Starfall

by Michael Griffo

  “Hi, Nadine,” he says. “You look great.”

  What?! Wasn’t he just shocked to see her outside strutting her impregnated stuff? What’s going on? The silver light isn’t emanating from Nadine’s body; it’s not reaching out to twist Archie’s mind and thoughts and words, but could she be doing it telepathically?

  “Thanks, Archie, you too,” Nadine replies. “Love your hair.”

  Absentmindedly Archie rubs the top of his head; he really looks like he’s mesmerized by the vision and voice of Nadine. I don’t know what’s going on, but the tears burn my cheeks even before they start to fall. I can feel them from the inside out, where all my secrets and pain and anger live. I don’t know why they’re springing to life; maybe because I hate what Nadine and her family have done to my friends and me, or because I know that the Jaffe family’s vendetta isn’t finished. All I do know is that I don’t want to cry in Nadine’s presence. But I have less control of girl-cries than I do wolf-howls. Sometimes the body just takes over when it knows the mind is too overwhelmed. Which is why I find myself running toward the river.

  The water feels cool and invigorating and very familiar. A few nights ago I reluctantly sought refuge in this same river, but now there isn’t any struggle; I don’t have to fight the wolf to stay under water; I know this is where I belong.

  Letting my body relax, I feel myself start to float. I see my red hair spreading out around me like freshly drawn blood, and for an instant I think that I’m dying, that my life is being pulled out of me so only the wolf can remain, and remarkably in that instant I’m consumed by a sense of peace more radiant and jubilant than any I’ve ever known.

  I look up, and I’m lost in a glow of sunshine so strong that it penetrates the surface of the water to brighten what lies beneath. The light is like Jess’s friendship, amazing and cherished and pure, and I marvel at how a thin layer of water bewitched by the sun separates me from the chaos on the other side. Is this feeling warranted, manufactured, a premonition? I don’t know and I don’t care; I just want to stay in this tranquility forever. But I have to breathe.

  Breaking the surface of the water my body stiffens because I’m leaving peace behind and entering enemy territory. When I open my eyes, however, I’m startled to see that I’ve brought some of that peace with me. Nadine is nowhere to be found.

  I race over to my friends and am filled with such glee that I practically pounce on top of Caleb. He recoils from my touch; my boyfriend is not in the mood for playtime. Matching dour expressions are clamped to Archie’s and Arla’s faces as well. I offer my friends the gift of peace and this is how I’m repaid? Ingrates!

  “What’s going on?!” I shout, standing over them. They suddenly look far, far away. “The wicked witch may not be dead, but she’s disappeared, which is almost as good.”

  “Nadine wasn’t looking for an invite to stay,” Caleb informs me.

  “As if anyone was going to pony up an invitation,” I reply. “Right?”

  I can’t help myself, and my eyes linger for a few seconds on Archie’s face. He doesn’t answer my question, but he does provide some insight as to why my friends look like the end-of-summer bash has turned into a pity party.

  “She, um, just stopped by to show you . . . this,” Archie says, handing me a rolled up newspaper.

  I open it up to see that it’s this week’s edition of The Weeping Water Weekly, and immediately I know that their impromptu party is being held in my honor and that Nadine, despite her softened appearance, is still made of barbed wire. One touch and she can wound.

  The headline of the Three W is one word, but it only takes one word to destroy my world: WEREWOLF.

  Chapter 3

  I feel like I’m still under water. I know that I’m standing. I know that my bare feet are pushing down into the grass. I know that my arms are pressed against the sides of my body. I know that I’m completely stiff and immobile and stationary, and yet I feel like I’m floating.

  A wind gust travels past me, and my hair is lifted; for a second it’s horizontal, and I’m reminded of how it looked while I was submerged within the body of the river, separated from my friends and from the rest of the world, while I was at peace. I want to be there now. I want to be on the better side of the water’s surface, where words have no sound and headlines have no meaning.

  “Dominy?”

  The wind is gone, and my hair falls to my shoulders. Its landing is gentle, but it feels as if a huge boulder has crashed onto me, making my knees buckle and my arms shake.

  “Dominy!”

