Charm & Strange (3 page)

“We’re not what?” My father grinned, but he didn’t look happy. His face took on an eerie cast from the glow of the television. A major league leer. I shuddered.

Keith shot a nervous glance in my direction. “Empathy’s not a bad thing, Dad.”

“Really? Are you so sure? Even when it’s a matter of life or death?”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Then what exactly are you talking about?”

“God!” Keith exclaimed. “Am I the only one around here who gives a crap about anything but myself?”

I tensed and waited for my father’s reaction. Even
I
didn’t like Keith’s tone.

But nothing happened.

After a moment, Keith dropped his gaze. “I mean, how hard would it be just to buy free-range chicken from now on?” he muttered. “’Cause that would be a great start.”

“Free-range?” My dad gave a sharp bark of laughter, startling me. Pilot growled. The sound came from deep in his belly, and I buried my face in his snowy ruff. Inhaled his doggy scent.

“Free-range,” he repeated. “Hell, sure, Keith.
That
we can do.”

I growled, too.

My dad swatted the arm of his chair one more time.

“Get over here, Drew.”

chapter

five

matter

The directive is handed down the following morning: We’re not allowed in the back woods on the far side of the river anymore. This is expected and I’m not sure what took so long, but the entire student body is complaining and making idiotic arguments like how there’s a greater chance of dying in a dorm fire than being eaten by a wild animal so maybe we should all strip naked, cover ourselves in fire-retardant foam, and sleep in the parking lot.

You know, just in case.

But the headmaster is firm. There’s something out there, he tells us while we’re all crammed shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh in the dark shadows of the school’s creaking chapel. A bear. A cougar. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. No one knows. State wildlife experts will investigate. The matter should be resolved quickly, and our cooperation is appreciated.

The platitudes and clichés spill from his mouth in rapid succession like the lame script of some poorly programmed android. I listen but learn nothing new. I do know the cops are in the woods again this morning. I know because I watched them trudge out there, real early, with their cadaver dogs and everything. But today’s forecast calls for rain, and this will wash away evidence, I guess. That’s too bad. I’d like the truth to be known as much as the next person.

More, really.

I feel restless. I do math inside my head. It’s been twenty-five days since the last full moon. That was during the first week of school, back in September, and I spent that night like others before it. I walked in the dark, alone. At curfew, I returned to my room, where I tossed and turned for hours. When I finally slept, I awoke to failure. I hadn’t changed. Again. Or so I thought.

Now I don’t know what to think.

I fidget. I long to leave. My elbow hurts and my hip hurts because I’m curled against the end of a pew, doing everything I can to avoid letting Brandon Black breathe on me. He smells awful, like some combination of scrambled eggs and designer body spray, and I have to inhale through my mouth because I’m this close to puking my guts all over the scuffed wood planks beneath my feet. I wrench my head to the right, and in an ocean of J. Crew and American Eagle, I spy the girl who looks like a boy sitting across the aisle and one row back. She’s wearing cargo shorts and leather sandals.

She’s also staring directly at me.

I nod. Her ears go red and she quickly faces forward. I follow her gaze. She’s not looking at the headmaster, I don’t think. She’s focused on what’s behind him—the Gothic wood carving that hangs above the altar. Supposedly, a group of students made it over a hundred years ago, back when the school was all girls. It’s dedicated to the founding headmistress. She’s the one who rescued this tiny clapboard chapel from demolition and had it moved piece by piece all the way up the mountain and reconstructed on the campus grounds. As the story goes, each girl chiseled a specific letter, one at a time. It must have taken them forever because the thing is
huge
. Today it’s kept well oiled, a massive mahogany glow that serves as the backdrop of every gathering we have in here, and although the school is secular, the quote is from Corinthians. It’s meant to be sacred, but it’s really just stupid.

Love never faileth?

Yeah, right.

chapter

six

antimatter

This I
really
didn’t understand.

Our family was cultured. If and when we traveled, we spent our days visiting museums and galleries, our nights in theaters or lecture halls. We didn’t
do
rural. Which was why it didn’t make sense that an entire Saturday in late November had been set aside to visit Semper Liberi, a hokey-sounding animal preserve located in West Virginia.

