Lunatic Fringe (17 page)

“
Lexie,” Brian continued,
under the close watch of his peers. “Don’t be a dyke, okay? I just,
I wanna . . .” He yanked her closer to him; she could smell the
coconut-scented gel in his hair, the rubbing alcohol in the
deodorant he wore, and the eggs that he had for breakfast. His
man-handling skewed her balance, with her weight resting on her
right foot and her left pinned awkwardly underneath the bench below
her. Lexie teetered, her elbow digging into his rib cage. The trees
of men surrounded her.

Her blood pumped hotter with each
pulse. The tiny hairs on the back of her neck stood erect, and her
muscles twitched with the anticipation of movement. It was a simple
feeling stirring a simple act. Her was arm bent at forty-five
degrees in Brian’s clumsy grip. She rotated her arm down past her
chest, dislodging Brian’s hand by torqueing his wrist, and threw
her weight into his sternum.

“
Get OFF me!” she shouted
as she pushed him away. Brian fell back, barely catching himself on
his feet as he seized his chest and coughed, sucking in a great
mouthful of air. He sputtered, but couldn’t catch his breath. Lexie
untwisted her foot and bounded down the bleachers, not looking back
to see if Duane reacted.

The third quarter had begun
uneventfully, and the girls were silent when Lexie returned to the
blanket. She sat and poured herself a tall glass of orange juice,
craving sugar and familiarity to calm her surging
adrenaline.

She breathed hard, as if she had just
finished a run. She looked up to see the Pack’s grinning
faces.

She gulped her orange juice. “You saw
that?”

“
You bet we did,” Blythe
said.

“
That was awesome!”
Sharmalee cheered.

“
I’m really proud of you,”
Blythe said.

Lexie looked at them all askance. “For
what?”

“
This is precisely how you
have to handle these masculine threats,” Blythe said. “Men don’t
understand words or rules. You have to be willing to take
action.”

Lexie shook her head. “He’s a jerk
showing off for his frat brothers. That’s all,” she said, rubbing
the red welt on her shin and noting how quickly it
faded.

“
That’s not all,” Blythe
said, dragging out the last word with a debutante’s lilt. “His
behavior is a symptom of a much larger disease, Lexie. All men’s
actions are contextualized by a history of violence. Brian and his
brothers are constantly reinforcing an idea of ownership over
women’s bodies when they grope you or overpower you.”

Lexie sighed. “Whatever. I’m not
exactly proud of what I just did.”

Jenna smiled, handing her a fresh glass
of champagne. “That’s fine. Just let us be proud for you,
okay?”

Lexie nodded, eager to move away from
this conversation. Pride seemed like an inappropriate response to
her own violence, though the Pack’s approval warmed her.

“
I think she’s ready,”
Jenna said.

Mitch nodded. “Yup, I
agree.”

“
Ditto,” Corwin
said.

“
Totally,” said
Sharmalee.

They all directed their eyes to Blythe,
whose pink lips curved in a sly smile. “I hesitate to speak for
Renee or Hazel, but I believe they’d be in agreement.”

“
Lexie,” she continued.
“We’d like to share more of ourselves with you.”

Lexie looked at the circle of eager
faces, hoping to glean an explanation.

“
We perform an important
service to the community,” Jenna whispered.

“
Renee could explain it
best,” Sharmalee offered.

“
Excuse me?” Blythe
said.

“
Whatever, Blythe. Just
tell her,” Corwin said.

“
Lexie, we’ve enjoyed your
company quite a lot the past couple of weeks. You’re bright, you’re
clever, and you seem eager to learn more about us and our family,”
Blythe said. “We’d like to share more of ourselves with you, if
you’ll let us. Does that sound like something you’d
appreciate?”

Lexie smiled and shrugged, as flattered
as she was confused.

“
We would like to take you
on a hunt.” The sentence hung in the air as the stands erupted in
cheers for yet another of Hazel’s killer shots.

