Liar

by Justine Larbalestier

  Instead, she leans toward me. I think there’s something on my face and she’s going to wipe it off. She doesn’t. She kisses me. The shock of her lips against mine travels from the nerve endings in my scalp to my feet. Her mouth is opening. I feel her tongue lightly press into mine. She tastes clean and faintly pepperminty. Her mouth is warm and her lips smooth. I feel hot and then cold. I’m kissing her in return.

  Tayshawn stares.

  Then, when Sarah pulls away, he leans forward and presses his lips against mine, which are still damp from Sarah’s. His mouth is a little cooler. He presses harder, but his lips are as smooth. He puts his hand to my cheek, both hands, opens his mouth wider, kisses me harder.

  I’m shaking. So’s he. I have no idea what’s happening but I wonder if Zach can feel it.

  When Tayshawn lets go I fall back blinking and watch as Sarah and Tayshawn kiss. My heart is racing. I’m not sure what I think except that I want them to kiss me again.

  I know that none of us killed Zach. We don’t have it in us.

  PART TWO

  Telling the True Truth

  CONFESSION

  I am a werewolf.

  There, I’ve said it.

  The heart of all my lies.

  Of the family’s lies.

  You guessed it already, didn’t you? What with the fur I was born in, the wolf in my throat, my weird family. She’s a werewolf, you said to yourself, from a werewolf family. That explains everything.

  Now you’re thinking, “Well, she killed him then, didn’t she?” This proves it. And accounts for the how as well: a werewolf. Micah the werewolf.

  Except that I didn’t kill Zach. I have never killed a person. Not as a wolf and not as a human.

  Or you’re thinking, “She’s crazy. She’s not just a liar—she’s insane.”

  Werewolves don’t exist. Not anywhere outside of dreams and stories, and yet she says she is a werewolf. Might as well claim that you’re a doorknob or a space station. Micah the doorknob; Micah the space station.

  You think my being a werewolf is the biggest lie of all ’cause it means I’m not the regular kind of liar who pretends she’s a boy, a hermaphrodite, or that Daddy’s an arms dealer.

  No, it’s worse than that: you think I believe it. That I am such a nut job I’m delusional.

  You think I killed him, too. Trapped in my delusional state, believing I am a werewolf, I killed Zach. Believing I’m a werewolf is the only way I can live with what I did.

  Except that I didn’t.

  That was a different werewolf.

  Yes, there’s more than one of us.

  HISTORY OF ME

  The change comes with my period.

  It hurts. Every nerve, every cell, every bone, the shape of my eyes, nose, mouth, my arms, my legs. All of it. Shifts and grinds and groans. Bone stretches, elongates; the muscles, too. Fibers twitch and snap. It’s as if every bone in my body has not only been fractured, but broken open, the marrow spilled. Muscles sheared from bone. Eyes pop. Ears explode.

  I howl.

  For the duration. For the twenty minutes of change I am nothing but a howl. It breaks and deepens and stretches and snaps. Starts human, ends wolf. It’s just as bad when it starts wolf and ends human.

  The cells in my brain. The gray matter. Squeezing and breaking my memories.

  I, the girl, I, the human

  is not

  I, the wolf.

  I could not do it every month. I would not survive.

  Three or four times a year—in the summer—is the most I can manage.

  That’s why I am so good about taking my pill. That’s why in the city I take one every morning without fail.

  Because the shifting of my spine from human to wolf, that alone is enough pain for a lifetime.

  I could not do it every month.

  But I miss my wolf days and long for the summer, for the days between those two twenty-minute bursts of change—human to wolf, wolf to human. Days when I run free and kill and eat raw and never think once about where I fit or who loves me or what I’ll be when I get out of school.

  I just am. I know where I belong.

  Until I’m human again.

  BEFORE

  My father told me about the wolf when I was ten. That’s when he decided that I was old enough to understand the weight of the secret. He’d have waited longer, but he had to tell me before puberty, before my first blood brought my first change. The Greats judged that he was already leaving it too late. One of my cousins changed when she was nine.

