Linger (12 page)

“It's me,” I said.

• GRACE •

I didn't know what emotion it was that flooded me when I heard Sam's voice instead of Rachel's. I just knew that it was strong enough that it made two of my breaths stick together into one long, shuddering exhalation. I steamrollered over the unidentified feeling. “Sam.”

I heard him sigh, which desperately made me want to see his face. I said, “Did Rachel tell you? I'm okay. It was just a fever. I'm at home now.”

“Can I come over?” Sam's voice was odd.

I tugged my comforter up farther on my lap, jerking it when it didn't straighten the way I wanted it to, trying not to reinvoke the anger I'd felt earlier when talking to Dad. “I'm grounded. I'm not allowed to go to the studio on Sunday.” There was a dead silence on the other end of the line; I thought I could imagine Sam's face, and it kind of hurt me, in a numb way that came from being upset for so long that you couldn't sustain it. “Are you still there?”

Sam's voice sounded brave, which hurt more than his silence. “I can reschedule.”

“Oh, no,” I said emphatically. And suddenly the anger broke through. I tried to speak through it. “I am making it to the studio on Sunday, I don't care if I have to beg them. I don't care if I have to sneak out. Sam, I'm so mad, I don't know what to
do. I want to run away right now. I don't want to be in the house with them. Seriously, talk me down. Tell me I can't come and live with you. Tell me you don't want me over there.”

“You know I wouldn't tell you that,” Sam said softly. “You know I wouldn't stop you.”

I glared at my closed bedroom door. My mother — my jailer — was somewhere on the other side of it. Inside me, my stomach still felt fever sick; I didn't want to be here. “Then why don't I?” My voice sounded aggressive.

Sam was silent for a long moment. Finally, he said, his voice low, “Because you know that's not how you want it to end. You know I'd love to have you with me, and it will be that way, one day. But this isn't the way it ought to happen.”

For some reason, that made my eyes prick with tears. Surprised, I scrubbed them away with a fist. I didn't know what to say. I was used to me being the practical one and Sam being the emotional one. I felt alone in my fury.

“I was worried about you,” Sam said.

I was worried about me, too
, I thought, but instead I said, “I'm okay. I really want to get out of town with you. I wish it were Sunday already.”

• SAM •

It was weird to hear Grace this way. It was weird to be here, sitting in my car with her best friend when Grace was home, needing me for once. It was weird to want to tell her that we didn't need to go to the studio until things calmed down. But I couldn't tell her no. I physically couldn't say it to her. Hearing
her like this … she was a different thing than I'd ever seen her be, and I felt some dangerous and lovely future whispering secrets in my ear. I said, “I wish it were Sunday, too.”

“I don't want to be alone tonight,” Grace said.

Something in my heart twinged. I closed my eyes for a moment and opened them again. I thought about sneaking over myself; I thought about telling her to sneak out. I imagined lying in my bedroom beneath my paper cranes, with the warm shape of her tucked against me, not having to worry about hiding in the morning, just having her with me on our terms, and I ached and ached some more with the force of wanting it. I echoed, “I miss you, too.”

“I have your phone charger here,” Grace whispered. “Call me from Beck's tonight, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

After she'd hung up, I handed the phone back to Rachel. I wasn't sure what was wrong with me. It was only forty-eight hours until I saw her again. That wasn't long. A drop in the bucket in the ocean of time that was our lives together.

We had forever now. I had to start believing that.

“Sam?” Rachel asked. “Do you know you have the saddest sad face ever?”

• SAM •

After I parted ways with Rachel, I headed back to Beck's house. The day had become sunny; not so much warm as the promise of warm — summer in the making. I couldn't remember weather like this. It had been so many years since this nearly-spring hadn't kept me locked inside my wolf form. It was hard to convince myself that I didn't need to cling to the shelter of the warm car.

I would not be afraid.
Believe in your cure.

I shut the car door, but I didn't go into the house; if Cole was still in there, I wasn't ready to face him. Instead, I headed around the back of the house, across the slimy dead grass from last year and into the woods. I had the thought that I ought to check the shed to see if there were any wolves inside. The building, buried a few hundred yards in the woods behind Beck's house, was a haven for new wolves as they shifted back and forth. It was stocked with clothing and tinned food and flashlights. Even a little combo TV/VCR and a space heater that could run off the boat battery. Everything a volatile new wolf would need to be comfortable while waiting to see if its human form would stick.

