by C. D. Bell
Chayton asked a question but Nessa couldn’t understand it—the connection was going in and out.
“Say that again?” she said.
“You were trying to run away?”
“Of course!” Nessa said. “The wolves were attacking this big wolf who is in charge of everything and this other wolf who was murdered was defending him. One of the same pack came after me, and I felt him bite my ankle.”
“He came after you from behind?” Chayton said. “You were running away from him?”
“Of course,” Nessa said. “I’m actually not stupid. I would have never tried to get anywhere near the wolf from that invading pack. Especially since he had those creepy filed teeth like that one I tried to free from the trap.”
“What? What kind of teeth? You’re breaking up.”
“They were sharp, like they’d been filed down or something to make them sharper. And they were huge, too, these wolves.”
She explained how the big gray wolf had protected her and then seemed to know the others in her pack.
“Oh, good,” Chayton said, dropping the accusation in his tone. “I’m glad he’s doing something right.”
“You know that wolf? Is he part of the pack?”
There was silence on his side of the call that went on long enough for Nessa to start to wonder if the call had been dropped.
“You still there?” she said.
“I’m thinking,” he answered. “Something bad is going on. How’s your ankle?”
“Sore,” Nessa said. “I’m supposed to run tomorrow. There’s a meet. It’s where you qualify for States.”
“You absolutely cannot run on a bad ankle,” Chayton said.
“I have to,” Nessa said. “If I don’t make States, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Recruiters will be there. Colleges. I’ve worked so hard.”
“Listen to me,” Chayton said, his tone verging on nasty. “You’ve got to heal. These wolves coming into your territory, being that aggressive. This is an issue. You have to be ready to fight.”
Nessa remembered seeing the submissive wolf go down. “Is Billy Lark okay?” she said.
Instead of answering her question, Chayton told her to sleep with a poultice of garlic, comfrey, cabbage, and plantain on her ankle, wrapped tightly in plastic wrap. “I’ll ask Selena if she has any of those around. I’ve got to go now.”
Chayton hung up, and Nessa just stared at the phone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Nessa managed to limp her way through the school day. Pretending to have a sore wrist, she went to the nurse, took the ace bandage she was dispensed, and wrapped it around her ankle where no one could see it under her jeans. It still hurt, but not as much, and with the extra support she was better able to hide the pain.
Fortunately, there was no practice that day. Coach kept them inside, where, instead of Chariots of Fire, they watched the first hour of Unbroken. Soccer had a short practice, so Cassian snuck into the screening and scooted his metal folding chair close to Nessa’s. Cynthia was sitting in the row in front of them. Even though they were friends, it made Nessa feel weird to have Cynthia leaning back to laugh when the track team was on the ship to the Olympics in Germany and taking full advantage of the all-you-can-eat situation on board (in the movie). Nessa didn’t know what the joke was, but it was clearly something. She didn’t ask, though. Cassian might be friends with Cynthia, but Nessa still did not trust her.
This time Coach didn’t see Cassian in the dark room and he got to stay until Coach turned the movie off.
“Good luck tomorrow,” Cassian said, pulling her aside when the movie watching was breaking up. He walked with her slowly outside, into the dark, heading toward the parking lot.
Nessa had the feeling that he wanted to kiss her again. Somehow she didn’t want him to. All she could think about was getting the ace bandage off and soaking her ankle again. How was she possibly going to run in a race the next day when she could barely walk now?
“Thanks,” Nessa said. Just then, Bree beeped from across the lot. “My ride’s here.” She waved at Bree, then smiled at Cassian as she hobbled off. Nessa could tell by the look on his face that Cassian was surprised.
Chayton was true to his word, and sure enough, Nessa found a plastic bag of herbs for making a poultice hanging on her front door. The note with instructions was from Selena. Nessa felt highly skeptical as she soaked the herbs and then wrapped them around her foot, but they felt good—tingly and cool.
Nate, hopping around the kitchen in train pajamas he still wore even though he’d grown out of them three years ago and the pants barely covered his knees, held his nose dramatically at the smell.
The next morning, the swelling on Nessa’s ankle was almost entirely gone. She rotated it while still in bed and felt nothing bad. It hurt a bit when she stood right on it, but after another double dose of ibuprofen, the pain was hardly noticeable.
Nessa tested putting her weight on her ankle as the team moved off the bus, and while the varsity girls ran a few laps to warm up, Nessa visited the medical tent and had the trainer tape her ankle. The trainer winced when he saw the bruising and the puncture marks left by the wolf’s tooth. “What did that to you?” he said.
“My brother left a woodworking project out in our garage,” Nessa lied. “Nails. Thank goodness I got a tetanus shot last month.”
“Yeah,” the trainer said, looking skeptical. If a kid hadn’t come in with a sprain just then, Nessa was pretty sure the questions would have kept coming.
On the starting line, Cynthia, uncharacteristically, turned back and bumped fists with everyone on the varsity team, Nessa, then Hannah, then Erin Cominski and Nora Liles. “Do your best,” Cynthia told them all, and Nessa was impressed and surprised until the horn sounded and it was time to go.
