Red Hood

by Elana K. Arnold

  And so, before the next full moon, that story had become Laura’s legacy—she was a girl who didn’t keep her knees closed, who played too fast, too hard. A morality tale for the rest of us. A warning.

  The Wolf Is Not Always a Wolf.

  —ITALIAN PROVERB

  I was not assigned a new roommate. I suppose it was bad luck, to sleep in the bed of a girl who had been killed. Or maybe the other girls harbored suspicions that I had had something to do with what happened to Laura, even though the police seemed satisfied by my answers.

  After Laura’s death, there were only a few weeks left before winter break. The last day of classes, the clouds produced a dusting of snow, and everyone—the students, the faculty, the staff—left for home in fine spirits. There weren’t many students on campus over the holidays, just those of us without money for travel and those for whom home was a worse place to be on Christmas morning than an empty dormitory. I would have been welcome back on the farm, I know that, but I had no desire to go. I had a stack of books; I had a stash of chocolate bars; I was content to nest, doing my best to ignore the bare mattress and empty shelves on the other side of the room.

  Eventually, though, I had to venture out to the grocery store. The dining commons were closed for the holidays, so that meant I was fixing food on a hot plate in my room. Also, with the full moon came my menses, and I needed supplies. It was on my way home from the store that a young man caught up with me. I had seen him around campus, and everyone knew who he was—tall, blond, very handsome, Dennis Cartwright had been voted Big Man on Campus three years in a row.

  You’ve never heard of that award? That’s for the best—it’s a silly thing. Well, this was a different time, in some ways. Much has changed, my darling, though too much has stayed the same.

  In any case, Dennis jogged up behind me. It was the middle of the day, two days after Christmas. He was wearing sweats and running shoes, training for some sport or other.

  “You’re Sybil, right?” he said.

  I didn’t deny it. He jogged slowly beside me as I walked, hefting my bag of groceries down the path to my dorm. He asked why I hadn’t gone home for the holidays and didn’t press me when I was vague in my response.

  I was . . . lonely. And I wasn’t used to attention from a boy like Dennis—so handsome, so popular, the kind of boy the world was built for. So that must have been why I agreed to go out with him that night, why I returned to my dorm flustered and excited, why I spent twice the time I usually would spend on my hair and face.

  He said he would pick me up at seven. I was waiting for him in the front hallway of my dorm, watching though the door’s glass inset for him to arrive, half expecting him to stand me up. But he arrived right on time, a few minutes early, even, and we went out for pizza and then a movie. He paid for both, which made me uncomfortable, but I didn’t have a lot of spending money, so I didn’t stop him when he insisted. He took me to see Carrie, that film about the telekinetic girl, the one who does such terrible things to her classmates after they treat her so poorly. I’ll admit, I was excited to be sitting in the dark with Dennis, sharing popcorn with him, and when the lights went down and he took my hand, it was like a dream.

  But then the film began, and we watched the opening scene—when Carrie gets her period in the locker room shower. Have you seen it? And all the other girls laugh at her and pelt her with tampons and pads? Oh, it was awful, just terrible, and I felt so sad and sick for her. And Dennis—he laughed. A loud, mean laugh. Like he really thought it was funny. A joke. And from that moment on, I was counting down the moments until the film was over and I could go back to my dorm room and be done with Dennis and our date.

  The movie ended, finally, at last, and the theater emptied out onto the street. The moon was out, it was a beautiful night, I remember. Dennis and I walked to his car and he opened the passenger door for me, a perfect gentleman. But I couldn’t get the sound of his laugh out of my head. I couldn’t stop hearing it.

  And Dennis didn’t take the turn to my dorm that he should have taken. He rolled right past it, and when I pointed it out, I said, “Dennis, you missed your turn,” he said, “That’s not my turn,” and he kept going.

  He drove us to a quiet parking lot and he turned into a spot, he put the car in park and twisted off the ignition. And then he smiled at me, and leaned across the front seat, and kissed me.

