Part 21 (1/2)

Even after he died.

Maybe more after he died.

I've never been as comfortable, as happy with another person as I was with Zach.

I wish I hadn't had to lie to him. I wish he knew what I really am.

If he had lived longer I think I would have told him.

Maybe.

I told the police that I would never hurt him. I don't think they believed me.

Biology was Zach's favorite cla.s.s. Mine, too.

Maybe if he'd known about me he would have wanted to help me figure out how my wolfishness works.

Right now I'm thinking about how Zach was made, was unmade.

Once in cla.s.s we had to put together a model of the human body. We looked at how the organs sat together: spleen and pancreas behind stomach. Gallbladder behind liver. Kidneys in the middle of the back. Large intestine nestling the small. All s.h.i.+ny and plastic.

Yayeko warned us that real bodies were only vaguely like the model. That spleens, pancreas, stomachs, gallbladders, livers, kidneys, large and small intestines are as varied as the nose and eyes and mouths on our faces.

Does that mean the model is a lie?

Zach's organs are even less like that model than they were. They no longer fit together. Even before they started to rot, they were pulled apart, shredded, blood breaking through the veins and capillary walls that were supposed to keep them housed safe, sound, and circulating.

Zach's blood got free, drowned all his organs.

But I don't know how. I don't know who did that to him. At least, I'm not sure. My suspicions are without any proof.

All I know is that he's gone forever.

I wonder if I would have loved his lungs, his voice box, his pancreas if I'd seen them nestled safe within him. If you love someone, do you love all of them? Even the mucus in their throat, the cankers in their mouth, the cavities in their teeth?

I want it to be winter always. Because I met Zach in winter. Really met him. Talked to him. Kissed him. Ran with him. All the things we did together. Those were winter things.

In winter he was alive. Organs well-knit.

In summer I was away, aching for him, being a wolf.

But here in the fall, he's gone. All the layers gone, too. Right down to his skin.

I'm not sure what to do without him.

The last time I saw him we were running. All the way from Central Park to his apartment building in Inwood. But I kept running, turned, ran backward slowly, waved, and then ran all the way down to the Lower East Side. To my apartment building, my tiny little room, where he had never been.

I never saw him again.

Not alive. Not with organs intact.

LIE NUMBER THREE.

There were never any doctors.

My parents were too afraid of blood samples being taken. Too afraid of what the doctors would find. Of what lives in my blood.

I have never been to a doctor. Not one. I've never had any tests done. Never been vaccinated. Never had my ears or eyes tested. When I run a fever my parents give me aspirin, put cold cloths on my forehead, and hope that it will come down.

No doctor ever told me to keep taking the pill. Mom wasn't horrified by the suggestion. She's the one who gets the prescription from her doctor. I added that detail to make it seem more real.

There were hair-removal specialists though. By the time I was ten I swear we'd been to every single one in the city: electrolysis, waxing, laser, creams, and unguents. Mom found an old French woman who made me drink a foul-smelling herbal drink that tasted like dirt and made me throw up. Chinese and Spanish herbs and ointments. There was acupuncture, even a spirit worker.

None of it worked.

The hair came, stayed for more than a year, then the hair went, to return only when I am a wolf.

SCHOOL HISTORY.

My school was founded by Quakers. They believed in equality and justice and wanted to make a school in that image. One of them was very wealthy, that's why there's so much scholars.h.i.+p money-that's how they've kept the school fees low. Well, not low by my standards, but low compared to most private schools in the city. Low enough that with scrimping and saving my parents can pay the half of my tuition that isn't covered by my scholars.h.i.+p.

But that rich Quaker-isn't that a contradiction? I thought Quakers were supposed to be poor-anyway, that Quaker left his Quaker wife and his many Quaker children and ran away with a much younger woman who was a dancer, not a Quaker. He moved to New York City to watch her dance every night. Until she up and left him, leaving him with a broken heart and-according to Chantal-a bad case of the clap.

That's when he founded the school and poured all his money into it.

He founded it in this building that used to be a prison. A women's prison. They kept the bars on the windows.

None of the students at the school are Quakers and only one of the teachers: Princ.i.p.al Paul.

I wonder if the Quaker sense of equality and justice extends to werewolves. Does it extend to me?

I realize I don't know much about Quakers.

But I know a lot about cages, about prisons. I've been kept hostage by lies all my life. Imprisoned by them.

This is how it is: I'm alone.

Bars surround me. Prison guards bind my arms, bring me pills several times a day. They ask me-beg me-to tell them the truth.

I am.

Every single word.

Truth.

They don't believe in my wolves.

AFTER.

The day after the funeral, I almost stay home from school. I'm not sure I can face Sarah and Tayshawn. The thought of seeing them makes my cheeks hot. I don't want to have a conversation about how it was a mistake, how we should forget about it, move on. I don't want to talk about it.