Out of Salem

by Hal Schrieve

  “Nobody knows I’m a werewolf. If they did, I’d be kicked out or sent to get electroshock treatments.”

  “How does nobody know? The registry would . . .” Elaine trailed off, squinting at Aysel in confusion.

  “My mother never told anyone I was a werewolf. She doesn’t believe in regulating werewolves. So I’m not registered.”

  “That’s nice of her,” Elaine said. “My parents dumped me at the police station the second that my first moon was over and I was strong enough to stand up again.”

  “Why were they allowed to do that?” Aysel asked. “I thought it was Child Protection Services that dealt with . . .” Aysel trailed off when Elaine grinned and started laughing. Her laugh was a wheezing, throaty thing, like a hyena.

  “I don’t know what world you’ve been living in. I mean, it might be different out West, I guess. CPS doesn’t have much to do with werewolf kids where I come from.”

  “I don’t know any other werewolves,” Aysel said apologetically.

  “For most of us it’s like, a little hospital, a touch of juvie, and then more hospital till your brain turns black and your magic curls up inside your muscles and dies. I ran away before I was old enough to get shocked more than twice a year, and even then my magic got pretty messed up. I still have like magic arthritis and a bunch of pain problems.”

  “In newspapers you only read about electroshock as helping people,” Aysel said.

  “Yeah. It doesn’t help. Or like it eventually makes you stop transforming but your body hates you. It makes you go crazy.

  I almost joined a cult for a second in 1992 and then squatted in this house for four years with some anarchists until they got super into drugs and I was like, oh wait, this place is gross.”

  “Oh,” Aysel said.

  “We got diseases, you know! We’re all little scummy babies running around and they wanna shock us until we turn into regular babies but we aren’t regular.”

  Aysel nodded. “My dad wanted me to get shock treatment. My mom divorced him.”

  “Tell your mom she’s cool for not registering you.”

  Aysel had never met someone angrier than herself. She couldn’t figure out what to say in response to this. She tightened her mouth, tasting her hot morning breath against her tongue. She wanted to ask about Elaine, find out everything about her. She felt her stomach do a strange slippery flop inside her. “Where do you live now?” she asked. “Like, when you’re not here in the woods.”

  “Nowhere,” Elaine said. “I’m a travelin’ soldier.”

  “Yeah,” Aysel said as if she understood. She blinked and, embarrassingly, yawned loudly. It was one of those yawns that come on with an irrepressible force, and she couldn’t stop herself.

  “How old are you, anyway, little puppy?”

  Aysel scowled. “I’m fourteen.”

  “A puppy,” Elaine said again, giggling. Her face grew serious. “But hey, really, are you really fourteen?”

  “Yeah,” Aysel said. She felt like she should leave soon.

  “You’re really young.”

  Aysel wasn’t sure whether to feel flattered. Mostly she felt as if she’d missed a chance for something. “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen,” Elaine said, throwing another log on the fire.

  “Wow, nineteen, that’s so old,” Aysel said. She meant it to sound biting but instead it sounded whiny.

  “It is, compared to fourteen,” Elaine said. Suddenly she looked up, tensing. “Someone’s coming.”

  “Hello, good morning, is anyone alive?” a boy’s voice called from the trees. There was a rustle in the bushes behind the tent.

  “Oh hey,” Elaine said, her shoulders relaxing. “Chad’s back. Chad, do you have pants or do you need some?” Elaine reached over and covered Aysel’s eyes with a grimy hand. Aysel felt the heat of her palm against her thin eyelids and shuddered. It was only partly because of how dirty Elaine’s hands were.

  “I have pants,” Chad called back. “I ended up pretty close to camp when I turned back. My clothes were right there.”

  “Your clothes? Your clothes? Whose pants are those, Chad?” Elaine yelled, uncovering Aysel’s eyes. She was laughing again. Aysel turned around to look at Chad.