  I did not want to kiss Dennis. I told him to stop, pretending like it was a big joke at first—I laughed loudly, as if it was preposterous that he could think this thing might happen between us, but my laugh, my protestations, seemed only to anger him. He kissed me harder, and the hand he’d been running down my arm stopped at my wrist, circled it, held it in my lap.

  Oh, darling, I wish I didn’t have to tell you stories like this. I really do. I suppose that’s why I’ve waited all this time. But there’s nothing to do but go forward, I suppose.

  He got rough with me, dear one. He tore the neck of my blouse, and he bruised my wrist, but as soon as I could manage it, I found the door handle with my other hand and pried it open. I yanked up with my arm and broke his grip, and I landed hard on the asphalt, hard enough to bruise my tailbone, hard enough to rip the skin from both of my elbows.

  And then Dennis laughed, as he had during the movie—he laughed at me on the ground. “Come on, Sybil,” he said. “Don’t play hard to get.”

  I wasn’t playing. He knew I wasn’t playing; he knew because he wasn’t playing, either. I stumbled to my feet and took off running.

  Well, dear, he chased, and I am sure you know where this story goes. It’s your story, too, after all.

  I ran, and he chased, and soon I became aware that it was no longer a man who followed me—it was a beast, a wolf. A white wolf with blue eyes, I saw, when I decided the time for running had passed.

  I am sure you have discovered, as I did that night, that sometimes we are made of different stuff than we imagined.

  The wolf was in no hurry to attack now that I had stopped running, now that I had turned to stand my ground. His thick white tail pendulumed back and forth, slowly, and he took slow steps forward, and I swear to you that he smiled.

  It was the smile that did it to me. I roared like a beast, and though I had nothing in my hands to defend me, no weapons, just my own ten fingers and nails, I attacked.

  I was fast and keen and ruthless—things I never knew I could be, but suddenly was, as if some different blood, some stronger blood, flowed through my veins. The white wolf snarled and leaped toward me, ears forward, and though he was swift, I was swifter. I went for his eyes—those blue eyes—and, fingers clenched like claws, I dug at them, the hot-wet squish of them against my palms. The wolf yelped and collapsed, his right eye half out of its socket, the left awash in a scrim of blood. I stood, panting, my left arm bleeding badly above my elbow where he’d gotten me with teeth or claws, I didn’t know which. Then the wolf shook his head and righted himself, and though his vision was compromised, his nose could still track me, and he growled and snarled and came at me with a face full of teeth and blood.

  When he leaped this time, though his fierceness was not dampened by his injuries, his precision was, and his speed, and I was able to anticipate where he would land and where he would strike. I got my arms up and ready, and when he made contact, my right hand went up and over his muzzle, my left around the back of his scruff, and I yanked, hard, and felt the crack of his neck.

  He fell dead at my feet, darling, and you know what happened after that, moments later—how the wolf shivered and changed and became a man.

  It was Dennis, naked and dead.

  That, dear heart, was the first time I ever saw a man without any clothes on his body. I had that thought, staring down at him, frozen, I suppose, in shock. Here was a man who had been with me just hours before, who had paid for my dinner. Here was man who had taken me against my wishes to an empty parking lot. Here was a man who had bruised my wrist and torn my blouse.

  Here w
as a man who had become a wolf, a man who had killed my friend.

  I was not sorry he was dead.

  It Is Better to be Torn to Pieces than to Become a Wolf’s Prey.

  —RUSSIAN PROVERB

  A dead boy—especially a dead Big Man on Campus, a dead star athlete—seemed to make a much bigger impression on just about everyone than two dead girls.

  Dennis’s death made the national newspapers, and I heard that later some novelist even wrote a book “inspired by the murder that shocked a college town,” though I never read it. I doubt it was anything like the truth of that night.

  This time, no one tsked about how Dennis shouldn’t have been alone in the woods, no one reported having seen him drunk and disorderly in the days and weeks before his death.

  Everyone mourned.

  I did not mourn, but I stayed quiet. Head down, avoiding conversations about his death. Someone in town reported having seen Dennis with “an ordinary-looking brunette” at the movies that night, but no one thought she might be me, and I didn’t offer up that information.

