Liar. Part 26

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, sushi. 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.

And one time-with Zach's mouth against mine, my track pants pushed halfway down, my T-shirt riding up, my skin tingling from his hands, from the cold, from the heat-one time, my skin contracted, not from cold or desire, but because the white boy was near.

I pulled away, ignoring Zach's complaints, shielded my eyes to look out of the cave. I couldn't see anything, but I knew he was there. The tiny human hairs were now standing up all over my body. I scrambled out of the cave, pulling my pants up, my top down, I could smell something that hadn't been there before.

Zach called to me to come back.

I turned and hissed at him, "Shhh!"

Something was there, someone.

I peered out into the trees and bushes bright with sunshine. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked. The wind made the trees move, leaves and branches rubbing against each other. I could feel someone looking at me, but I could not see them. I recognized the odor, but I could not name it. Not till later-after Zach was dead-did I finally put that smell and the white boy together.

But I think I knew even then that the smell, that the boy, was dangerous.

FAMILY HISTORY.

We used to take vacations. Back before I changed for the first time, my parents would try to take a vacation once a year. Nothing fancy. We've never had much money. One year we went to the Jersey Sh.o.r.e and stayed in a friend of Mom's family cottage. It was a bit rundown-her friend apologized for it-but it was about a hundred times bigger than our apartment. I loved it. Loved inhaling the tangy salt of ocean and sand only a few blocks away. When I climbed onto the roof I could see it: vast and blue and flecked with white peaks. None of the gray oiliness of the Hudson and East rivers.

We went swimming every day for a week. Our skin-even Mom's-became warmer and darker and happier. I wish we could have stayed there forever.

Another time, Dad had to review a new top-of-the-line Winnebago. We drove it all the way down to Florida, stopping at every campsite on the way. We couldn't afford Disney World but we drove past signs for it. I was having so much fun out of the city, seeing new places every day, I didn't even mind.

Dad bought me my first cotton candy as a Disney World apology. It was tall and blue and dissolved into sweet chemical acid on my tongue. I ate it slowly, savoring it, wishing I could have cotton candy every day.

We went into the ocean in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. It was the same ocean in every state. The same ocean as the Jersey Sh.o.r.e. When I was little, that didn't make any sense to me. It seemed magical.

After I changed there were no more vacations. Not for me. It was the city or the farm or nothing.

I suggested it once. Asked my mom if we could go to France, to where she came from. She gave me such a look, an are-you-crazy-you're-not-going-anywhere-ever look. "We have not the money," is what she said. But what she was thinking is, How can a wolf travel? What if you forget your pill and start to change on a plane? In a hotel room? Out on the streets of a foreign city?

No travel for you, Micah. Not ever.

The change has closed down every part of my life.

It's late when I get home but my parents are awake, both sitting at the kitchen table, looking at me, wanting to talk. I try not to groan.

"How'd it go?" Dad asks, before I have time to dump my backpack or go to the bathroom, or ask-beg-for something to eat.

"Fine," I say.

"Everyone is well?" Mom asks, even though she doesn't care. She doesn't like any of the Wilkins. Nor do they like her. But none of them bothered with the fake politeness of asking after her health.

Their questions make me nervous. This is not about my trip, there's something else. My stomach growls so loudly they must have heard. No food is offered.

"Funny thing," Dad says, "I ran into your biology teacher, Ms. Shoji. She wanted to know how you were doing. I told her and she said something about dogs killing Zachary Rubin. How dreadful it was but what a relief it was to finally know what happened. She thought I already knew."

"Dogs," Mom says. "We are wondering why you didn't mention this fact to us."

I sink down against the fridge, leaning on the backpack between me and it, and close my eyes. My stomach growls even louder. I have a hunger headache. They were bound to find out. I'm lucky they didn't see it in the newspapers. "It wasn't me," I say at last. "It really wasn't."

"Four days, Micah. Four days you were missing."

"You came home barefoot in someone else's clothes," Dad says. "You were torn up."

I know that. Why are they telling me what I already know? "I didn't kill him."

"How do you know?" Dad asks. His eyes are wet. My father rarely cries.

"Because I would remember. I remember all my kills." Dad flinches at the word. Mom looks away, but I push on. "Every single one. I've never killed anything bigger than a deer."

"Deer can be large," Mom observes. Her lips are pressed tight. Her eyes are clear. "Zach was skinny."

"He was six foot four. He weighed a lot more than a deer," I say. I'm not sure that's true. Some of the bucks I've killed could easily have been 170 pounds. "Besides, I've never killed a deer alone. Hilliard always hunts with me. My cousins, too."

"The police say it was dogs. How likely do you think that is, Micah?"

"They'd know if it was a wolf. They'd say!"

My parents are quiet now. The tiny kitchen is full of their disbelief, their sadness, their disappointment. The air reeks of it. I'm not sure I can stand it. If I were my wolf self my fur would be standing on end.

"There's another one," I say at last. "Another wolf. That's why I went up to see the Greats-to tell them about him. To ask them what to do. They told me to bring him up to the farm. I know he killed Zach. He's been following me, too. He saw me with Zach. I think . . ." I'm not sure what I think. "I think he killed Zach to get at me. He must have smelled me on Zach or something," I say, before I realize what I've said.

"Smell you on Zachary?" Mom asks. Her tone is even, but she's angry. Her back held straight. Her lips go thinner still. "Why would Zachary have your smell on him? Unless you have lied to us. Again. That you still see this boy? Kiss this boy? Make love with this boy? After you've told us you do not. That it's only happening once, you say, and that now you're only friends. You lied to us?"

"Zach's dead-"

"Micah," Dad says. "Don't. You need to tell us what happened. Did you change that weekend because you . . ." He pauses, made squeamish by the thought of me having s.e.x.

"I told you. I told you what happened. I forgot," I say. "I forgot my pill. I didn't realize. By the time I was changing it was too late to get home."

"So you hid in Inwood Park?"

I nod.

"You didn't go anywhere near Central Park?" Dad asks. He doesn't believe me.

I shake my head. I'm telling the truth. Why don't they believe me when it matters? Okay, I know why. But can't they think rationally? How would a wolf get from Inwood to Central Park without being noticed? That's almost a hundred blocks. It's not possible. I was lucky to get up to Inwood before the change was complete.

"You must stop, Micah," Mom says. "No more lies. If you kill this boy we'll still love you. Nothing changes that. I think always I know this." She's so upset her English is crumbling. "What you do. I know it, but I can't let myself believe."

"I didn't, Mom! I didn't. I could never kill Zach. Not as a human, not as a wolf. I loved him."

"So much that you slept with him, changed, and killed him?" Dad says quietly. I'd almost prefer if he yelled.

"I didn't!"

"Didn't what, Micah?" Dad rubs at his eyes, making the tears that didn't quite fall disappear. "Didn't kill him or didn't sleep with him?"