At first, her ankle felt fine. She ran at the front of the pack, neck and neck with Cynthia. She ran down a gravel road around a landfill/junkyard, and then up a hill and around an old cemetery. She was running fast. She felt strong. With about a mile to go, Nessa passed Cynthia. That’s where her ankle gave out.
It twisted slightly underneath her. She kept running. She kept up her pace, but she could feel her opposite arm swinging too much, compensating for the fact that she was favoring her other leg.
She dropped back, a few runners she’d passed now passing her. She tried not to let this get to her. She took a deep, ragged breath. It wasn’t that far to the end of the race. She just had to run through the pain.
Then she rolled her ankle again. This time she stopped, cried out in pain, and crouched down over it. Within seconds, the pack she was running with was gone, and runners she hadn’t even seen before were passing her.
Nessa stood.
She willed herself to move forward and she did, but her ankle hurt worse with each step. Nessa felt like she was running in slow motion, as if underwater. Runner after runner passed her by.
Nessa kept going anyway. She had no sense if she was running fast anymore. She was just running. As the course returned to the school grounds, she straggled into the chute, knowing the top runners had already finished. Embarrassingly enough, Coach Hoffman came over to comfort her. “Are you hurt?” he asked. “You’re limping.”
Nessa didn’t say anything. She swallowed.
“Hey,” he said, leaning down. “You okay?”
“What was my time?” she choked out.
“18:10,” Coach said.
Nessa wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. She would have killed for that time last year, but now it felt way too slow. “I’m pretty sure that time’s going to take you to States,” Coach said. “It’s not what you ran at Homecoming but it’s still very strong, and the two numbers together will let you qualify.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The cross-country bus and the boys’ soccer bus pulled into the parking lot behind Tether High at about the same time. When Nessa climbed off, carrying her pillow and sleeping bag and backpack, Bree was leaning
against the hood of her car, talking to Gabe. By the time Nessa had dumped her stuff in the back seat and texted her mom that the bus was back and she was with Bree, Cassian had wandered over. “How’d you do?”
“I rolled my ankle,” she said, trying to control the emotion she felt. “I ran 18:10,” she told him. “How about you?”
“We won. But forget about that. I wondered about your limp. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, it’s getting better,” Nessa fibbed. She didn’t feel like going into it. She was relieved when Cassian let the subject drop. It was getting chilly. The sun was beautiful on the horizon, and everyone was hanging around, chatting, savoring the moment.
Just as the passing cars were turning on their headlights and the trees were turning inky black against the still light-filled pale blue sky, a motorcycle turned into the Tether High parking lot. Nessa thought nothing of it at first.
But then she saw that the bike was weaving around as if the driver were scanning the crowd of kids still hanging out at their cars. The bike was headed in her direction, its lights blinding her until, at the last minute, the driver turned the bike 90 degrees and brought it to a decisive stop. Nessa saw that the rider was a man in leathers. When he took off his helmet and shook out his long hair, Nessa saw that it was Chayton.
There was something about him, about the sight of him. It was just the way he swung a leg over the wide seat of the Harley, or the spread of his strong, fine fingers as he palmed the helmet. There was something considered and deliberate in every gesture he made. Not to mention that as he stowed his helmet on the back of the bike and unzipped his jacket, you could see his sculpted abs under his thin shirt. In spite of how annoying and unreliable he was, Nessa felt something in her throat tightening just looking at him, and from points across the parking lot she heard a few different girls start to whisper. One of the boys whistled.
“Who the heck is that?” Cassian said, his voice low so only Nessa could hear. “Do you know him?”
“Unfortunately,” Nessa said, “I do.”
She took a few steps toward Chayton, meeting him about halfway between his bike and Bree’s car, a safe distance from the others. Nessa was wary. She felt like they were representatives from opposing armies, meeting to agree on terms before battle. Every pair of eyes in the parking lot seemed to be turned their way.
“I thought you weren’t running on that ankle,” Chayton said.
Nessa was still in her racing tank with the bib number pinned on.
“I thought you were in Wyoming.”
“I was.”
For another minute, they just stared each other down until Chayton finally said, “So, you think being stubborn makes you strong—is that it?”
Nessa did think that, but the last thing she would do was admit it here, so she didn’t say anything.
“You’re not going to hear me, I get that, but I’m not going to dance around you either. This is serious, what’s happening to you, and it’s dangerous. This isn’t the time for some teenage rebellion horseshit. I’m not your parent.”
He turned then, and Nessa thought, Okay, so he came down here to yell at me for running the race and now he’s going off in a huff. Fine. Be crazy. But after he straddled his bike, and slid his helmet on, he reached behind him and pulled out another. Lifting his chin in her direction, he said, “I’m going to teach you something that will offer you better protection than what you’ve been doing. You gonna come with me?”
And Nessa hated it, but she felt just then that he had won. Because all the lightness of the moment in the parking lot was gone, replaced by the fear. It was like getting woken up in the morning before you’re ready.