  Finally, I gasp, and the warm air rushes into my lungs, revitalizing me, bringing me up from the water’s depths and back to the present, to where I don’t want to be.

  “Domgirl, sit down.”

  Caleb is speaking, but I can’t see him clearly just yet. My vision is lagging behind my breath. I feel his hand on my left arm. Someone else’s hand takes hold of my right arm, and together they help me descend, not to the bottom of the river, but to the safety of my towel.

  My legs stretch out listlessly in front of me, so the heels of my feet glide across the soft fabric, while my hands press down at my sides and my fingers grip the thick cloth tightly. Peace and destruction, living together simultaneously; my body is in perfect balance. My mind is in perfect chaos.

  “They know,” I say. My voice is soft, barely a whisper, but it’s made of fear, so it sounds to me like I’m shouting.

  “No, they don’t,” Caleb replies. His voice is just as quiet, but it’s different, it’s confident. “It’s just a stupid headline.”

  Archie holds the paper up again so I can see the word—WEREWOLF—and it’s like someone has pressed a white-hot branding knife into my eyes. The burning sensation is so ridiculously painful and it penetrates so deeply into the core of my brain that at first I don’t feel a thing; for a moment the meaning of the word escapes me. But then my mind kicks in, and it remembers the word’s definition and origin and implication, and pain roars throughout my body.

  Thankfully, when my mouth opens, no sound rushes out, so no one else knows that my world has officially collapsed. No one else hears the girl screaming and the wolf howling and all the other sounds blasting inside my body; it’s my own silent symphony, my own unheard expression of fear and panic and sorrow. And worst of all, my own inevitable capture.

  “Caleb,” I say, my voice so much calmer than my thoughts, “I’ve been found out.”

  Lines appear on his forehead as it scrunches up and his eyebrows come closer together. For some insane reason his lips elongate into a smile. “No, you haven’t,” he replies.

  I grab his wrist tightly, too tightly, more like an animal and less like a girl, but I can’t help myself. “Read the headline,” I seethe.

  “No,” he says, his voice getting louder, braver. “You read it.” He grabs the newspaper from Archie’s hands and shoves it into mine; it feels like lava. “Read it carefully.”

  It’s only one word; how carefully do I have to read it?

  “I don’t know how, Caleb, but they’ve found out what I am,” I declare.

  “No, Dom,” Archie interjects. “They have no idea what you are. It’s only speculation.”

  It isn’t speculation; it’s discovery! God, I hate when people act like idiots! When they can’t see the truth or when they deliberately avoid the truth when it’s right in front of their eyes. Like I’m clearly doing right now.

  “That’s why they added a question mark,” Archie says.

  I reread the headline, this time seeing it for exactly what it is, and it’s like I’m seeing a sliver of hope. Lars Svenson hasn’t presented fact to our town, not at all; the editor of the Three W is simply playing a guessing game. Gigglaughs rip out of my mouth when I realize that grammar really does save lives. Plug a question mark after the word werewolf, and it takes on a whole new meaning, one that’s rife with doubt. And even though doubt is just fact without the certainty, it has to come from somewhere; there has to be
a reason that compelled Lars to plaster his paper with superstition. All I have to do is skim the opening paragraph to find it.

  While initial laboratory tests confirm that officer Pablo Gallegos was mauled by a wolf during Thursday night’s attack, they also indicate something far more disturbing. Evidence of human saliva was found in the officer’s wounds.

  That word sounds so foreign to me—human—like it doesn’t have any place in the sentence or in my world. What’s it doing there? That’s the same question Lars seems to be asking.

  No one else was admitted to the emergency room and no other person is believed to be involved in the assault, but, until Gallegos awakens from his coma, we can only speculate as to why both human and wolf DNA were found in the victim’s blood sample. It could be simple human error, or it could be something much more unholy.

  Unholy? Really, Lars? Talk about trying to incite a riot. Then again, when I realize this curse began thanks to Luba’s unholy alliance with Orion, Lars’s choice of adjective is less sensational than it is accurate. But is it believable?

  “Do you think the question mark really makes that big of a difference?” I ask.

  “Totally!” Archie cries.