  “Okay, yes, they’re your pants,” Chad said. He emerged from behind the tent. He was not wearing a shirt, and his chest was striped with scars: two, cutting bilaterally across his chest, looked straight and sharp and surgical, white and faded, but others were like bite marks. The scars intersected with a pattern of wobbly home-made-looking tattoos. He had on a pair of acid-washed jeans which looked as if they had been made for someone with broader hips than either Chad or Elaine. Chad rolled up the cuffs and hitched the pants up around his hips. They fell down again, showing the waistband of blue boxer shorts. His curly black-brown hair was tangled in one large mat on the top of his head. He had a slightly greasy mustache. Aysel recognized him as the boy who had spoken to her on the bus, the one who had known about the supermoon.

  “Hey, Lane, do we have a rope?” Chad held his pants up with one hand and gestured to them as a way of indicating that he was having a hard time keeping them up. The clean pants contrasted with the rest of Chad’s grimy body. His pale skin was smeared with dirt and as he approached Aysel could smell a strong odor coming off of him—sweat and blood, for the most part. Aysel knew she didn’t smell too great either, so she couldn’t hold it against him.

  “In the tent,” Elaine said. Chad went into the tent.

  “He’s such a loser,” Elaine said, loud enough that Chad could probably hear. “I love him so much.”

  Chad emerged wearing the pants with a rope and a sweatshirt. He looked at Aysel with interest. “So who are you?” he asked. “Are you new?”

  “No,” Aysel said. “I’ve lived here for a long time.”

  “She’s not with the House,” Elaine said matter-of-factly. “She’s enrolled in school. She’s like fourteen.”

  “Hey, I’ve met you before,” Chad said. “Cool necklace.”

  “I saw you on a bus,” Aysel said. “You asked what day it was.”

  “Yeah,” Chad said, grinning. “You knew about the supermoon. I was like heyyyyy this kid’s somehow . . . You’re in school? How’d you work that?”

  “Her mom lied to the school people,” Elaine said.

  Chad raised his eyebrows. “That rocks,” he said. “I mean about your mom. School sucks.”

  Aysel shrugged. “It pretty much sucks.”

  “Yeah, I bet,” Chad agreed.

  “School is important, though,” Elaine said.

  Aysel remembered again it was a school day, and she needed to get home and get ready—if she wasn’t already late. She stood up anxiously and almost tripped over her own feet. “I have to leave, actually,” she said. “I need to get back to the road and get to class. Do you know which way it is?”

  Chad laughed. “Uh-oh, poor little werewolf can’t find its way out of the woods.”

  Elaine looked like she was also struggling to contain a smirk. “How the hell have you survived this long?” she asked Aysel.

  “I just don’t go over the hills,” Aysel said. “I stay close to Zena Road and the Maple Mound reservoir. That way my mom can find me if anything goes wrong. I’ve never been this far out.”

  “That ruins all the fun,” Chad said. “We get to run through all the fields, too.”

  “Ruins all the excitement to hide all night,” Elaine added. “Anyway, it’s misty a lot this time of year. There’s nobody looking, except maybe the odd cow. Police don’t come out this way.”

  “Well, okay,” Aysel said. “But my mom has rules. And the cops . . .”

  Both of them laughed, the fire crackling between them, and Aysel flushed.

  “You have to learn to navigate sometime,” Elaine said.

  “Hey, I’m a puppy, remember? Can’t you just tell me where to go?” Aysel asked. She was beginning to worry that if she was marked absent her mother would fi
nd out and think that she’d run into trouble as a wolf and gotten shot or captured—or that she meant to skip school. Aysel wasn’t sure which was worse.

  “That way,” Elaine said, pointing. “But there’s no trail.”

  “It’s not that way, it’s that way,” Chad said, pointing the opposite way. He smiled.

  Aysel pursed her mouth. “Please just tell me where to go,” she said.

  “I’m right, Chad’s messing with you. Just stay and have breakfast with us,” Elaine said. “You need to eat some human food. You need energy.”

  “It’s Spam and bananas,” Chad said. “How exciting, right?” He rolled his eyes. “There’s instant oatmeal too.”

  “Spam tastes okay when you fry it,” Elaine said.

  “I should go right now,” Aysel said, though she was hungry. “I can hang out with you all sometime, that would be cool, but I need to get to school. I can’t start missing first classes after a full moon when everyone’s so worked up about werewolves.”

  “Whatever,” Chad said. “I have to pee.” He stood up and went into the bushes.