  Life went on, as life does, and though I took care to keep to myself, even this was not all that different from how things had been before he died—before Laura died, too.

  School resumed, a new year began—1977—and as winter faded and spring bloomed, with no more awful encounters, I began to reconstruct the events of the previous winter not as a dream, exactly, but as something that might as well have happened in a different world, or to a different person. The wound on my arm healed before T-shirt season, and there were no more deaths on campus. It was easy to believe—it was comfortable to believe—that whatever may have happened, it was over and done with, and I could safely put it out of my mind for good.

  It was true that with each cycle—of the moon and my blood—I felt a heightened sense of awareness. It was as if colors were more saturated; as if smells were sharper and more immediate; the whole world, turned up. But I felt no pull to the woods, and so it was easy enough to lie to myself and say nothing had changed. That I had not changed.

  That semester, I enrolled in Feminist Poetry, two words I hadn’t given much thought to, to be honest. The class fit my schedule and filled a prerequisite. I wasn’t expecting much. I wasn’t expecting anything.

  Even without expectations, however, I was surprised when I met Garland. The course was taught by a woman and, with the exception of Garland, it was populated entirely by female students.

  Walking into class that first day, I saw Garland at once. He sat in the third row, a head higher than any of the fifteen young women in the seats around him. His books were stacked neatly in the top right corner of his desk; he had a notebook folded open; he held a pencil in his left hand, and he twirled it, with nervous energy, around his fingers.

  He wasn’t handsome. That’s not to say that he wasn’t attractive; he was attractive, to me, though the other girls didn’t seem to pay him much attention. He was too skinny, and too tall; he was too white, as if he’d spent all his life indoors; and he wore glasses that didn’t sit quite straight on his face, lenses smudged with fingerprints. He wore his hair shorn unfashionably short, and it was clear he pressed his shirts. He was . . . unthreatening. That’s what he was, more than anything else. When I walked in, he looked up and smiled, almost apologetically, as if he was in a space that might have preferred if he hadn’t been there at all.

  The course was taught by Professor Lane, a young black woman not much older than us students. All that spring, I read the words of women—Lola Ridge, and Sylvia Plath, and Qiu Jin, and Adrienne Rich, and Gertrude Stein, and Maya Angelou, and Margaret Atwood, and Lucille Clifton, and Djuna Barnes, and Anne Sexton . . . I never had known that there were so many ways to be a woman, that there were so many voices.

  I read poetry, and I fell in love with Garland Wright. He came to my dorm almost every evening, though he had to leave by curfew. In every way I was closed, he was open. For every secret I kept, he offered up a vulnerability. He loved to talk about his mother, Clara, who had been a computer programmer at MIT. He told me that his mother had loved her work more than she loved her children, but he didn’t say it like he was upset; he said it with pride, and affection. He was so proud of his mother, so proud to be her son. She had died the summer before, Garland told me, and he was taking this course, Feminist Poetry, as a way to feel close to her. He said that if he could learn to understand the poets that she loved, then it would be like he could be close to her again. Even though she was gone.

  That was probably when I fell in love with him. That night, in my dorm room, when he confessed to me why he was in the poetry class, even though he was a computer science student. That night was also the second time I saw a naked man, and this time it was much, much better.

  Oh, don’t blush like that, darling girl! Love is a beautiful thing, after all.

  And that is what we did, all through that spring—we loved. Each other, and poetry, and each blossom that burst open. When school was out for the summer, I decided not to return to the farm. I rented a room in town from a rising senior whose roommate was going abroad, but I mostly used it to store my things. Almost every night, I was with Garland. He had a room in a house with three other young men, all serious, like him, all earnest. Two of them had girlfriends, like Garland, and the third had an on-again, off-again romance with a teaching assistant, a very good-looking young man named George.

  And all that spring, and all that summer, with all the love, I did my best to forget the white wolf, the dead boy, even Laura, for I couldn’t think of her without thinking of the other.