What I
did
understand was that it was a good two-and-a-half-hour drive to the place—a twisty ride that would take us into the depths of the Monongahela National Forest. I didn’t want to go, for numerous reasons. Besides the obvious car dilemma, I did not enjoy zoos or aquariums or anything related. The animals always smelled or hid, and I generally just didn’t care. But I had no say in the matter.

I survived the road trip in the family Volvo by skipping breakfast and getting drugged up on Phenergan, the only medication with the power to suppress my motion sickness. It also knocked me out cold. Keith had to shake me awake as we pulled into the parking lot of the preserve. I flailed and tried to hit him. I wanted to continue sleeping. I wanted to remain unwoken.

I stepped from the car into the frigid autumn air. A huge puddle of drool smeared across my cheek and all the way down my neck. The echo of familiar nightmares rattled in my head, and my limbs felt weak and unreliable. I lagged behind my family, shadowed by the crunch of gravel beneath my feet and lost in my own internal fog. A bitter wind howled off the hillside with locomotive force and I stumbled, once, twice, over the untied laces of my Nikes. But I caught myself. Kept going.

Nothing looked real. Nothing felt right.

I heard my name bounce around in the breeze like a Wilson double core on clay and looked to see Keith beckoning me with one arm. My brother smiled calmly, a beatific look. He stood at a split trailhead with beech and black cherry trees towering above him in their newly bare autumn glory.

“Come on!” he called.

“Why are we here?”

“Come on,” he repeated. “We’re going to see the wolves.”

We took the left-hand trail and hoofed it down into the dark woods. The sharp scent of birch oil hung in the air. My brother’s body fairly thrummed with excitement, and I struggled to keep up. I was no match for his long legs or bright-eyed eagerness.

“You all right?” He ducked down once to squint at me. His red-brown hair flopped over his forehead, and he’d recently taken to wearing button-down shirts that reminded me of our father’s favorite students. The ones who stopped by our house to drink with him at all hours of the night. The ones our mother hated.

“I’m fine,” I mumbled, although this wasn’t quite true. Phenergan residue left me with a pounding headache and dry mouth, like playground sand, which I sometimes ate. “What did you say about wolves?”

“They have them here at the sanctuary. Pretty cool, huh?” Keith jutted his chin in the direction of our parents. “It took forever to convince them to bring us. You know how Dad is with the whole animal rescue thing. I had to promise to get straight A’s and not convert you into a vegetarian, but I wanted you to see it.”

So Keith had been to this place before? And coming again had been his idea? That was news to me. He shouldn’t have bothered. I was in no danger of becoming a vegetarian.

We caught up with the rest of our family, and an overly friendly docent waved us into the visitors center. Siobhan immediately set to work on being hyper. She jumped up and down in an imitation of Tigger on a sugar high, and the movement made her ribboned pigtails bounce like mattress springs. Our mother, who had little in the way of patience, told her to stop about twenty times. When the docent launched into a boring speech about the history and mission of the preserve, I crept up from behind, took one of Siobhan’s honey-colored curls into my hand, and tugged.

“Hey, you,” I whispered. I hoped my sister would smile or squeal the way she always did when I got too close. She didn’t. Instead my father warned, “Drew!” and I slunk off to the far side of the room, where my stomach growled and hot beads of resentment welled up inside my chest.

Cruising the back wall like a lowrider, I stared at the wildlife photography hanging above me. There was a bobcat. Birds of prey. A family of raccoons. A big-eared thing I thought was a rat until I read the sign informing me it was a fennec fox. Then I came to the wolves. Such ugly beasts. All scary eyes and open mouths and lolling tongues. What was so cool about them? Sure, I’d absorbed their gothic draw from books I read. Movies I watched. Wolves were meant to be fearsome, wild, the darkness untamed. I’d met the lone wolf. The big bad wolf. The wolf at the door. I’d cried wolf, wolfed down my food, and thrown others to the wolves when at all possible.

I stared harder.

The longer I stood there, the more their predatory gaze felt familiar, chillingly so.