  Ten was a bad year for me. I was miserable. The hair I’d been born with returned and every day it seemed to be getting worse, not just on more parts of my body—my feet, the palms of my hands—but coarser and thicker. No doctor had any solution. No hair-removal technique worked for more than a few days. I hated school. The teasing was constant.

  Dad decided to tell me the truth up on the farm. He said a week away from the city would be good for me. We could relax with the Greats and their assorted children and grandchildren.

  I was grateful. I knew they wouldn’t say anything about the hair. Some of my cousins were every bit as hairy: the family illness. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t tease me. They would: about being a city girl, about the color of my skin, about how I dressed, how I talked. Before I’d hated it. Now it seemed like nothing.

  When we played they weren’t as vicious or violent as they normally were. They didn’t lead me out into the depths of the forest and leave me there. Didn’t make me do their chores: cleaning out the stables, spreading compost, feeding the pigs.

  They liked me better when I was covered in hair. They didn’t laugh at me as much and I didn’t rag on them for being the same age as me and not reading as well as my little brother.

  When Dad called me into the house, we were playing soccer on a cleared patch of land where corn had grown, but was now left fallow.

  I kept playing. My cousins stopped, looking at each other and glancing at me. As if they knew what Dad wanted. I kicked the ball at the two cans that marked the goal. Even with the goalie paying no attention I missed.

  “Micah!” Dad called again. I headed toward him slowly, looking back at the cousins. They knew something I didn’t. I wanted them to tell me. I wanted to keep playing. Instead I followed Dad through the trees and into the house.

  Grandmother and Great-Aunt Dorothy were sitting in front of the fireplace. Their dog, Hilliard, curled up in a silvery gray ball at Great-Aunt’s feet. His white snout with the brown stripe that started on the top of his head and ended at his shiny black nose rested on his paws. He raised his head and looked at me and then put it down again.

  Dad sat on the chair next to the couch. I sat in the one on the other side, closest to the fire. Despite all the extra hair I was cold.

  “You know we have an illness in our family,” Dad said.

  I nodded even though it wasn’t a question. I didn’t point at my hairy arms or say anything sarcastic.

  Grandmother and Great-Aunt tutted. I couldn’t tell if they were disapproving of Dad or of me.

  “Well,” Dad said, “it’s not quite what we said it was.”

  Both the Greats harrumphed.

  “She’s only ten,” Dad said. “She needs me to break it to her slowly.”

  “Break what to me slowly?” I asked, feeling a prickle of irritation at being called “only ten.” Dad knew I wasn’t dumb. It was true my grades weren’t that good, but what else would you expect with all the moving from school to school? He just liked hiding things. How bad could it be anyway? I was already covered in hair. I could take whatever it was they were going to tell me. “I want to know.”

  “You’re a wolf,” Grandmother said, jerking her head toward their dog. “Same as your great-uncle there.”

  The farm dog was my great-uncle Hilliard? Great-Uncle Hilliard who’d died? Not just named after him? Grandmother wasn’t smiling. Not that it would have made a difference. She never joked.

  “W
erewolf,” Dad said, glaring at his mother.

  I looked at Hilliard. I looked at Dad. Then at the Greats. None of them were smiling.

  Great-Aunt Dorothy nodded. “Same as your grandmother, your great-uncle, your aunts Jill, Christine, Hen, and uncle Lloyd, and your cousins Sam, Jessie, Susan, Alice, and Lilly. The rest of us are carriers, passing it on, but not wolfish ourselves.” She sounded a little sad. “That’s why you’re hairy. Once you start turning wolf the hair will go. When you’re human, that is. You’ll be hairy only as a wolf. A gray wolf to be exact, Canis lupus. Though most werewolves are Canis dirus, the dire wolf what’s extinct except for werewolves. That’s why we Wilkins are smaller than other werewolf families. Gray wolves only get up to 175 pounds or so. Mostly not even. Same as us. Long and skinny.”

  “Lean,” Grandmother said, stretching out a stringy well-muscled arm. “Strong.”

  “We’re a werewolf family?” I asked. The hair on my arms and face was silvery and coarse. Like animal hair. Like Hilliard’s coat. I felt the skin on my entire body tighten.

