t expect him.”
Bree and Nessa backed out slowly. There was something creepy about this place. Nessa had read that wolves have an instinctive awareness of vulnerability. Someone here was sick or weak or old.
Rather than plan, Nessa relied on hoping…that the transformation wouldn’t happen. Or that it wouldn’t happen the way Chayton had said it would. That she would be more in control. That the race would get rained out. That the moon would not follow the three different calendars she’d found online. That between now and the next big race weekend, something major would change.
Anything, let it be anything, she prayed in her mind.
But then “anything” came along, and Nessa wished she had been a little bit more specific.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Friday after Homecoming, Nessa arrived at school with Bree and wasn’t surprised to see a freshman girl from cross-country heading straight for her. Nessa was getting used to being treated as a quasi–school celebrity, so she smiled at the runner, Maryn.
But Maryn didn’t look worshipful. She looked worried. “Nessa, you’ve got to go see Coach right now. He keeps asking us if we’ve seen you. I think something might be really wrong.”
Not caring that the first bell was about to ring, Nessa headed straight for Coach Hoffman’s office.
Before she was even close, she heard voices coming through his open door—Coach Hoffman, Mr. Porter, and Principal Sarakoski. The hallway was filled with sound and people and conversations and slamming lockers, but still, she was able to hear every word, every nuance, as if she were in the room.
“Tell me this isn’t raising a red flag for you, Hoffman.” This was Principal Sarakoski. Nessa recognized the way her high voice got a little nasal with emotion.
“It is a little unusual,” Coach was saying.
“Unusual? I had the Commissioner of Youth Sports on the phone last night. I believe the word he used was unprecedented.”
“She’s a highly focused young lady.” This was Mr. Porter speaking now. “We shouldn’t rush to judge.”
“I’ll tell you who is going to rush to judge. The state’s Commission on Illegal Substance Use in High School Athletics, that’s who. In case you don’t know, this is a group convened by the legislature just this past year. And we thought when we learned about it, ‘Great! Not our problem!’ Everyone assumed that the districts affected by this kind of pressure are the downstate towns with the big programs. We’ve got poverty and OxyContin addicts and Lord knows what else, but rich kids gaming the sports system? We thought we were immune. All those metro-area charter schools—how much of a coup is this for them now? It’s going to be quite a feather in their caps to have the test case come from up here.”
“Andrea,” Coach Hoffman began, “we don’t know—” but Principal Sarakoski clearly wasn’t done.
“It’s bad enough an entire generation of children in this town is being studied for cancer, that the only thing anyone knows about us is that we sat by and allowed ourselves to be poisoned. Now we’ll be the town where kids are poisoning themselves via the use of performance-enhancing drugs in high school athletics. A dead-end school district where kids will do anything just to get out.”
Nessa had reached the door to Coach Hoffman’s office by now, and Mr. Porter spotted her. “Nessa!” he called, the fake cheeriness in his voice meant to signal to his boss that she should stop talking in such blatant tones.
Principal Sarakoski managed to rein herself in, but Nessa could see that she was still pretty worked up. Nessa could practically feel the throb in the big vein visible at her temple.
“Coach Hoffman?” Nessa asked. “You wanted to see me?”
“Yes,” Coach said. He looked up at Principal Sarakoski, then at the floor. He seemed not to be able to look Nessa in the eye. “Sit down,” he said, pointing to a chair. She took it, a little reluctantly. It felt weird to be the only one sitting. Coach Hoffman was standing behind his desk, Mr. Porter was perched on a low bookshelf, and Principal Sarakoski was pacing behind both of them.
“First off, Nessa,” Coach Hoffman said, “before we bring up some very serious accusations that have been made, I just want to know if there is anything you’d like to tell us. Sometimes—well—all of us—we do things and they lead to other things, and then we find ourselves going down a path that we never exactly intended, and we turn into versions of ourselves we never could have predicted we’d encounter, and…”
Nessa had no idea where he was going with this. Every word seemed to be causing Coach Hoffman so much pain, Nessa felt almost sorry for him.
On the other hand, she was starting to get the idea that she was in very serious trouble. Was it possible they’d found out about what had been happening to her?
“You see—” Coach Hoffman began again, but this time, Principal Sarakoski cut him off.
“Good Lord, Peter, let’s cut to the chase. Nessa, is there anything you have to tell us?”
Nessa slid her hands under her thighs. For a second, she envisioned letting everything that had happened to her during the first month of school spill out. That on top of training and studying and all the things you had to do your first semester of junior year if you wanted to go to college—and especially if you wanted to go to college on a scholarship—she’d been attacked in the woods by a wild animal, been in and out of the doctor’s office, had rehabbed her way back onto the team, and then, oh yeah, had transformed into a wolf? Had been “cured” by a shaman who said it was going to happen again in a week’s time? Had no idea how to make it stop so that she could run a race that was also only a week away?
“No,” she said. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I’m just going to come out and ask you, then,” Principal Sarakoski said. “Have you been using any performance-
enhancing drugs?”