I thought of the look in Soren’s eyes before I hit him. My father’s words on empathy.

My head swam.

What was I? Hunter or hunted?

My stomach growled again.

When the talk ended, we got to tour the property. The animals kept here couldn’t be returned to the wild for some reason or another. As I stepped down into the preserve, the first thing I noticed was the stench. Everything everywhere smelled strongly of animal waste. A wooden placard told us that the first enclosure we came upon housed a herd of miniature goats and a donkey. Siobhan waggled her fingers and stuffed blades of grass through the fence into the waiting mouth of a speckled kid.

I wandered off on my own. Kept going until my family was out of sight. I passed the little fox and the raptors until I reached the wolf habitat. The animals all lounged in the dirt, lazy. Staring at them, I felt disappointed, romance swallowed up by reality. They weren’t even big. More like exotic dogs. I remembered the guide telling us the current pack consisted of a young male, his mate, and an older female whose mate died over the summer. That made me sad. Wolves mated forever, he’d said, so that meant the older wolf would be alone until she died. I wondered if she knew. I thought I understood how she might feel.

I turned and kept walking.

Above me, the sun struggled to break through the thick cover of tree branches and I shivered in my unlined jacket. With a twist of my head, I caught a faint view of the surrounding mountain range and the wide swath of river chewing through the land below. My heart pounded from the quiet beauty. I wanted it to take me. I wanted it to fill me up, this cool flush of green and brown forest sanctuary.

Heading deeper and deeper into the West Virginia woods, I realized I was not alone. The older wolf had followed me, pushing through the underbrush not three feet from the path where I walked. I swiveled to look at her. Amber eyes bored straight into mine. Her ears flattened. She was a ratty beast, with patches of thinning fur and protruding bones.

Her presence pleased me, but I couldn’t have said why. Maybe she was drawn to our joint loneliness. I walked to a cutout in the cyclone fencing meant for cameras and fished one of Pilot’s dog treats from my pocket. Then I thrust my hand through the chain-link barrier.

“Come here, girl,” I crooned. I made a kissing sound with my lips.

The wolf took one step forward, then squatted to pee in the soil. She didn’t take her eyes off me. A dozen more steps and we stood facing each other, separated by mere inches. Her coat was a dull swirl of brown, silver, and white. I wanted desperately to touch her and reached out farther with the hand that held the small piece of liver. It happened in an instant. She whirled and slashed with her sharp teeth and I flinched, dropping the treat in the process. The wolf snapped it up, then vanished. My cheeks burned. I pulled my arm back and glanced around.

No one else had seen a thing.

Later, we ate lunch at a roadhouse across the highway from the preserve. It was a giant wooden structure full of dusty nooks and crannies and a sparsely populated bar. My father drank quietly while NASCAR played on about eight different television screens. I was starving. My mother admonished me not to eat too much, but I ate my entire burger and finished Siobhan’s, too, when she passed it to me under the table. Afterward, Keith and I slipped away and snuck up a rickety staircase to the second floor, where we discovered an air hockey table and an old jukebox. The only song I recognized was Don Ho’s “Tiny Bubbles.”

The Phenergan didn’t work on the ride back. My sleep was fitful and in my dreams I saw the old wolf, her yellow gaze and the points of her teeth. Even she hated me. I was worthless. My eyes flew open when we were about halfway home and I vomited suddenly with a groan and a rush. Siobhan screamed and held her nose. I started to cry. We pulled over at the next gas station and Keith helped me change my shirt and tried to comfort me.

“It’s okay, Drew,” he said, and tousled my hair. I kept sobbing and hiccuping. I could feel my father’s disapproval, my mother’s disdain. I knew I could only be falling short in their eyes.

“I hate myself.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I want to die.”

Keith put an arm around me. “No, no, you don’t. Okay, kid? Just believe me when I say, someday life is going to get a lot better. I promise.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know. Soon you’ll know, too.”

chapter

seven

matter

While everyone else is busy bitching or gossiping or spilling fake tears over the dead townie, I slip from the chapel into muggy morning air that’s way too warm for this time of year. It feels like autumn’s missed its stop or had to reschedule because I’m already sweating bullets.