  It was during that summer that I received a small package from the farm, from Gennie. In it was a letter, which told me that Frank had had a minor heart attack, but was recovering well, and that John had taken over most of the heavy duties. “We don’t know what we would do without him,” the letter said, which would have wounded me if I had been in a different place, if I hadn’t had Garland. As it was, I was glad for the three of them, that they had each other.

  Gennie also wrote that she had come across some of my mother’s possessions while doing some spring cleaning, and that she found a necklace she thought I’d like. “I don’t think your mother ever wore it,” she wrote. She’d found it, she said, in an old yellowed envelope tucked among some papers. The envelope said “Frannie’s things.” Frannie, you know, was my mother’s mother.

  “I’m sorry it took me all these years to go through your mother’s things,” Gennie wrote, “but this necklace, I think, would suit you.”

  It was the necklace you are wearing right now. My grandmother’s, and then your grandmother’s, and now yours. Isn’t life strange, my darling? I discovered, as you did, the necklace’s sharp-tipped secret, and because it did suit me, I wore it, from time to time.

  When the leaves began to crisp and darken that next September, rather than returning to the dorms, I moved with Garland into a tiny studio apartment up above a Chinese restaurant and developed a keen appreciation for Asian cuisine. I began a class in writing poetry, which scared me deeply. It was one thing to read and appreciate the words of other women; it was another thing entirely, so naked-feeling, to write my own. Garland was a dear and listened to me read any of the poems I was willing to share with him, which weren’t many. And everything seemed just lovely.

  It did until five weeks after school had started back up—Wednesday, October 26, 1977. The night of a full moon.

  A Wolf Sheds His Coat Every Year, but His Nature Never Changes.

  —RUSSIAN PROVERB

  Garland was asleep in our bed next to me, glasses still on, the book he’d been reading splayed open on his chest. I was hot, and then cold, and uncomfortable, done reading the book of poems I’d brought to bed with me, back tender with the beginning of my monthly flow.

  I leaned over and took Garland’s glasses from his face and his book from his chest, and I put them on the bedside table. I flipped off the lamp and stared toward the window across from me,
through its clean, clear rectangle and out at the wide, white moon.

  I was hot again. I threw the covers back, walked to the window, stared outside. There was a reason I should be out there. I didn’t know what the reason was, but I was certain there was a reason, and I felt trapped like a caged animal by the four walls of our tiny apartment, walls I usually so loved. But Iwasn’t trapped, of course. I was free to go, anytime.

  And so I went. I dressed, tied tight my shoelaces, and unlocked our door. Just before I passed through it, I decided that I’d like to have my grandmother’s necklace with me, and so I took it from the dresser where it lay and strung it around my neck.

  Our door opened to a tiny balcony that led down behind the Chinese restaurant to the alley. It was raining, but not badly, and I had my hair tucked up into a cap. I stood at the base of the stairs in the rain, hesitant. Then I decided that I would just go where my feet took me, without thinking too much about it.

  My feet took me, of course, to the woods. Always the woods, yes, my love?

  And since this is a night of truth telling, let me tell you this as well: I loved it. Being outside, alone, in the night. The moon gazing down on me, a benevolent goddess. The strength I felt. The smells, the sensations, all of it.

  When I was upon the path of pins, I began to run. There wasn’t much time, I knew, though I didn’t know how I knew it.

  Here, trees broke the moonlight into shadow. I felt aware of everything—of the distance between trees; of the rustle of nocturnal animals in the undergrowth; of the smell of bird droppings. I felt so alive, dearest, alive like I felt when I read a particularly wonderful poem, or when I managed to write a line that felt perfectly true, or when I laid in Garland’s arms. And, for the first time in many years, I imagined Mother’s face, my mother, who was not alive, who would never be alive again, because of the man who killed her. And I felt angry, dear one. Oh, the rage was thick enough to choke. But I swallowed it, for this was no time to be distracted. Now, out here, somewhere, there was a wolf who hunted. I knew it. And it was my duty to hunt the wolf.