Red Hood

by Elana K. Arnold

  Back in the day, men were pretty much guaranteed a wife, and this meant their sexual desires were met on a regular basis, which, let’s face it, is good for society as a whole. Who wants a horde of horny guys wandering around? But now that’s pretty much what we have, as women are choosing their mates and competing for (or sharing) the top men. Some psychologists are arguing that the cure for our societal problems is a return to forced monogamy, and I, for one, think that’s a great idea. A girl for every guy—isn’t that fairer than one guy getting all the girls, and the rest of us left alone on Saturday nights?

  It’s signed, “It’s No Crime to Expect Love.”

  The letter manages to be both idiotically stupid and remarkably creepy at the same time. You push away your sandwich, appetite gone.

  James isn’t eating much, either. He didn’t like Tucker or Phillip, but the first was a teammate, and the second was a guy he’d known since kindergarten, and maybe he’s thinking that either of them could have been him.

  As if James knows what you’re thinking, he says, “I think we should stay out of the woods for a while.” He’s picking at the skin of his thumb, near his nail bed, a nervous habit he has. You rest your hand on top of his to quiet it.

  “You’re scared.”

  “Aren’t you?” James asks. “I mean, anyone could be next. It could be me. It could be you.”

  “Nobody’s going to be next,” you say, but your voice is unconvincing. You don’t really know that. You try again. “You won’t be next. Neither will I.”

  “That’s because we’re going to stay out of the woods.” James flips over his hand, laces his fingers with yours, squeezes. “Okay?”

  You think about Mémé, about everything she sacrificed, about all the times she went back into the woods. You think about the girls she saved.

  And then you squeeze James’s hand, and you lie to him. “Okay.”

  “So, I’ve been doing some research.” It’s after school. James is working out today, and Keisha has offered to drive you home.

  “Of course you have.”

  “Have you ever heard of Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun? Or Gilles Garnier, or Peter Stumpp?”

  “Should I have?”

  Keisha checks her rearview mirror and then looks over her shoulder before she changes lanes. “They were executed back in the fifteen hundreds for crimes of lycanthropy.”

  “Lycanthropy?”

  “Being werewolves, basically. And killing people.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. The first two, Burgot and Verdun, were a team, I guess. Like, serial killer buddies. They were French. Garnier was a French guy, too, called the “Werewolf of Dole.” He confessed to serial killings before he was executed. There was another man—that’s Stumpp, he was German. He confessed to murder, rape, and cannibalism, all while under the spell of full moons. His daughter and his girlfriend were both executed along with him.”

  “Were Stumpp’s daughter and girlfriend werewolves, too? Or murderers?”

  “Nope. They were killed for ‘knowledge of his crimes’ and for having sex with him.”

  “His daughter had sex with him?”

  “Not willingly. Maybe no one cared if it was rape or consensual. Either way, she was guilty.”

  Keisha is a careful follower of traffic laws. She uses her blinkers every time she changes lanes, and she comes to a full stop at each stop sign. When a light ahead turns yellow, she slows to a stop, even though she probably would have had time to make it through.

  “Do you know what’s interesting?” Keisha asks. “People used to believe that werewolves were created by witches. So, even way back in the fourteenth century, women were being blamed for men’s bad behavior.”

  You don’t say anything to this. You think of Mémé, of the girls she saved, how everyone wondered what those girls were doing out alone at night. You think of your mother. You think of your father, still out there somewhere. And the other women who might have crossed his path in the years between then and now. It’s too much to think about, and so you focus your attention on just one thing.

  “Hey,” you say, “what’s up with the letters to the editor lately?”

  “Yeah, I know,” Keisha says, eyes on the road. “They’re awful.”

  “So why are you running them? Aren’t you, like, the editor?”

  “I ran the first one because it was gross but nonthreatening, and I wasn’t in the mood for another round of emails from dude-bros complaining about how biased the school paper is,” Keisha says. “I ran the second one, though, so I could write a response to it.” Here, she smiles, but it’s more like a baring of teeth than a sign of happiness. “I’m going to eviscerate him tomorrow. Fucking incel.”

  It occurs to you that Keisha may enjoy a fight as much as you do.

  “An incel?” you ask. “What’s that?”

  “Oh, my friend, that’s a dark deep dive for sure,” Keisha says, pulling up in front of your house. “Don’t google before bedtime unless you like nightmares.”

  Incel. You tuck the word away for later. “Thanks for the ride,” you say.

  “Anytime.”

  Since it’s a Monday, you expect to be greeted by the wafting yeasty smell of fresh bread, and Mémé does not disappoint you. You stop just inside the door, close your eyes, breathe the fresh hot scent.

  You sit down on the bench to untie your shoes, and that is when you notice the footprint—big, a man’s print—on the entry rug.

  And then you hear two voices in the kitchen: Mémé’s, and a man’s.

  “Are you sure about that?” says the man.

  “Yes, Alan, though I will let you know if I change my mind.”