Sometimes, however, a new pack member would shift back to a wolf while inside the shed too fast to open the door, and then there was a wild animal, slave to instinct, trapped in walls that stank of humans and shifting and uncertainty.

I remembered one spring, when I was nine and still relatively uncertain in my wolf skin, the warm day had stripped my pelt from me and left me naked and embarrassed, curled on the forest like a pale new shoot. Once I was certain I was alone, I'd made my way to the shed as Beck had told me to. My stomach was still aching, like it did between the shifts back then. It was enough to double me over, my sharp ribs pressing against the tops of my legs as I crouched, biting my finger until the spasm passed and let me straighten up and open the door to the shed.

I spooked like a colt at the sound of a voice as I came through the door. After a minute, my heart quieted enough for me to realize that the voice was singing; whoever had been inside last had left the boom box on. Elvis asked whether I was lonely tonight while I dug through the bin marked
SAM
. I pulled on my jeans but didn't bother to find a shirt before I went for the food bin. I tore open a bag of chips, my stomach growling only when it was sure that it was about to be filled. Sitting there on the bin, scrawny knees pulled up to my chin, I listened to Elvis croon and thought about how song lyrics were just another sort of poetry. The summer before, Ulrik had been making me memorize famous poems — I could still remember the first half of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I tried to remember the second half as I crunched through the entire bag of corn chips, hoping to get rid of my stomach pains.

In the time it took me to notice that the hand holding the
bag of chips was shaking, the ache in my abdomen had turned into the inside-out squeeze of the change. I had no time to get to the door before my fingers were useless and stubby, my nails ineffective against the wood. My last human thought was a memory: my parents slamming my bedroom door, the lock snicking shut as the wolf bubbled out of me.

My wolf memories were hard to remember, but I did remember this: It took me hours to give up trying to get out that day.

It was Ulrik who found me.

“Ah,
Junge
,” he said in a sad voice, running a hand over his shaved head as he looked around. I blinked at him blankly, somehow surprised that he was not my mother or father. “How long have you been in here?”

I was curled in the corner of the shed, staring at my bloody fingers, my brain slowly drifting out of my wolf thoughts and into fragmented human ones. Bins and their lids were scattered across the shed, and the boom box lay in the middle of the floor, the cord jerked from the wall. There was dried blood smeared on the floor, with prints both wolf and human through it. Chips and peelings from the door made a violent confetti, surrounded by torn bags of chips and pretzels, their ruined contents abandoned, uneaten.

Ulrik crossed the floor, his boots crunching softly across the fine sand of potato chips, and he stopped halfway to me as I shrank back. My vision danced, showing me by turns the trashed shed and my old bedroom, strewn with bed linens and shredded books.

He reached a hand toward me. “Come on, get up. Let's get you inside.”

But I didn't move. I looked again at my blunted nails, bloody splinters shoved beneath them. I was lost in the small world of my fingertips, the shallow ridges of whorls outlined delicately with red, a single banded wolf hair caught in my blood. My gaze slid to the lumpy new scars on my wrists, spotted with crimson.

“Sam,” Ulrik said.

I didn't lift my eyes to him. I had used all my words and all my strength trying to get out, and now I couldn't bring myself to want to stand.

“I'm not Beck,” he said, voice helpless. “I don't know what he does to make you snap out of this, okay? I don't know how to speak your language,
Junge
. What are you thinking? Just look at me.”

He was right. Beck had a way of pulling me back to reality, but Beck was not there. Ulrik finally picked me up, my body limp as a corpse in his arms, and carried me all the way back to the house. I didn't speak or eat or move until Beck shifted and came into the house — even now, I still didn't know if it had been hours or days.

Beck didn't come straight to me. Instead he went into the kitchen and clanged some pots. When he came back out to the living room, where I hid in the corner of the sofa, he had a plate of eggs.

“I made you food,” he said.

The eggs were exactly the way I liked them. I looked at them instead of Beck's face and whispered, “I'm sorry.”