  “I told you there’s no point pussyfooting about,” Grandmother admonished Dad. “Micah already understands. Should have told her years ago. It’s not right growing up not knowing what you are.”

  Dad shot his mother a poisonous look. I didn’t know why then but now I’m sure he was thinking of his unknown father, of battling through all his mother’s lies to find him, and failing.

  Even at ten I’d known my family was a mess, but I hadn’t realized how messy. If they were all lying . . . I looked at their faces. They weren’t lying.

  “I’m a werewolf?” It made more sense than the doctors’ explanations for my hairiness. Hormone imbalances and all that. Great-Aunt said the hair was going away. She had, hadn’t she?

  Grandmother leaned forward and patted my knee.

  “It’s not so bad as all that,” she said. “You can live up here with us. Plenty of space for wolfishness here.”

  Hilliard was still looking at me. I thought of all the times I’d petted him and played with him. I hadn’t even known he was a wolf. I thought he was a regular dog. Named after my dead great-uncle. Except that Great-Aunt Dorothy and Grandmother and the others always talked to him as if he was a person. But then I’d seen people in the city carrying dogs in their purses and talking to them as if they were babies. People with animals are weird. Except Dad and the Greats were saying Uncle Hilliard wasn’t even a regular wolf.

  He was a werewolf. Like me.

  “Can he understand what we’re saying?” I asked.

  “Mostly,” Grandmother said. “Though it’s hard to tell. Hilliard doesn’t change anymore. He’s a wolf all the time.”

  Would that happen to me? Did I have to live up here? Did Mom know? Would it hurt?

  “When will I become a wolf,” I asked. “How long for?”

  They told me. They told me everything they knew about the signs that would tell me the change was coming, about cycles, what the wolf me would know and what the human. How to control it. How to live with it.

  They told me how long the Wilkins had been wolves. (Always.) What the family legends were. (Many and varied.) Why they’d come to America. (Space. Freedom.)

  When they were finally done my butt was numb, my head was spinning, and I was so hungry my stomach growled. Yes, like a wolf.

  FAMILY HISTORY

  When The Change—menopause—comes most of us stop the other kind of change. One way or the other. Grandmother stayed human, greeting each new month with a tightening of the skin, with headaches and hot flashes, sometimes an itchy layer of fur that’s shed within hours. Human still.

  Hilliard went the other way. He’s wolf all the time. Prowling, howling, stuck on a farm that isn’t even a tenth of the size of a normal range.

  He strays of course. How could he not?

  He takes deer and raccoon and rabbit. Sheep sometimes. But not often.

  Humans? you ask.

  Never humans. Wolves don’t eat people. Neither do werewolves. Not unless there’s a reason. We never kill a person for food. Too dangerous. Too suspicious. Besides—rabbit, deer—they taste better.

  Upstate, when those sheep disappear, everyone blames it on coyote. Coyote bigger than anyone’s ever seen before. Coyote are bigger in the Northeast. But that big?

  There aren’t any wolves in upstate New York. So it can’t be wolves taking them.

  There’re hardly any wolves in North America anymore. A few in the far north: Alaska, parts of Canada, tiny bits of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Those they reintroduced into Yellowstone Park—they’re the only wolves that aren’t in danger of being shot at or trapped.

  North America used to be all wolves. All wolves and many werewolves, too. Now it’s humans and highways and hubris. At least that’s what the Greats say. But sitting on their porch in the middle of summer all I can see is honeysuckle and hummingbirds. And Hilliard.

  He’s lonely. The lone wolf—except for when my cousins change. Then they run like a pack, playing, hunting, howling. In summers I’m there, too. But my cousins and me change for only a few days each month. The rest of the time it’s just Hilliard.

  Wolves are social. They need their pack.

  I wonder if Hilliard misses changing. Living life as both.

  I know Grandmother does.

  THE MOON

  The moon has nothing to do with it. Not unless you cycle with the moon.

  You must be wondering about the males. They don’t menstruate. They don’t go through menopause. How do they turn into wolves? How do they stop?