  You walk in your socks, silently, to the kitchen doorway. Mémé is standing by the sink, leaning against the counter, holding a mug. On the counter is a slip of paper with something written on it. Even from this distance, you can tell the writing is not hers. Sitting at the table, a cup of coffee in his hand, is the plainclothes officer you encountered in the forest when you went looking for the wolf’s body and found instead a taped-off crime scene. His back is to you, but you recognize him by the slope of his shoulders, the way he takes up space. He is wearing his boots in the house, even though they are muddy, even though there is a rule against shoes past the entry hall.

  Mémé makes eye contact with you briefly over the officer’s head. Her eyes, you think, are warning you.

  “Well,” the officer says, “if you change your mind . . .”

  “I’ll have your number.” She sets her cup down on the counter and taps the slip of paper, as if to indicate that the conversation has reached its end. You can read his name, above the number: Alan Scott.

  To his credit, the officer takes the hint. He finishes his coffee in a quick slurp, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He gets up—a bit awkwardly, like his knees give him some trouble—and then walks over to put his cup in the sink. His badge, strung around his neck like jewelry, catches the light and shines. He is standing just inches from Mémé, who straightens herself from leaning, taking up space of her own.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” he says, and then he turns toward the doorway. “Oh,” he says, surprised. “I didn’t hear you come in. Sybil, she looks just like you.”

  “There is a resemblance,” Mémé says. “I’ll walk you to the door.”

  You step to the side, giving the officer wide berth to pass. Mémé follows him into the hallway and opens the door for him to leave.

  “All right, girls,” he says to both of you. “Stay safe, now. Don’t go into the woods.”

  You bristle at this, but Mémé laughs. “Good advice,” she says. “You stay safe, too.”

  When he’s outside, Mémé waits until he’s gone down the stairs from the porch before she closes the door.

  “What was that about?”

  “It was odd,” Mémé says.

  “What was he doing here?”

  “He said he wanted to ask me on a date.�
�

  “Really?”

  Mémé smiles. “Don’t act so surprised. It happens, from time to time.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” you say. “Just—why now?”

  “Apparently you ran into him in the woods last month?”

  You nod.

  “I guess meeting you . . . jogged his memory. He says we met once, many years ago, though I can’t recall when that might have been . . . I suppose seeing you—our resemblance . . .”

  Mémé’s expression is inscrutable.

  Anxiety tightens your stomach. “Did he say anything about Phillip?”

  “Nothing specific. He did mention that there were a couple of incidents with girls, one here in Seattle, another in Berkeley, where Phillip’s brother is a student? Problems that might have made either of the young women perhaps less than sorry to see Phillip dead. Not, he said, that the girls were under investigation.”

  “Why would he tell you that?”

  “I don’t know, actually.”

  “Do you think he suspects something? Do you think he knows?”

  Mémé leans against the counter again, taps her fingers against it. “He didn’t give any indication that he did,” she says at last. “Though it is strange that he volunteered information about the investigation.”

  “It’s my fault,” you say. “You never left bodies . . . I’ve left two in two months.”

  Mémé waves her hand, shushes you. “Don’t be silly,” she says. “You couldn’t have known.”

  “We should have gone back and moved it.”

  “I considered it. But it seemed the greater risk.”

  “But the cops—”

  “Yes, the cops,” Mémé says, “it’s true, and there could be others, too, whose unwanted attention this could attract. But it’s no use crying over spilled milk, my darling. If there is blame, it is mine, for not giving you information you could have used. Knowledge, as they say, is power. And I kept you in the dark for too long. For that, I hope you’ll forgive me. As for the bodies . . . well, if any problems arise as a result, I shall resolve them.”

  “We,” you say, and you take her hand. “If there are any problems, Mémé, we’ll fix them. Together.”

  Mémé smiles, squeezes your fingers in her warm strong grip. “Of course, my girl, of course.”

  Then she slices you a thick, warm slice of bread, and butters it for you as if you were a child.

  You take the bread to your room. You close your door, and then you pull your mother’s poems from the bedside drawer. You trace your finger up and down each letter, following the path she took all those years ago.

  She was a whole person once. A living person. A daughter, then a wife, and then a mother—but aside from that, aside from those roles, she was a person.

  You wonder what your mother would be like now, if she were alive instead of dead. Would she have written other poems? Would she have had other children? Would she have rehabilitated the farm? Would she have sold it and used the money to travel with you abroad?

  She would have lived to see the thaw, if he had not come. She would have watched your little hands as they gripped stones, as you learned to skip them across the pond.

  You write.

  II

  I was alone

  in the ghost room

  waiting for it to end

  alone

  hoping he wouldn’t find me

  he came

  and blew down everything

  the moon was made of blood

  your bed was full of blood

  when he touched you

  with his fists and fangs

  he could have kept you safe

  but he didn’t want to

  Alpha and Omega

  A Response to “It’s No Crime to Expect Love”

  By Keisha Montgomery, Editor in Chief

  A hundred years ago, antibiotics hadn’t been invented yet and you could die from an infected zit.

