I needed to talk to Olivia and find out how much of this was real and how much of it was Rachel’s love of a good story.
“Is this about The Boy? He can come! I don’t care!” Rachel said.
The hall was slowly emptying; the bell rang overhead. “We’ll talk about it later!” I said, and hurried with Rachel into first period. I found my usual seat and began sorting through my homework.
“We need to talk.”
I jerked to attention at the sound of an entirely different voice: Isabel Culpeper’s. She slid her giant cork heels the rest of the way under the other desk and leaned toward me, highlighted hair framing her face in perfect, shiny ringlets.
“We’re sort of in class right now, Isabel,” I said, gesturing toward the taped morning announcements playing on the TV at the front of the classroom. The teacher was already at the front of the class, bent over her desk. She wasn’t paying attention, but I still wasn’t thrilled with the idea of a conversation with Isabel. Best-case scenario was that she needed help with her homework or something; I had a reputation for being good at math, so it was sort of possible.
Worst case was that she wanted to talk about Jack.
Sam had said that the only rule the pack had was that they didn’t talk about werewolves to outsiders. I wasn’t about to break that rule.
Isabel’s face was still wearing a pretty pout, but I saw storms destroying small villages in her eyes. She glanced toward the front of the room and leaned closer to me. I smelled perfume—roses and summer in this Minnesota cold. “It will only take a second.”
I looked over at Rachel, who was frowning at Isabel. I really didn’t want to talk to Isabel.
I didn’t really know much about her, but I knew she was a dangerous gossip who could quickly reduce my standing in the school to cafeteria target practice. I wasn’t really one who tried to be popular, but I remembered what had happened to the last girl who had gotten on Isabel’s bad side. She was still trying to get out from under a convoluted rumor that involved lap dancing and the football team. “Why?”
“Privately,” hissed Isabel. “Across the hall.”
I rolled my eyes as I pushed out of my desk and tiptoed out the back of the room. Rachel gave me a brief, pained look. I was sure I wore a matching one. “Two seconds. That’s it,” I told Isabel as she shuffled me across the hall into an empty classroom. The corkboard on the opposite wall was covered with anatomical drawings; someone had pinned a thong over one of the figures.
“Yeah. Whatever.” She shut the door behind us and eyed me as if I would spontaneously break into song or something. I didn’t know what she was waiting for.
I crossed my arms. “Okay. What do you want?”
I’d thought I was prepared for it, but when she said, “My brother. Jack,” my heart still raced.
I didn’t say anything.
“I saw him while I was running this morning.”
I swallowed. “Your brother.”
Isabel pointed at me with a perfect nail, glossier than the hood of the Bronco. Her ringlets bounced. “Oh, don’t give me that. I talked to him. He’s not dead.”
I briefly wrestled with the image of Isabel jogging. I couldn’t see it. Maybe she meant running from her Chihuahua. “Um.”
Isabel pressed on. “There was something screwed up with him. And don’t say ‘That’s because he’s dead.’ He’s not.”
Something about Isabel’s charming personality—and maybe the fact that I knew Jack was actually alive—made it very difficult to empathize with her. I said, “Isabel, it seems to me like you don’t need me to have this conversation. You’re doing a great job all by yourself.”
“Shut up,” Isabel said, which only supported my theory. I was about to tell her so, but her next words stopped me cold. “When I saw Jack, he said he hadn’t really died. Then he started—twitching—and said he had to go right then. When I tried to ask him what was wrong with him, he said that you knew.”
My voice came out a little strangled sounding. “Me?” But I remembered his eyes imploring me as he lay pinned beneath the she-wolf. Help me. He had recognized me.
“Well, it’s not exactly a shock, is it? Everyone knows that you and Olivia Marx are freaks for those wolves, and clearly this has something to do with them. So what’s going on, Grace?”
I didn’t like the way she asked the question—like maybe she already knew the answer.
Blood was rushing in my ears; I was in way over my head. “Look. You’re upset, I get that. But seriously, get help. Leave me and Olivia out of this. I don’t know what you saw, but it wasn’t Jack.”
The lie left a bad taste in my mouth. I could see the reasoning behind the pack’s secrecy, but Jack was Isabel’s brother. Didn’t she have a right to know?
“I wasn’t seeing things,” Isabel snapped as I opened the door. “I’m going to find him again. And I’m going to find out what your part is in all this.”
“I don’t have a part,” I said. “I just like the wolves. Now I need to get to class.”
Isabel stood in the doorway, watching me go, and I wondered what, at the beginning of all this, she had thought I was going to say.
She looked almost forlorn, or maybe it was just an act.
In any case, I said, “Isabel, just get help.”
She crossed her arms. “I thought that’s what I was doing.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE SAM
54°F While Grace was at school, I spent a long time in the parking lot, thinking about meeting wild Rachel and wondering what she’d meant by the wolf comment. I debated hunting for Jack, but I wanted to hear what Grace found out at school before I went on any wildgoose chase.
I didn’t quite know how to occupy my time without Grace and without my pack. I felt like someone who has an hour until his bus arrives—not really enough time to do anything important, but too much time to just sit and wait.
The subtle cold bite behind the breeze told me that I couldn’t put off getting on my bus forever.
I finally drove the Bronco to the post office. I had the key to Beck’s post office box, but mostly, what I wanted to do was conjure memories and pretend that I’d run into him there.
I remembered the day Beck had brought me there to pick up my books for school—even now, I remembered it had been a Tuesday, because back then, Tuesdays were my favorite day. I don’t remember why—it was just something about the way that u looked like when it was next to e that seemed very friendly. I always loved going to the post office with Beck; it was a treasure cave with rows and rows of little locked boxes holding secrets and surprises only for those with the proper key.
With peculiar clarity, I remembered that conversation clearly, down to the expression on Beck’s face: “Sam. Come on, bucko.”
“What’s that?”
Beck shoved his back ineffectually against the glass door, suffering under the weight of a huge box. “Your brain.”
“I already have a brain.”
“If you did, you’d have opened the door for me.”
I shot him a dark look and let him shove against the door a moment longer before I ducked under his arms to push it open. “What is it really?”
“Schoolbooks. We’re going to educate you properly, so you don’t grow up to be an idiot.”
I remembered being intrigued by the idea of school-in-a-box, just-add-water-and-Sam.