“You mean doping?” Nessa asked, her brain connecting the dots between the conversation she’d overheard and her presence in this room. Then anger fired up in her. She looked back and forth at the three adults.
“No way!” Nessa responded. “I’ve been working for this. I’ve been working so hard. I’ve never even seen drugs like that!”
Coach put a hand on her shoulder. “I know, sweetheart.”
“So you won’t mind if we inspect your gym locker right now,” Principal Sarakoski said in a much less sympathetic tone.
“You want to search my locker?” Nessa knew her anger made her sound guilty, and she bit her lip and stopped talking.
“There was an anonymous message left on the school’s voicemail suggesting that you’d been doping,” Coach Hoffman explained further, his tone gentle. “We would have disregarded it if we hadn’t found bottles of androstenedione in the trashcan.”
“It’s school policy to search lockers when a viable threat has been received,” Principal Sarakoski said.
“It’s actually not school policy, Andrea,” Coach Hoffman corrected. “Situations like this are so unheard of we don’t exactly have a school policy.”
“It’s school policy to take action.”
“But you can’t!” Nessa said. “I mean, it’s private property.”
Later Nessa would wish she had acted less disturbed by the idea of their opening her gym locker. Or at least explained that it was embarrassing to think about her deodorant and tampons going on display for her principal, guidance counselor, and coach. Her nasty running bra hanging on the center hook where she’d left it to dry.
“Technically, your locker is the property of the school,” Principal Sarakoski said. “On loan to you.” She nodded to Mr. Porter, who lifted a walkie-talkie to his mouth and said, “Go ahead and open it.” That was when Nessa understood that whether she agreed to it or not, the search was happening NOW.
“Shall we?” Principal Sarakoski said, and t
he three adults escorted Nessa to the locker room where Pasty Pete had already cut open her combination lock with the assistant principal, Mr. Cooper. Pete looked up and met Nessa’s eye.
“That’s my stuff,” Nessa said, noticing right away that the bra was already on the floor. So were the pictures she’d taped up of herself running through the finish line at a race the year before. And the picture of Nate, Delphine, and her mom from last summer, camping with cousins at a lake. Pete was taking no care not to bend or tear the photographs and other objects that were important to her, as he dumped them into a cardboard box on the floor.
Nessa spun around, looking to the crowd of gawking girls to see if any of them would say something. No one did. Even Cynthia, who was there with her friends, said nothing.
“You know me,” Nessa said to Cynthia. “You know I’d never do something like this.”
“You wouldn’t?” Cynthia replied. She shook her head like all of this was making her sad. “Nessa, I’ve never known anyone who wanted to win as much as you.”
“Is this it?” Pete asked, holding up a supplement bottle. It wasn’t even scary looking: a regular brown bottle like a vitamin C bottle, with the blue image of a runner and a yin and yang symbol to make it even friendlier. Pete read the label out loud, “‘Androstenedione.’ Is this what you’re looking for?”
Nessa glared at Pete, hating him for his discovery. “I’ve never seen that before,” she said. “I’ve never even heard of andro…nos…stadon or whatever it’s called.”
Nessa looked from one face to another, feeling her shame growing with each passing second. The trapped wolf, that’s who she had become. All she wanted to do was run.
Nessa was sent back to class for second period—she had English.
As if she could possibly concentrate on English. On anything.
She was so angry, she didn’t think she could sit down in her seat, let alone talk about nature and nurture and symbolism. She would so much rather be quizzed on math facts or asked to recite formulas for physics than give an opinion about whether people had destinies or what makes a character evil.
She tossed her book bag under her chair and threw herself into her seat with an aggressive thump, sending the angry beam of her gaze toward anyone who had a problem with her being in the room.
She knew news traveled fast in school. Had four minutes of passing time between first and second periods been enough for the lies to circulate? Did everyone in this room now think of her as a confirmed doper? Like she hadn’t earned that win? Like it hadn’t been her legs, her sneakers, her muscles, her hours and miles and minutes adding up to the way she’d torn up the course at Homecoming?
No one met her eye.
“Nessa, great job,” she heard from Ms. Nightingale, who was handing back the papers from the week before. Nessa looked at the top of hers where an A was written in red and circled. Nessa stared at the letter. She remembered the night she wrote it. The feeling of putting the last period on the last sentence of the last line at the very moment that the song on her mix compilation ended. The serendipity of that night was wrecked now. It didn’t mean anything to her. How could it?
CHAPTER TWENTY
Vivian didn’t take off work for much, but when the school called to say evidence had been found suggesting that Nessa had been taking illegal performance-enhancing drugs, she left work and came to school for an emergency meeting with the principal.
Her hair drawn up on top of her head, her chin held high, her legs crossed in a way that brought dignity to her vet tech scrubs and nurse clogs, she listened to Principal Sarakoski describe the anonymous tip, the search, the findings in Nessa’s locker.
Vivian swiveled in her seat and faced Nessa. “Did you take these pills or anything else that may have caused your times to improve so dramatically? Tell me the truth now, tell it one time, and we’ll deal with this whatever the case may be.”