  There are always more female werewolves than male. Because it’s the females who cause the change. A male werewolf who grows up alone, far from his own kind, never becomes a wolf.

  He has to be around females. We start to change, they start to change. We hit menopause, they hit menopause.

  This is why so many of us live in packs. Those of us who aren’t extinct.

  Those of us who aren’t hiding in the cities dutifully taking our pills. Or, if they’re boys, avoiding their own kind. A boy wolf can stay human forever—all he has to do is never go near a girl wolf.

  THE ANIMALS

  You’re wondering about the other animals on the farm: the chickens, geese, pigs, goats, cows, and horses. How do they cope with wolves around? Not just Hilliard, but when the other Wilkins wolves change together?

  First of all, geese aren’t afraid of anything, not even human wolves. They’re not like regular animals, so they don’t shy from us when we’re human. (There’s a good side to most animals fearing us: there’s never been a rat or a mouse in our apartment in the city—or on the farm—you’d think my parents would be grateful.)

  But the animals freak when we change. The minute one of us feels it coming we get away from the house and stables and pens and into the woods. Of course, the freaking at the change is nothing compared to how the animals feel about having a wolf anywhere near them. When the pack is out in force, to be on the safe side, the Greats make sure none of the animals are loose.

  Though we wolves know to leave them alone.

  Rabbits and deer, yes. Anything domesticated, no. Too much trouble, whether they’re our own or our neighbors’ animals.

  BEFORE

  My pill?

  Sometimes, not often, I forget.

  My desk?

  The one that clangs? That’s made of metal?

  It’s a cage: three feet by six feet.

  When I forget my pill that’s where I am imprisoned.

  It’s where they put me the first time.

  It was like this:

  I was twelve. My skin started to itch. The way it used to when the extra hair was growing in. I was in middle school. The hair had disappeared. I’d been in the same middle school ever since.

  My skin started to itch on the walk home from school. I had the cell phone my parents gave me to call them in an emergency—the emergency being any of the signs that I was about to change—but m
y school was only five blocks from home: one avenue, four streets. I was sure I’d make it. I quickened my pace. Bolted up the stairs, through the apartment door, hung my backpack from the coat rack by the door.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said. He was at the kitchen table, surrounded by a pile of glossy magazines and pamphlets, laptop open, typing furiously. He looked up, nodded, turned back to the screen.

  I opened my mouth to tell him about my skin itching, but that was the do-not-disturb look. Instead I went into the bathroom. There was blood. Not a lot. Tiny spots of it on my pants.

  Two of the signs the Greats had told me to watch for.

  Hot flashes was another. Also aching teeth.

  I washed my hands and felt my forehead. I didn’t feel particularly warm. My teeth felt fine. How many signs before I tell Mom and Dad?

  I went back into the kitchen, leaned against the fridge. “Dad?” I said tentatively. The whole thing seemed unreal. Hey, Dad, I think maybe it’s about to happen. It might be time to lock me in the cage.

  He didn’t look up.

  Maybe I should wait for another sign? But the Greats had said that even one sign was enough. Sometimes the first change comes on scary fast.

  “Dad,” I repeated.

  “What, Micah? I’m kind of busy.” Dad looked up.

  I felt idiotic. What if it was nothing? The blood spots were really tiny.

  “What, Micah?”

  “Um,” I said, “I think it might be about to, or, you know, going to happen.”

  “What’s going to happen? This is due in”—he glanced at the screen—“two hours.”

  “The change. I think—”

  Dad jumped up, narrowly missing whacking his head on the bicycle above. He put his hand to my cheek. “You feel hot?”

  “Not yet. Just my skin.” I held out my arms. Red bumps were starting appear. “And there was blood. Not much but—”

  “Damn,” Dad said. He almost never swears. “This is it then. You ready to go in?”

  I wasn’t, but I nodded. The Greats had said it could happen quickly. I felt strange, like my heart was beating too fast, but I couldn’t tell if that was the change starting to happen or me being afraid it was about to happen. Then I remembered: rapid heartbeat was another sign.