  “Absolutely!” Arla shouts.

  “You know it does!” Caleb yells.

  Lots of noise, but is it just noise to cover their lack of conviction? My friends know, just as I do, that there are three groups of people in this town. The first group will read this article and laugh at Lars’s attempt to mix fiction with fact, forgiving him for letting his creative juices overflow onto the newsprint. The second group, the one that nurses a less favorable view of the man because of the editorial monopoly he holds over Weeping Water’s readers, will believe they have proof that Lars has once again succumbed to his paranoia and memorialized one of his conspiracy theories. They’ll feel they have written confirmation that he’s a quack. That leaves the third group, and while this might be the smallest, it’s also the most dangerous. This group is comprised of the people who willingly accept superstition as truth and myth as fact; they’re the ones who passionately argue that aliens are being bred in a huge hangar in the Nevadan desert for secret scientific study and that man didn’t walk across the face of the moon, but across an elaborately designed Hollywood soundstage. These are the people I’m afraid of, because this headline is all the proof they need that someone like me really does exist.

  “Liars!” I reply. “You all know what this means.”

  Three blank stares. Has Stupid Girl Academy gone coed?

  “The people in this town with vigilante tendencies are going to throw a party,” I explain. “Attacks that only take place when there’s a full moon, human and wolf DNA swimming together in the same petri dish—this is like the grassy knoll suddenly developed a mouth and the power of speech and said ‘Hell yeah, there was another gunman!’ ”

  “Even if some people do latch onto Lars’s outlandish theory,” Arla begins.

  “Which we all know is unoutlandish,” I clarify.

  “Even if they do, who is really going to believe him? It’s ludicrous,” she finishes.

  “Them’s there are some big words, Arla,” Archie says. “But people are scared, and trust me, scared people will grab hold of possibility like a life preserver. It’s human nature.”

  There’s that word again. Well, this girl is only part-human, so my flesh tingles and my fur stands up on end when I feel the outside world closing in tighter and tighter around me. My nature is to fight against the inevitable. But how?

  “What do we do?” I ask.

  “Nothing.”

  And it’s official: Caleb is SGA’s valedictorian.

  “I can’t just do nothing,” I protest. “This is like a public relations nightmare.”

  Caleb rubs some sunscreen onto his arms, the white cream making his muscles look like a snow-topped mountain range; he’s obviously more interested in protecting his pale skin from sunburn than in protecting my life from ruin. “There’s nothing you can do, Domgirl,” he says, his eyes focused on his task and not his girlfriend. “Without exposing yourself to everyone and sabotaging yourself by making your own worst nightmare come true.”

  “Bells is right, Dom,” Archie adds. “If people are that susceptible and that willing to believe that Comic Con is a cover-up so supernatural creatures can safely show their ugly heads in public, there’s nothing you can do to stop that.”

  “Are you saying that when I’m a wolf I’m ugly?” I ask.

  “I so knew she was going to go there,” Arla chimes in. “Riddle me this, Dominy, does the wolf ever wonder if she’s a pretty girl when she transforms back?”

  “Bite me,” I joke. Grateful that I still have friends who make me smile, when all I really want to do is cry.

  “If you would learn not to bite first,” Arla replies, “you wouldn’t be in this situation.”

  Friends who also make me question why they’re my friends in the first place. “Arla!”

  “I’m sorry, Dom, but it has to be said,” she continues, not backing down. “I know that Nadine probably had something to do with Gallegos’s going all bounty hunter on you, but you have got to learn how to take control when you find yourself in these out-of-control situations. Otherwise . . .”

  The next headline is going to replace the question mark after the word werewolf with an exclamation point, and my photo is going to be directly underneath. Grammar can save, but it can also kill.

  Sighing heavily, I lie back on the beach towel and look up at the sky. I can only see an immense stretch of blue; no sun, no golden light is anywhere to be seen. It reminds me of the absence of Jess. If only she had shown up when Gallegos was pointing his gun at me, she could’ve created a distraction, some illusion like an abrupt fire or yellow lightning to make Gallegos pause and give me time to flee into the night. But Jess never came. I know it’s not her fault. Well, that’s a complete lie; it’s at least sort of her fault, but how can I blame her? She was my first victim and my first savior; she doesn’t owe me anything. I’ve just come to think that whenever I’m in danger, Jess will rescue me. Time to start rethinking my options.