“There's nothing to be sorry for,” Beck said. “You didn't know any better. And Ulrik was the only one who liked those damn Doritos. You did us all a favor.”

He set the plate down on the sofa beside me and went down the hall into his study. After a minute, I took the eggs and slid silently down the hall after him. Sitting down outside the open study door, I listened to the erratic patter of Beck's fingers on his keyboard as I ate.

That was back when I was still broken. It was back when I thought I'd have Beck forever.

“Hi, Ringo.”

Cole's voice brought me back to the here and now, years later, no longer a nine-year-old guided by benevolent guardians. He stood at my elbow as I faced the shed door.

“I see you're still human,” I said, more surprised than my voice let on. “What are you doing out here?”

“Trying to become a wolf.”

A nasty chill ran down my skin at that, remembering fighting the wolf inside. Remembering the turn in my stomach before the shift. The sick feeling just when I lost myself. I didn't reply. Instead, I pushed open the door to the shed, fumbling for the light. The space smelled musty, unused; memories and dust motes suspended in the stale air. Behind me, a cardinal made its squeaking-sneaker noise again and again, but otherwise, there was no sound.

“Now's a good a time as any to get familiar with this place, then,” I told him. I stepped into the shed, my shoes making dusty shuffling noises on the worn wood floor. Everything was in place as far as I could see — blankets folded neatly beside the dormant television, watercooler filled to the top, and jugs lined up obediently behind it, waiting their turn. Everything was waiting for wolves to fall into humans.

Cole stepped in after me, looking around at the bins and supplies with vague interest. Everything about him radiated disdain and restless energy. I wanted to ask him
What did Beck see in you?
Instead, I asked, “Is it what you expected?”

Cole had one of the bins opened a few inches and was looking inside; he didn't look away as he replied, “What?”

“Being a wolf.”

“I expected it to be worse,” he said, and now he looked at me, a sly smile on his face like he knew what I'd gone through to not be one. “Beck told me the pain was unbearable.”

I picked up a dried leaf that we'd tracked into the shed. “Yeah, well, the pain's not the difficult part.”

“Oh yeah?” Cole's voice was knowing. It was like he wanted me to hate him. “What's the difficult part, then?”

I turned away from him. I really didn't want to answer. Because I didn't think he'd care about the difficult part.

Beck had picked him. I would not hate him. I would
not
. There had to have been something in there that Beck saw. Finally, I said, “One year, one of the wolves — Ulrik — he decided it would be a great idea to start growing Italian herbs from seeds in pots. Ulrik was always doing crazy crap like that.” I remembered him poking holes in the potting soil and dropping seeds in, tiny, dead-looking things disappearing into the deep black earth. “This had better work, dammit,” he had said amiably to me. I'd been standing by his elbow the entire time, getting in his way while I watched, moving only when his elbow accidentally prodded my chest. “Think you can stand any closer, Sam?” he'd asked. Now, to Cole, I added, “Beck thought Ulrik
was crazy. He told him that basil was only two bucks a bunch at the store.”

Cole raised one of his eyebrows at me, his expression clearly indicating that he was indulging me.

I ignored his expression and said, “I watched Ulrik's seeds every day for weeks, waiting for any little bit of green in the dirt, anything to tell me that there was life waiting to happen. And that's it. That's the difficult part,” I told Cole. “I am standing here in the shed, and I'm waiting to see if my seeds are going to poke out of the dirt. I don't know if it's too early to look for signs of life or if, this time, winter has claimed my family for good.”

Cole stared at me. The contempt was gone from his expression, but he didn't say anything. His face held something empty, something I didn't know how to react to, so I didn't say anything, either.

There was no point in staying any longer. I did the last step while Cole hung back, checking the food bins to make sure no insects had gotten into them. I left my fingers hooked on the edge of the plastic bin for a moment as I listened. I didn't know what I was listening for; there was only silence and more silence and more silence again. Even the cardinal outside the still-open door had fallen quiet.

Pretending Cole wasn't there, I strained my ears like I had when I was a wolf, attempting to create a map of all the creatures in the nearby woods and the sounds that they made. But I heard nothing.

Somewhere, there were wolves in these woods, but they were invisible to me.