  Elaine looked interested in what Aysel had said. “You mean like, hang out not on the full moon? You’d want to do that?”

  Aysel looked at Elaine. She wondered if Elaine had friends who weren’t werewolves or who didn’t live in the woods. “Sure,” she said.

  “Like—could we go to the movies?”

  Aysel was surprised by her enthusiasm. “Yeah, we could go to the movies,” she said. She took a deep breath. “But not right now.”

  “Oh my gosh. Could we go to the movies this Saturday?” Elaine asked.

  “Um. Sure?”

  “We should go to a matinee.”

  “I guess, yeah,” Aysel said. “That sounds fun.”

  “What time should I meet you? We can go see The Crucible. Wait, is that still out? Probably not, huh.”

  “I . . . have to ask my mom. Maybe the afternoon?” Aysel said, wondering if she was going to be able to leave soon. Elaine and Chad didn’t seem to understand that she had everything to lose if anyone realized she was always sick the week of the full moon. They had already lost everything, or hadn’t had it to begin with. Aysel knew that meant she should be sympathetic toward them, but it made her feel even more alienated. She couldn’t even empathize with them.

  “How about two?” Elaine asked. She was still caught up in the details of the movie. “I’ll wait around for half an hour and if you don’t come I’ll know you’re a liar or your mom’s a jerk or something,” Elaine said.

  “Okay,” Aysel said. “Let’s uh, let’s do that.”

  “This is great,” Elaine said. She was grinning. She opened a can of Spam. “I’m so excited we’re friends now.”

  “I’m really excited about meeting other werewolves, I really am. I just . . . really have to leave now, okay?”

  Elaine shrugged. She was smiling goofily. “That’s real,” she said. “I’m still worried about you not eating breakfast.”

  “I get lunch at school,” Aysel said. “I’ll be okay.”

  “Okay.” Elaine brushed her hair back from her greasy forehead. “The path we cut to the road is through those trees.” She pointed. “That’s not very far. Not too much brush.”

  Aysel set off walking. The sun was still low overhead, but she couldn’t be sure that she would make it to class on time. As the wind stung Aysel’s toes, she realized she still didn’t have any shoes on. Elaine hadn’t had any extra to spare, apparently. This was going to be very hard to explain, Aysel thought.

  By the time she walked into the office—without her backpack and with pine needles still sticking to her clothes—it was past ten in the morning.

  “I’m really sorry,” Aysel said to the woman at the front desk.

  “What did you do, dear, roll down a hill in the woods?” the woman asked her, sniffing. Her hair was frosted and fluffed up on the top of her head. Aysel looked at the name tag in front of the woman. It said Crystal Bell. It took Aysel a moment to realize that this was the woman’s name. “Are you barefoot?”

  “Yes,” Aysel said with automatic impudence.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I am barefoot.”

  “Are you all right? Were you in the woods?” Crystal’s voice was rising in pitch, like a thermometer shooting up. She looked very distressed.

  “Not in the woods, exactly. I, uh, I rode my bike to school,” Aysel invented wildly, looking as earnest as possible.

  “A bike?” the woman named Crystal Bell asked, looking down her nose at Aysel. Aysel knew she was trying to say something about Aysel’s weight as well as the fact that Aysel had no shoes on.

  “My mom just got it for me,” Aysel said quickly. “She wants me to exercise more.” That should satisfy her, Aysel thought. She had referred to her own fatness. Adults liked it when she acted insecure about her body. Now Crystal Bell the secretary wouldn’t have to poke at her about it.

  “Oh, I see,” said Crystal Bell. Her eyebrows looked like thin needles.

  “And, uh, there’s this stretch of the road with no shoulder, and a truck drove by and I had to go off in the ditch to avoid getting hit. My bike’s tire popped and I had to leave it there. I uh, I lost my shoes when I fell.” Aysel wasn’t sure if this was entirely credible, so she said it with a helpless smile. “I had to take a city bus the rest of the way to school. My mom’s already at work.” It reoccurred to Aysel that Azra would be worried about her. She would be worried that Aysel wouldn’t be able to get to class. “Could uh, could I call her so she knows what happened?”

