Part 26 (1/2)

Can I just leave it to them? The Greats didn't even know Zach and if they had, they don't give a d.a.m.n about anyone who isn't family, who isn't wolfish.

”We told you,” Grandmother says, ”that it's dangerous having wolves in the city. We don't belong. None of us belong there.”

I don't roll my eyes because this time they're right: if the white boy wasn't in the city he wouldn't have killed Zach. He doesn't belong there. But I'm different: I can control the change.

”Is he Canis lupus or dirus?” Great-Aunt wants to know.

”Lupus, I think. He's scrawny. Not as tall as me.”

”That doesn't mean anything,” Grandmother objects. ”How old is he?”

”I don't know. I think he's my age. Maybe younger.”

”Hasn't hit his growth spurt then, has he?” Grandmother tuts at my stupidity. ”Besides, Canis dirus isn't much bigger than us.”

”Teeth are,” Great-Aunt says. Her needles click to emphasize her point.

”A bit,” Grandmother says, waving Great-Aunt Dorothy's words aside with her hands. ”They're slower than us anyhow. Shorter legs. Doesn't matter what size their teeth are. That's why they're extinct.”

”Except as werewolves,” I say.

Grandmother tuts at me for saying the obvious.

”What difference does it make then?” I ask. ”Whether he's dirus or lupus?”

Grandmother and Great-Aunt exchange looks. I'm supposed to already know, or this is information I'm not ready for, or they're tired of talking. It's hard to know which.

Out in the forest one of my kin howls. The too-dense hair on my arms stands on end.

Grandmother tuts again. ”That's where you should be,” she says. ”Not sitting on a rocking chair.”

AFTER.

I don't change, but it's close.

On Sunday, my one non-wolf uncle takes me to the train station in the horse and buggy. I wear long sleeves and pull my hat down low over my eyes to hide the eyebrows that now meet in the middle, threatening to take over my face. My back is aching and my eyes hurt.

I'm hoping that getting away from the farm, from all the wolves, will reverse the change.

The horses shy away from me when I climb onto the seat. They take coaxing to head into town. I try not to scratch at the coa.r.s.e hair all over my body. I tell myself it's receding. My heart beats too fast. I ache.

”Coming back in the summer?” my uncle asks.

He's not a talker so the question startles me. ”Yes,” I say at last. ”Always.”

Neither of us mentions that if the change doesn't slow soon we'll have to turn the cart around and go back to the farm. He grunts and there's no further conversation.

It takes an hour to get to the station. Not until we're at the fringes of the town can I be sure that the change is unwinding: my heart slows, the aches dull.

My uncle glances at my now normal hands and lets me off at the station. He rides away without waiting to see if the train's late. It is. It always is: on time leaving the city; late, late, late going back.

I'm hungry but I don't have enough money for even a candy bar out of the vending machine. What little I had went on the return ticket up here. Metro-North doesn't come this far upstate, and Amtrak's expensive.

On the train, everyone around me is eating: McDonald's, bags of chips, sus.h.i.+. The old man next to me has two huge meat sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, oozing mustard and pickles. The smell is sharp in my nostrils. I press my face to the window and watch the Hudson, trying not to think about food, or the white boy, or Zach, or anything else that makes the muscles of my stomach contract. It's not easy. I wish once again that Zach had not died, that my life was where it had been.

By the time I'm back in the city the hair's gone completely, my heart is normal, and the spotting has stopped. Now all I have to do is find the white boy and lure him upstate.

I don't think it will be as easy as the Greats say.

AFTER.

I walk home from Penn Station. I wish I could afford to refill my MetroCard or had the energy to run. I'm starving. The train was two hours late and then it was another three back to the city. I'm finding it hard to think about anything other than food, but I force myself to look for traces of the white boy as I head home.

The sooner I find him the sooner he'll be taken care of.

Taken care of. I feel like I'm Mafia. Cosa Nostra. Lupo Nostro. Or something.

I can't smell the boy. Will I be able to find him if he doesn't want me to?

The city reeks in ways the farm never does. There are so many scents it's hard to track older odors. Not that the boy's smell is subtle. But I'm looking in places that thousands-hundreds of thousands-of other people have been. Not to mention dogs, squirrels, rats and then closer to the park-horses, and all the smells that go with all those people and animals: urine, s.h.i.+t, vomit, garbage, sewage smells worming their way up from underground. There's also bicycles, cars and taxis and trucks with their gasoline fumes, construction sites that smell of brick, mud, soldered metal, rusting metal, plastic, plaster, sand, cement.

The food smells are the worst: meat grilling, hot dogs exploding under the weight of pickles and mustard and ketchup, fruit rotting, pretzels burning, cotton candy, gum chewed and spit out. My stomach growls so loud it hurts.

I put my hand over my nose, try to breathe out of my mouth. But then stop because I'm trying to smell him.

When I unlock the door to our building I haven't caught the faintest whiff of the boy and I'm too hungry to think straight.

What happens if I can't find him?

I can't bear the thought of the white boy not paying for what he did. I think of Grandmother's saying: Lupus non mordet lupum. ”A wolf does not bite a wolf.”

They don't bite, they kill.

BEFORE.

There was another time I encountered the white boy. A time I forgot.

I was with Zach. We were making out on a blanket in his secret cave in Inwood.

Yes, I'd been there before the funeral. Yes, I made out there before that time with Sarah and Tayshawn. It had been our special place, mine and Zach's. I didn't like the idea that he'd brought other people-other girls-there. That it wasn't just his and mine.

So I lied.

How many lies is that now? I'm losing track.

But surely it's not so big a lie, really? I don't think I'll include it in the official tally. It was just to Sarah and Tayshawn. And you.

Now I'm telling the truth: me and Zach, we went there, more than once.

I thought it was our place. Uncomfortable, cold and stinky, but ours.