Lexie waited for more, but none came.
“A hunt?” she asked. “For what?”

“
Wolves,” Blythe
answered.

Lexie looked at the faces of the other
girls. Their shared eagerness confirmed Blythe’s story.

“
You mean like gray wolves?
Or like the rare wolf wolves?”

“
Oh, we don’t hunt normal
wolves,” Sharmalee said, shaking her head. “That would be
terrible.”

“
Well yeah, I figured. But
rares? You guys?” Lexie asked.

“
Um, yeah,” said Mitch.
“What’s so weird about that?”

“
The rares take down at
least two men a year. And those guys are usually heavily armed
wilderness types. How would you do that? Why would you even
try?”

“
Don’t you know the truth
about them?” Sharmalee whispered.

Lexie responded with confused
silence.

“
They’re werewolves,” Mitch
whispered.

“
What?”

“
The wolves that attack
your classmates and neighbors are werewolves. Our Pack keeps them
from overrunning everything,” Blythe said.

“
Barely,” Corwin muttered.
Blythe shot her a stern look.

“
What, you mean like humans
that change with the moon? Like ‘werewolf’ werewolves?” Lexie
asked.

The girls nodded in unison.

“
And how do you do this?”
Lexie asked, more amused than shocked, convinced that a punchline
was coming soon.

“
Come to the house after
sunset,” Blythe said. “Dress warm. Bring a weapon.”

“
I’ve lived in this area my
whole life,” Lexie said, shaking her head.

“
Small towns keep the best
secrets,” Blythe said, shrugging. “You don’t believe me, and I
understand. It’s an unbelievable claim. But trust me, all the
attacks you read about in the paper, all the girls that transfer or
the boys that disappear, it’s all because of the
wolves.”

“
Werewolves,” Lexie said,
and Blythe nodded. “Who are they, then?”

“
Men from town, sired by an
ancient pack of full-bloods.”

Jenna shifted on her knees, “But they
aren’t all townies.”

“
You’re saying the rare
wolves are men, and the men are werewolves?” Lexie
asked.

Corwin nodded.

“
So then these ‘werewolves’
you’re hunting. You kill them?”

The girls nodded.

“
Then you’re killing men,
yeah?”

“
No way,” Corwin insisted.
“These guys are monsters.”

“
But real monsters or just
‘bad guy’ monsters?” Lexie asked, glancing back to Brian and his
frat buddies.

“
Is there a difference?”
Mitch asked.

“
No difference,” Blythe
said. “A monster is a monster, even if he’s wearing human skin. Or
a varsity jacket,” she tipped her chin over to the bleachers, where
the boys still whooped.

“
I don’t know. They may be
nasty animals, but aside from eating a hunter every once in a
while, they don’t seem to cause too much trouble,” Lexie
shrugged.

“
Don’t be naive,” Blythe
said. “The wolves may only kill a person or two every once in a
while, but that doesn’t account for the runaways.”

“
This town sucks. That
explains the runaways. I thought about it once or twice myself,”
Lexie replied.

“
And those people whose
names get buried in the back pages of the paper?” Jenna
said.

“
Everyone knows meth’s a
big problem around here,” Lexie shrugged.

“
Regardless of the maulings
that get all the press, you have no idea what the werewolves are up
to in human form,” Blythe asserted.

“
Like what?”

The girls shifted quietly on the
blanket and Blythe spoke. “Milton has the highest rates of rape,
assault, and relationship violence out of all schools of comparable
size. We have the highest transfer rate among women, as well as the
second highest rate of expulsion of male students.”

“
You’re blaming werewolves
for rape?”

“
You bet I am. Human males
have a hard enough time controlling their primitive ids. Add a dose
of the beast and they go feral. They need to be handled, and that’s
where the Pack comes in.”

“
By killing
them.”

“
That’s right.”

“
I don’t know if I can
support this.”