  Crystal Bell stared skeptically at Aysel but gestured with a manicured finger so that Aysel could see where the phone was. Aysel rang her mother and left her a voicemail saying she had had a mishap but was at school. She hoped Azra would remember to check her messages. If she didn’t she would be in a state of absolute panic by the afternoon. She’d think that Aysel was dead or had been captured by police.

  “Can I just go to class now?” Aysel asked Crystal Bell.

  “You can’t go to class barefoot,” the secretary said. “You should go to the nurse’s office and get some shoes there.”

  “I don’t need to. I have some extra socks and shoes in my locker for gym class,” Aysel said, wincing at the idea of putting some unknown pair of smelly extra nurse’s office shoes on her feet.

  “All right, well, go get those.” The secretary tapped her fingers on her desk. It was clear that she wanted Aysel to go away.

  “I will,” Aysel said.

  “All right, dear. I hope the rest of your day isn’t as unusual and stressful as this morning must have been.”

  “It won’t be,” Aysel said with bright ferocity.

  “Good luck with the bike,” Crystal Bell told Aysel in a saccharine tone. As Aysel walked out into the hallway and headed to class, she made a mental note that she would never in her life learn to ride a bicycle.

  9

  After two days in the Tahirs’ garage, the potion was no longer the original deep purple; instead it was an odd opalescent lavender color. It had the consistency of a thick milkshake, and it wobbled as Z walked home with it on the night of the supermoon, moving shakily. The sky above was slate gray and mist covered the ground and slid between the trees. Z imagined that a living person would be able to feel the mist pressing against their skin.

  One of Z’s eyes couldn’t see properly; something had gotten into it, and because the eyeball was so dry, Z had not been able to get it out again. The eye was the same one that had fallen out in church. Z was afraid to touch it too much, in case it fell out again. They closed their eyelid over their eye on the walk home, which left everything a little skewed and off-kilter, and made it even more difficult to balance.

  When Z was a block and a half away from Mrs. Dunnigan’s apartment, they paused and set their bag down on the cold sidewalk. They weren’t sure if they should hide the potion from Mrs. Dunnigan or not. They knew they would have to explain where the n
ecromancy books had come from, and even if Mrs. Dunnigan wanted to protect Z, they weren’t sure she would want to protect Tommy too. Z wrapped the potion bottles carefully in their sweater and put them in their bag. They walked the rest of the way to the apartment.

  The sun set early in winter, and the misty afternoon became the misty night. It was very dark. Z pictured Aysel in the woods at night.

  Lately Mrs. Dunnigan had decided organ meats were probably very good for Z. Because money was tight, she didn’t buy much else. There was rice in the cupboard, and meat in the refrigerator, and cat food, and some tea, and that was almost everything. She had almost bought cow’s brains at the supermarket until Z convinced her that this was a bad idea. Z wished fervently that they could be vegetarian.

  They didn’t watch the news that night. Mrs. Dunnigan had decided she didn’t want to.

  “All the news lately is so bad,” she said.

  Z did their homework to the noise of hissing cooking meat in a pan and the sound of cats endeavoring to be in everyone’s way at once.

  After dinner, Mrs. Dunnigan was tired and went to rest on the couch, so Z cleaned up, trying to scrub the black marks off the pan and the plates. Z looked out the window. The sky was very black and because it was so misty one could barely make out anything at all in the space between the houses.

  The phone rang. Mrs. Dunnigan could not hear it over the sink, so Z slouched over and picked it up. The thick white plastic cord bumped against the wall.

  “Hello?” Z asked.

  “Hey,” said a high voice on the other end.

  “Who—”

  “It’s Tommy,” Tommy said quickly. “Is this Susan?”

  “I go by Z,” Z said.

  There was a moment of confused silence.

  “You have the right person,” Z said, “I just go by Z, not Susan. I had to tell you sometime.”

  “Oh,” Tommy said. “Well, uh, can I talk to you? Are you free?”

  Z looked over at Mrs. Dunnigan. She had picked up one of her books about the history of Irish independence. “Why? What do you want to talk about? Does it have to be now?”

  “I just felt like talking to you,” Tommy said. His voice sounded odd, like he had been crying.