  And as much as I would like to invent a time machine and send you back to such a fine era, time machines are as much of a fantasy as those psychologists you’re talking about—the ones who would force girls to be in your sexual service as some sort of magical cure for social ills.

  Because you seem to like science so much, let me tell you about natural selection. This is the theory where undesirable traits are bred out because they’re undesirable. This happens to every single living creature. Roosters who can’t get laid don’t flap off to Mother Nature demanding a chicken sex slave. They work on their crow.

  You talk about how smart and talented you are, but then you go and reveal that you think “forced monogamy” is a good idea. That right there makes you a complete dodo. Forcing anything when it comes to sex is completely unacceptable. It’s an idea that, like the dodo, has died out except in the most primordial of postpubescent-boy swamps.

  Come out of the swamp. Cleanse yourself of the ooze. It’s not going to guarantee you a partner, but it’s a start. I’d offer you a hand, but you presumably have two of those. You can use one to pull yourself out of the muck and the other—well, use your imagination on that one the next time you’re alone on Saturday night.

  “It’s got more comments than any other post this year,” Keisha says, a little smug, the day after her response goes live. “Almost all positive.” She looks up from her phone, grins. “And Mackenzie asked me out.”

  “Big Mac?”

  She nods.

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him I’d think about it,” Keisha says. “We’re pretty busy right now.” You are together in your bedroom. You are supposed to be studying for the chemistry test (Keisha’s idea, and one you took her up on since she’s currently setting the curve), but though your books are open, no real studying has been done. First Keisha had to show you all the comments to her editorial response, and now she’s moved on to something else.

  “Maybe we should sync our cycles,” she says.

  Since you rescued her in the woods, Keisha has made your business her business. You aren’t sure if it’s because she feels grateful to you or if it’s because she views you like a real-life research project, but your suspicions lean toward the latter.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I read somewhere that if women spend a lot of time together, they can get their menstrual cycles to align. I’ll bet you’re an alpha.”

  “An alpha?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Keisha grabs her laptop, flips it open. “An alpha female stays on her cycle. Everyone else syncs up with her. It can take a long time, though, like months.” Keisha is eager now, doing what she does best—research—but after a minute, her face falls. “Oh.”

  “What is it?” You scoot over to look at her screen, intrigued now in spite of yourself.

  “I guess maybe it isn’t true. It’s confirmation bias, this says. There’s new research—they had all these women, roommates and teammates and stuff—track their periods with an app. And they found out that women who spend a lot of time together usually move further apart in their cycles, not closer together.” She knits her brow. “I wonder why that is.” She begins typing again, her fingers hitting the keys hard.

  “Why would you even want to sync up with my . . . cycle?”

  Keisha doesn’t answer. Her lips are tight and behind her glasses, her eyes narrow in concentration. “That’s interesting,” she says after a minute of reading, but she’s not talking to you. She is lost in her own little world.

  It’s annoying. You guys have work to do, and if she is going to ignore you, she should just go home. “What’s interesting?”

  “Oh,” Keisha says, looking up and snapping back into the present. “Sorry.” She turns her laptop around and hands it over so you can read the article she’s found. The first part recaps what she’s already said—that even though women often believe their periods are syncing up, when their experiential evidence is tracked as data, there’s no true correlation, maybe even a slight reverse correl
ation.

  The article goes on:

  In large-mammal studies, researchers found that among groups that spent most of their time together (great apes, other primates, etc.), menses did not occur in sync. Researchers postulate that this may be because it does not provide an evolutionary advantage for all potential mating partners to be unavailable for insemination during the same period. Indeed, it is much more advantageous for there to always be a female who is “ready and willing” for mating behavior to occur.

  You hand the laptop back to Keisha. “Ew.”

  “Totally,” she says. “It’s super gross to think about it that way—that it’s better for the males if females don’t sync.” She sighs, clicks away from the article and onto something else. “So much for that theory.”

  You ask her again. “Why would you want to try to sync cycles, anyway?”

  “Oh. I just thought, like, maybe if we were on the same schedule, then maybe, you know, when you need to go into the forest to . . . hunt . . . then I could go with you. Maybe if we had our periods together, I would be like you. You know. Maybe I’d get, like, strong and tough, when you did.” She shrugs, looking sort of embarrassed, and pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose—the tortoiseshell ones today.

  You laugh. “That’s not a very scientific line of reasoning.”

  “It was just an idea!”

  “Anyway, if I were the alpha, wouldn’t that make you, like, my omega?”

  “Your beta,” Keisha corrects. “It would be funny, actually, because those terms usually apply to pack animals. Like dogs. And wolves.”

  “I’m not a wolf.”

  “Oh, I know.” Keisha skims another article on her laptop while she talks to you. It’s amazing, how she can do both things at the same time. “But it would be an advantage for you not to be alone out there. Like your grandmother. I still think that’s sad.”

  “It’s not sad,” you say. “It’s brave.”

  “Things can be more than one thing at a time,” says Keisha, and she’s right. Brave and sad. Boys and wolves.

  “Anyway,” you say, “I’d rather not have to fight wolves than just have more company while I fought them.”