“
Well I suppose you don’t
have to. But I thought more of you. I expected you to be capable of
great things, of making great change. Renee said she saw it in you.
I think we all did.”

The girls nodded, and it was Lexie’s
turn to shift uncomfortably.

“
It’s just hard to
believe,” Lexie spoke, barely audible.

Blythe nodded along with the rest of
the Pack. “None of it seems real until it happens to you. Come
hunting with us tonight. You’ll see how real it can be.”

Lexie looked into the expectant faces
of her friends. She wanted to believe them and didn’t want to in
equal measure. She considered the local mythology of her hometown
and whether her neighbors could have been so wrong for so long, or
worse, hiding the menacing secrets themselves. None of it made
sense, but Lexie was too intrigued to back down, and too concerned
with how the Pack viewed her to say no. Biting her tongue so hard
that the taste of salt filled her mouth, she looked into Blythe’s
blue eyes and nodded.

Chapter 11

Lexie’s breath clouded in the light of
the waxing moon as she walked to the Den. The girls gathered in the
backyard, circled around a small fire burning in the pit. Fog
accumulated beneath the young trees at the edge of the property and
beaded every surface with wetness.

Hazel wore black and carried a length
of rope around her shoulder. Renee, too, looked like a cat-burglar
as she lubricated the spring mechanism on a crossbow. Lexie liked
the look of that weapon; she had always wanted to learn use one,
but her father suggested it was less humane than the clean efficacy
of bullets. Jenna adjusted her gloves, a bowie knife strapped to
her belt. Corwin slipped brass knuckles onto her thick fingers,
squeezing them, testing their weight. Mitch dug through a dark
canvas bag, sorting its inventory. All the girls wore dark
hand-knit hats, gifts from the crafty Jenna no doubt. Sharmalee was
the only one in street clothes. Nobody carried guns.

Noting Lexie’s confusion, Corwin
whispered, “She’s the lookout,”

“
Lookout for
what?”

Blythe emerged from the house in an
army-green turtleneck, black leggings and sneakers. She wore a
ski-mask rolled up on her forehead, looking like the queen on a
chess set.

The whole scene looked like posse
theater, and Lexie had a fleeting moment of sympathy with Brian
when he suggested they were all crazy.

At the behest of some silent signal,
the women began to move, darting through backyards and cutting
across less-trafficked areas of campus.

Lexie’s fingers grazed the hilt of her
knife, secured on her right hip. She traced the engravings on the
handle. Even in the cool night air, it felt warm in her hand. She
wondered, briefly, if she should’ve brought her gun
instead.

“
Um, the forest is that
way,” Lexie suggested.

“
Someone grew some sass,”
Renee replied, the first thing she said since Lexie’s arrival.
Lexie bit her tongue.

Blythe strode alongside them both.
“Lexie, I’m going to need you to keep quiet and just watch for now,
okay?”

At the eastern edge of campus, the Pack
hung a left and scurried up Moosejaw Avenue. The quiet street ended
at a sad, neon “Open” sign clinging tenuously to the eaves of the
Mill Tavern. Never patronized by students, it was a townie haunt.
Tonight, though, it looked merely haunted. The gravel parking lot
held two trucks, one of which didn’t look particularly eager to go
anywhere, its tires buried in muddy divots.

“
Shit,” Blythe said,
seemingly apropos of nothing. “We’re late.”

“
I’m on it,” Sharmalee
said, removing her sweatshirt and handing it to Corwin. Blythe
frowned.

Corwin placed her open hand on Blythe’s
shoulder, “We need a win, Blythe.”

Renee hefted her crossbow, and Blythe
sighed.

Sharmalee kissed Corwin’s cheek and
waved at the group. “Be right back.”

‘
Right back’ ticked by,
minute after tense minute. The women hid around the back of the
tavern, while Lexie crouched with Renee in the shadows of the woods
beyond. The tavern’s screen door swung open with a rusty squeal,
and Sharmalee fell out of the bar with a huge man draped around
her.