Back was the fear she’d felt—smelled—facing down the other wolf, tracing back to every other fear she’d had in her life. The white wolf who bit her, the fear that Nate would not grow up to be okay, the fear that she wouldn’t get out of Tether, that she wouldn’t go to college, that she wouldn’t be able to run. And also the fear that she would escape someday, and that she’d no longer have a mom and a home.
She returned to Cassian, who looked peeved. She started to speak, then shook her head numbly because she had no idea how to explain. She looked at Bree, whose jaw had dropped, at Gabe, who looked like he didn’t quite know what to do with his face. “Sorry, guys,” Nessa said. “I’ve gotta go.”
And then she walked over to Chayton’s bike, threw a leg over the saddle, put on the helmet, and placed her hands gingerly on either side of his waist.
“Oh, no, sweetheart,” Chayton said. “When this bike starts moving, you gotta be holding on for real.” Nessa reached around to grasp him fully around the middle. Through the leather of his jacket, his muscles felt like they were made of steel. The bike peeled away from the parking lot. Nessa could feel the loose hair flowing behind her as the bike picked up speed.
“If I’m not home in an hour,” Nessa shouted into the wind, hoping Chayton could hear, “my mom’s going to freak out. She’s going to call 9-1-1.” Nessa was pretty sure this wasn’t true. Vivian had more pressing things to worry about than Nessa’s coming back late. Vivian trusted her daughter.
“Don’t worry,” Chayton said. “I’ll have you home before your precious mama so much as notices that you were gone.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Riding on the back of Chayton’s bike, Nessa got cold. As they passed through Tether’s Main Street and then out in the direction of the old Dutch Chem plant, her teeth started to chatter and her fingers to ache. She held on tight to Chayton for warmth as much as to keep from slipping off the seat when he took the curves, and when they got to where they were going—the side of one of the smaller roads leading out of Tether—they pulled over next to a random farm field.
Chayton said nothing but found a flannel shirt in his bike’s trunk box and tossed it to her. Nessa wrapped it around her shoulders, missing the winter jacket she’d left in the back of Bree’s car.
“Where are we?” she asked, looking around.
“We’re at the old distillery,” he said, pointing. “See that?” Nessa peered into the darkness and, yes, behind some trees, she could see the dark outlines of a building. “A buddy of mine is reopening the place. He’s going to make his own whiskey, which is kind of ironic.”
“Why?” Nessa said.
“One of the reasons people invented whiskey was because the water was contaminated and would make you sick. Now we’ve got whiskey coming out of the town with the poisoned water supply.”
“Not anymore,” Nessa said. “Not since the Dutch Chem cleanup.”
“Whatever,” Chayton said, walking away from the bike, jumping a narrow ditch, then digging into the cold dirt with the heel of his boot. “Do you see what’s growing here?”
Nessa didn’t follow him. Keeping her arms crossed in front of her chest, she said, “Aren’t those weeds? It’s November.”
“Wrong,” said Chayton. “It’s rye.” He reached down with his hand and picked up a handful of something—a few small strands of what, in the dark, looked to Nessa vaguely like grass. “You know much about rye?”
“Is it what makes rye bread?”
Chayton nodded. “Rye’s the kind of miracle plant that white farmers used for centuries and then forgot all about. They didn’t need it after they came over here from Europe and stole so much rich land from Native Americans. At least, until it all turned to dust and blew away after a hundred years of erosion and soil degradation. The dust bowl—when white farmers began to know what it was like to be like us.”
Nessa felt like she should apologize or something, but Chayton was moving too quickly.
“Now, farmers have been learning to live in better harmony with the land. They’re going back to methods from their homelands, and rye is part of that. You plant it in fields where nutrients have been sucked out, and it restores the soil. It grows in the harshest conditions. It grows in the winter. It sends down deep roots so that when it’s time to plant corn, those
plants’ roots can have a path to follow, and everything gets better established right away.
“And then, with some varieties of rye, bonus! You can harvest and make whiskey. My friend’s got his own field here, but really, what’s brilliant about his plan is farmers will let him grow his crop in their fields for free—it’s like a favor to them.”
“Wow,” said Nessa, sarcastically. “This is fascinating.”
“It is,” Chayton said, ignoring her tone, picking what still looked to Nessa like simple prairie grass. He stepped back over the ditch to take Nessa’s hand, press the rye grass into her palm, and close her fist around it. “For someone with a wolf issue, rye can be your best friend.”
Chayton climbed back on the bike, waiting until Nessa realized she was meant to follow him. After she’d climbed on, Chayton gunned the engine, driving down the rutted dirt road past the distillery building he’d pointed out, and then to another field, where brown stalks of what looked like wheat were growing waist high. “This is what rye looks like when it’s mature,” Chayton said.
After climbing off the bike, he walked into the field and Nessa followed him. “You feel that?” Chayton said. Nessa wasn’t sure what he meant. The dry grasses were brushing her arms and enveloping her, but instead of feeling itchy, she felt like everything around her had gone quiet, the way she felt in the band room at school, which was lined with dense foam panels meant to deaden sound. There was more, too, now that she stopped to consider it. In spite of Chayton’s loaner shirt, she had still been freezing standing in the other field. Now, she was so warm, her fingers and toes ached with the return of sensation.