Victor slammed his shoulder into my chest, one hundred and eighty pounds of repressed anger, and this time I crashed to the ground, a piece of asphalt grinding into my back. “You’re such a waste of space.
Life is one big ego trip for you, you privileged son of a bitch.” He was kicking me now, and Jeremy was watching, arms crossed.
“That’s enough,” Jeremy said.
“I—want—to—smash—that—smile—off—your —face,” Victor said between kicks. He was out of breath now, and finally, one of his kicks threw him off balance and he fell heavily to the ground next to me.
I stared up at the rectangle of gray-white sky above us, framed in by the dark buildings, and felt blood trickle from my nose. I thought about Angie back at home and the way she’d looked when she told me she’d rather go it alone, and I wished she could’ve watched Victor kick the crap out of me.
Above me, Jeremy held out his camera phone and took a picture of the two of us lying on the asphalt in some city I couldn’t even remember the name of.
Three weeks later, that photo of me flying off the stairs, Jeremy and Victor watching me, hit magazine stands and made the front page of the mag. My face was everywhere. No one was forgetting me anytime soon. I was everywhere.
Later in the afternoon, lying on the floor of Beck’s house, the shift became urgent inside me, so insistent that I realized that my nausea earlier had only been pretend, nothing like the real thing, which bit and tore and ripped at my guts. I made my way again to the back door and opened it, standing and looking out at the grass. It was surprisingly warm outside, the overcast sky gone, but an occasional stiff breeze reminded me it was still March. This time, when a cold gust of wind blew, it cut right through my human body to the wolf inside. Goose bumps raced across my skin. I stepped onto the concrete stoop and hesitated, wondering if I should go to the shed and leave my clothing there to make it easier to retrieve later. But the next gust sent me double with shudders. I wasn’t going to make it to the shed.
My stomach groaned and pinched; I crouched and waited.
But the shift didn’t come right away, like it had before. Having been human for almost a day now, my body was more sure of its form, and it didn’t seem like it wanted to give it up easily.
C’mon, shift, I thought, as the wind pulled another rack of shuddering from me. My stomach churned. I tried to remember that it was just a reaction to the shifting process; I didn’t really need to throw up. If I just resisted the impulse, I’d be fine.
I braced my fingers against the cold concrete, willing the wind to push me into a wolf. Out of the blue, I remembered Angie’s number, and I felt an irrational desire to go back inside and dial it, just to hear her say hello before I hung up. I wondered what Victor was thinking right now, after all this.
My chest ached.
Get me out of this body. Get me out of Cole , I thought.
But that was just one more thing out of my control.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
• GRACE • That night, there was nothing different about my bed without Sam there. There was nothing unfamiliar about the shape of the mattress. The sheets were no larger without him. I was no less tired without the steady sound of his breathing, and in the dark, I could not see the absence of his square shoulder beside me. The pillow still smelled like him, like he’d gotten up to get his book and had forgotten to come back.
But it made all the difference in the world.
My stomach aching, an echo of the pain of last night, I pressed my face into his pillow and tried not to remember those nights when I had thought he was gone for good. Imagining him over in Beck’s house now, I rolled over and got my cell phone. But I didn’t dial his number, because, stupidly, all I could think of was when we were lying together and Sam was shivering and he said, Maybe we should rethink our lifestyle.
Then I thought of him telling me to stay over here, not to come over and stay with him.
Maybe he was glad to be over there, to have the excuse to be alone. Maybe he wasn’t. I didn’t know. I felt sick, sick, sick, in some new and terrible way that I couldn’t describe. I wanted to cry and felt foolish for it.
I put my phone back on the nightstand and rolled back into his pillow and finally went to sleep.
• SAM • I was an open wound.
Restless, I roamed the halls of the house, wanting to call her again, afraid to get her in trouble, afraid of something nameless and huge. I paced until I was too tired to stand, and then I headed upstairs to my room.
Without turning on the light, I went to my bed and lay down, my arm thrown across the mattress, my hand aching because Grace wasn’t underneath it.
My thoughts festered inside me. I could not sleep.
My mind slid away from the reality of the empty bed beside me and curved my thoughts into lyrics, my fingers imagining the frets they would press to find the tune.
I’m an equation that only she solves / these Xs and Ys by other names called / My way of dividing is desperately flawed / as I multiply days without her.
As the endless night crawled slowly by, As the endless night crawled slowly by, innumerable minutes piling one upon another without getting anywhere, the wolves began to howl and my head began to pound. One of the dull, slow aches that the meningitis had left as its legacy. I lay in the empty house and listened to the pack’s slow cries rise and fall with the pressure inside my skull.
I had risked everything, and I had nothing to show for it but my open hand, lying empty and palm up toward the ceiling.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
• GRACE •
“I’m going for a walk,” I told Mom.
No day had ever passed as slowly as this Saturday. Once upon a time, when I was younger, I would’ve been thrilled to have an entire day with my mother in the house; now, I felt restless, like I had a houseguest. She wasn’t really keeping me from doing anything, but I didn’t feel like starting anything while she was around, either.
Currently, Mom was delicately folded on the end of the couch, reading one of the books that Sam had left behind. When she heard my voice, her head whipped around and her entire body stiffened. “You’re what?”
“I’m going for a walk,” I said, tempted to take Sam’s book out of her hands. “I’m bored out of my mind and I want to talk with Sam, but you guys won’t let me and I have to do something or I will start throwing stuff around my room like an angry chimp.”
The truth was that without school or Sam, I needed to be outside. That’s what I had always done in the summers before Sam—fled to the tire swing in the backyard, book in hand, needing the sound of the woods to fill the empty, restless space inside me.
“If you go chimp, I’m not cleaning your room,” Mom warned. “And you can’t go outside. You were just in the hospital two nights ago.”
“For a fever that is now gone,” I pointed out. Just beyond her, I could see the sky, deep blue and warmlooking, and, beneath it, the somehow pregnantlooking branches of the trees reaching into the blue.
Everything in me itched to be outside, smelling the oncoming spring. The living room felt gray and muted in comparison. “Plus, vitamin D is great for sick people like myself. I won’t stay out long.”
When she didn’t say anything, I found my clogs where I’d left them in the hall and slid them on. As I did, silence hung between us, speaking more strongly to what had happened that night than our few exchanged words had.
Mom looked profoundly uncomfortable. “Grace, I think we should talk. About”—she paused—“you and Sam.”
“Oh, let’s not.” My voice conveyed exactly how much enthusiasm I had for the suggestion.
“I don’t want to do it, either,” she said, closing the book without checking the page number, which reminded me again of Sam, who always checked his page number, or folded the book temporarily closed around one of his fingers, before looking up to speak.
Mom continued, “But I have to talk to you about it, and if you talk to me, then I’ll tell your father you did, and you won’t have to talk to him.”
I didn’t see why I had to talk to either of them. Until now, they hadn’t cared what I did with myself or where I was when they were gone, and in a year, I’d be in college or at the very least out from under their roof. I thought about bolting but instead crossed my arms and faced her, waiting.
Mom got right to it. She asked, “Are you using protection?”
My cheeks burned. “Mom.”
But she didn’t back down. “Are you?”