  But why do I have to think about survival techniques on such a beautiful day? Why do I have to do anything other than look at my hot boyfriend’s bathing suit ride up the length of his thigh? Because I’m cursed, that’s why. Cursed by a psychotic old Native American Indian woman and her pregnant granddaughter. Which reminds me.

  “Shouldn’t Nadine be staying home at night taking prenatal vitamins instead of hiking through Robin’s Park and hypnotizing cops?” I ask, absentmindedly tugging on the little hairs just above Caleb’s ankle.

  “She was probably foraging through the woods looking for some root herbs to make a potion so her baby won’t grow up to be as vile as she is,” Arla replies.

  I smile because my friend knows exactly the right button to push to make me feel like I’m nothing more than a superficial, gossipy girl. And Archie knows exactly which button to push to make me tumble back to reality.

  “Unless her baby daddy is some unbelievably smokin’ Abercrombie & Fitch flip-flop-wearing dude,” he ponders.

  It’s as if Caleb’s invisible string is pulling at me to look at him, but I refuse; there is no way that he’s the father of Nadine’s baby. I won’t accept it, and I can’t believe for a second that it could be true.

  Turning my head in the other direction is just as bad because I see Barnaby hanging in midair, about to plunge into the river. Stay under, Barnaby; stay where it’s peaceful; don’t ever come back up. My wish is ignored, and seconds later he pops up, shaking his head from side to side and spraying Gwen and Jody with water. The three of them quickly engage in a splash fight, and I wish I could watch them forever, but there’s something nagging at me in the pit of my stomach, the same something that’s growing inside of Nadine’s. The next generation of evil has got to have a father. Then again maybe not.

  “You are not going to believe this!�
��

  In one quick motion Caleb, Archie, and I are surrounding Arla, looking at the screen of her iPhone.

  “And just why are we looking at a jellyfish?” Caleb asks.

  “This isn’t an ordinary jellyfish,” she replies. “It may also be a jaffefish.”

  A what?

  “This type of jellyfish reproduces asexually.”

  I’m only mildly better at science than I am at math, so I can’t follow Arla’s lecture. Luckily, Caleb is a left-side brain person, and he gets it instantly.

  “You think Nadine could’ve impregnated herself?” he asks.

  Archie and I make the same face, as if we just realized we bit into a booger burger; we are beyond disgusted to think that Nadine did the nasty to herself. Teenagers, however, are incredibly fickle, and grossed out quickly turns into engrossed.

  “And you will never ever guess what this type of jellyfish is named,” Arla taunts. “And by never ever I mean never to the infinite power.”

  Well then, why should we even try to guess?

  “It’s called a moon jellyfish!”

  The three of us gasp so loudly that the cluster of kids near us looks over to investigate. Luckily their interest is only mild, and they soon continue with their own conversations, and we follow suit.

  “Let me see that!” I demand, ripping Arla’s phone out of her hands. She’s right! The only type of jellyfish that can reproduce without any help from another jellyfish is called the moon jellyfish. That can’t be a coincidence because I’ve already proven that there are no coincidences. No, this is a sign; the universe is telling us that just as the moon controls me, it’s controlling Nadine. My boyfriend’s thoughts are less sophisticated.

  “Do you think Nadine hooked up with herself again after the dirty deed?” Caleb asks. “Or do you think she’s been avoiding all her texts?”

  Seconds later out bursts his trademark high-pitched laughter, and soon we all join in, our laughter so loud that we attract even more attention. What does it matter? There’s no way that they can know what we’re laughing about; there’s no way that they can know we’ve stumbled upon another possible truth that defies explanation. Because if I can turn into a werewolf and Luba can draw upon Orion for her unnatural powers, why can’t Nadine get pregnant on her own without having sex? And even if the concept of an indecent conception doesn’t entirely compute, it at least allows me to have a few worry-free hours hanging out with my friends.