Page 96 of The Turning of the Tables

Quincy was my current personal hero, because all she did was slide a box of Kleenex through the cracked door where I was huddled with the lights off, go to the meetingand make something up that had apparently been believable, and then bring me a package of Unreal coconut bars, which was about the only chocolate-esque candy I could actually eat. Stupid alpha-gal.

Which had led to more crying, because I’d become a complete emotional wreck.

Quincy understood that this was probably one of the most awkward and humiliating things that had ever happened to me—and definitely the most awkward and humiliating thing that had ever happened to me at work—and didn’t ask any questions or mention a thing when I finally emerged. At least I’d managed to get a little bit of paperwork done and push a few buttons on some machines, even if Quincy had been the one to actually pull the final results.

I didn’t die and I hadn’t eaten anyone, so I suppose I had to count that as a win, at least. It didn’t feel very much like one.

Noah had picked me up about five minutes after my shift ended and had a turkey and mustard sandwich with pickles waiting for me in the car. Which had almost set me off again, but the idea of having to explain myself to Noah helped me hold it together.

You would think that Noah would have been my first confidante. We were twins. He was a shifter, I was now a shifter… But I just couldn’t. I couldn’t tell him how horrible I felt about being what he was. How much I hated this body and everything it saw and felt and smelled and heard. And I didn’t know how to tell Noah without hurting him—and that was something I couldn’t do.

I’d told Elliot that I hated ‘it’—without being specific about what exactly ‘it’ was. It was easy to pretend that it was the newness of it—that what I hated was having toadjust to a new body, not the new body itself. Not myself inside of it.

The minute we’d gotten back home, I’d pleaded exhaustion and curled up in bed, expecting a night of misery.

Noah woke me up almost three hours later, bringing me a plate with two chicken pot pies—the kind you get out of the freezer, not that I was complaining. They’re surprisingly good, given how much processed weirdness goes into them.

“You need to eat, Sethy,” he said—a refrain that was getting very old, very fast.

But as soon as he’d shaken me from sleep, I’d smelled them, and that had awakened my appetite, if not my brain. I grunted, but pushed myself up to sitting, and Noah set the plate on the night-stand so that he could help by propping my pillow up behind me. Once I was settled, he passed me the plate, a fork sitting on it beside the two pies in their little oven-safe paper trays.

“Thanks,” I mumbled, my hands awkward as I lifted the fork.

This had been the principal source of frustration at work. I’m a scientist—I have to be able to have steady hands to use pipettes, to pour, to carry, to work with the glass slides that went into the microscopes… and my fingers didn’t work quite right.

I’d dropped and broken about four different things—fortunately nothing irreplaceable, like evidence, thank God—before Quincy had gently suggested that maybe I should confine myself to computers and paper for the time being. She hadn’t been wrong, but I hadn’t been prepared to get to work and find that I couldn’t actuallydomy job anymore.

25

SETH MAYS

Why is everything so much harder?

ELLIOT CRANE

The whole world is different.

You have to adjust, baby.

It takes time.

I can’t do things. Basic things.

I’m dropping everything.

Your hands will steady out.

Your muscles and tendons have to re-figure out how they work.

I also can’t remember stuff.

Stuff I used to know.

It comes back.

Promise?

Promise.