“I didn’t do this,” Nessa said.
“Thank you,” said Vivian. Then she turned to Principal Sarakoski. “You heard her. She didn’t do it. Now what?”
Principal Sarakoski’s face looked pained but firm. “There’s a state initiative to investigate this kind of thing, and it looks very bad for the whole county, our whole half of the state, if rumors are flying that we’re being lax on this up here. You’ll get all the Detroit people complaining that the funding we get up here for our after-school activities is coming from state dollars while theirs comes from towns….” The principal’s speech veered off into charter school politics and tax incentives, Title I funding, and Title IX. Nessa shifted in her chair and stared at the floor, but her mother’s gaze remained clear and fixed on the principal.
“That’s all well and good for the state,” she said. “But what I’m interested in is my daughter. What does any of what you just said mean for her?”
“If it was only up to me, Vivian,” Principal Sarakoski said, “I’d take her word for it. But as it is, she’s going to have to take a blood test. And…” Principal Sarakoski paused.
“And?” Vivian repeated.
“And she’s going to have to be suspended from competition pending the results of the test.”
Vivian continued to stare the principal down.
“And her results from the Homecoming time trials will be withheld until her other test results are in.”
Principal Sarakoski looked down at her desk with finality.
Vivian looked over at Nessa’s face, and Nessa could see that her mom registered what this meant for her.
“And what happens if Nessa doesn’t want to submit to a blood test?” Vivian said.
“Then she forfeits her position on the team,” Principal Sarakoski replied.
“Oh, is that all—just her chance of attending college?” Vivian snapped, descending to sarcasm when it became evident that Nessa was in pain and there was nothing Vivian could do.
Nessa spent the rest of the morning in a daze, ending up at lunch not being able to eat a mouthful of food.
“Hey,” she heard, while debating whether to just trash her turkey sandwich entirely. She turned and saw it was Cassian. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“For me?” Nessa said.
“Yes.” Cassian shrugged. Nessa was tall, but he was even taller. His shoulders were broad. He smiled at her. “You changed your nail polish,” he said.
“What?” Nessa blinked at him and then looked down at her hands. “Oh. Yes, I did,” she said. Then she couldn’t help but smile. Delphine had given Nessa a dark gray manicure last night to be “calming.” It obviously had other effects. She didn’t expect Cassian to keep up with the status of her nail polish. “Thanks for noticing.”
“Mind if I sit?” he asked. Nessa was too fatigued to say anything, so she slid over on the webbed metal bench and nodded yes.
“I just thought, you know, with everybody making this big thing about the androstenedione, you should know that not everybody thinks you did it. I don’t think you did it.”
“You don’t?” Nessa said.
“I know what it’s like to want to get out of this town, and I know why you’d want to dope to make it happen,” he went on. “But I don’t know—I just don’t think you did.”
Nessa smiled. She felt like a window had cracked open in a dark room.
“Well,” she said. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“I’d like to see you someplace other than the health clinic,” Cassian added suddenly. “I think we’re more alike than you think.”
Nessa just nodded and tried to keep her face from wrinkling up, completely overwhelmed. WHAT?
“Do you like bowling?” Cassian asked.
Visions of a failed venture when Nate was about six filtered through Nessa’s memory. Delphine hated the shoes and Nate…hated the entire time. “Bowling?” Nessa repeated.
He cleared his throat. Did Cassian Thomas look…nervous? “Well, I like bowling,” he said. “And it’s a good thing ’cause Tether doesn’t have movies or r
oller skating or any of the other things that I might want to ask you to do with me this weekend.”
Nessa felt like her brain was firing on a single cylinder, and that cylinder was not capable of parsing exactly what was happening. With Cassian looking right at her, it was hard to concentrate.
“So maybe you’ll…go bowling with me? Next weekend? After the clinic?”
Nessa was a little charmed by his nervousness. “Sure, I’ll go bowling.” She laughed. Like an idiot. Nothing here was funny. “I’d—sure.”
It wasn’t until she was lying in bed that night that she thought how odd it was that Cassian could so easily pronounce the word “androstenedione.” It wasn’t exactly common vocabulary. And the word had just slid off his tongue.
Nessa’s first date with Cassian was oddly not exciting her. Instead, she felt a burning need to see Chayton.
Nessa tried Chayton’s number at the shop. She tried his cell. She texted him for the twentieth time, but she didn’t have to worry about being a pest—every text she’d sent received a red exclamation point in response: they weren’t going through.
Finally, she called Selena.
“This is just Chayton,” Selena explained. “He disappears. He’s not trying to be cagey. He’s devoted to his friends, and he gets really absorbed in what he’s doing.”
“How long is he usually away?” Nessa asked. She was trying not to sound desperate.
“Days, sometimes,” Selena said. “But other times he can be gone for months.”
“Months?” Nessa said. It came out like a squeak. She suddenly felt how much she’d been counting on his help.
“I need to talk to him,” she said. “I’ve got to take this blood test, and I don’t know if I should, and I’m not sure when this wolf thing is coming, and I just…” How could he have left her to manage this all alone?