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Everybody kept sneaking funny looks at me and whispering, and I was sure it was because I couldn’t help walking funny with the pad between my legs and they could smell what was happening, which as far as I knew hadn’t happened to anybody else in Eight A yet. Just like nobody else in the whole grade had anything real in their stupid training bras except me, thanks a lot!
Anyway I stayed away from everybody as much as I could and wouldn’t talk to Gerry-Anne, even, because I was scared she would ask me why I walked funny and smelled bad.
Billy Linden avoided me just like everybody else, except one of his stupid buddies purposely bumped into me so I stumbled into Billy on the lunch-line. Billy turns around and goes, real loud, “Hey, Boobs, when did you start wearing black-and-blue makeup?”
I didn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing that he had actually broken my nose, which the doctor said. Good thing they don’t have to bandage you up for that. Billy would have been hollering up a storm about how I had my nose in a sling as well as my boobs.
That night I got up after I was supposed to be asleep and took off my underpants and T-shirt that I sleep in and stood looking at myself in the mirror. I didn’t need to turn a light on. The moon was full and it was shining right into my bedroom through the big dormer window.
I crossed my arms and pinched myself hard to sort of punish my body for what it was doing to me.
As if that could make it stop.
No wonder Edie Siler starved herself to death in the tenth grade! I understood her perfectly. She was trying to keep her body down, keep it normal-looking, thin and strong, like I was too, back when I looked like a person, not a cartoon that somebody would call “Boobs.”
And then something warm trickled in a little line down the inside of my leg, and I knew it was blood and I couldn’t stand it any more. I pressed my thighs together and shut my eyes hard, and I did something.
I mean I felt it happening. I felt myself shrink down to a hard core of sort of cold fire inside my bones, and all the flesh part, the muscles and the squishy insides and the skin, went sort of glowing and free-floating, all shining with moonlight, and I felt a sort of shifting and balance-changing going on.
I thought I was fainting on account of my stupid period. So I turned around and threw myself on my bed, only by the time I hit it, I knew something was seriously wrong.
For one thing, my nose and my head were crammed with these crazy, rich sensations that it took me a second to even figure out were smells, they were so much stronger than any smells I’d ever smelled. And they were—I don’t know—interesting instead of just stinky, even the rotten ones.
I opened my mouth to get the smells a little better, and heard myself panting in a funny way as if I’d been running, which I hadn’t, and then there was this long part of my face sticking out and something moving there—my tongue.
I was licking my chops.
Well, there was this moment of complete and utter panic. I tore around the room whining and panting and hearing my toenails clicking on the floorboards, and then I huddled down and crouched in the corner because I was scared Dad and Hilda would hear me and come to find out what was making all this racket.
Because I could hear them. I could hear their bed creak when one of them turned over, and Dad’s breath whistling a little in an almost-snore, and I could smell them too, each one with a perfectly clear bunch of smells, kind of like those desserts of mixed ice cream flavors they call a medley.
My body was twitching and jumping with fear and energy, an
d my room—it’s a converted attic-space, wide but with a ceiling that’s low in places—my room felt like a jail. And plus, I was terrified of catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I had a pretty good idea of what I would see, and I didn’t want to see it.
Besides, I had to pee, and I couldn’t face trying to deal with the toilet in the state I was in.
So I eased the bedroom door open with my shoulder and nearly fell down the stairs trying to work them with four legs and thinking about it, instead of letting my body just do it. I put my hands on the front door to open it, but my hands weren’t hands, they were paws with long knobby toes covered in fur, and the toes had thick black claws sticking out of the ends of them.
The pit of my stomach sort of exploded with horror, and I yelled. It came out this wavery “woooo” noise that echoed eerily in my skullbones.
Upstairs, Hilda goes, “Jack, what was that?” I bolted for the basement as I heard Dad hit the floor of their bedroom.
The basement door slips its latch all the time, so I just shoved it open and down I went, doing better on the stairs this time because I was too scared to think. I spent the rest of the night down there, moaning to myself (which meant whining through my nose, really) and trotting around rubbing against the walls trying to rub off this crazy shape I had, or just moving around because I couldn’t sit still. The place was thick with stinks and these slow-swirling currents of hot and cold air. I couldn’t handle all the input.
As for having to pee, in the end I managed to sort of hike my butt up over the edge of the slop-sink by Dad’s workbench and let go in there. The only problem was that I couldn’t turn the taps on to rinse out the smell because of my paws.
Then about three a.m. I woke up from a doze curled up on a bare place on the floor where the spiders weren’t so likely to walk, and I couldn’t see a thing or smell anything much either, so I knew I was okay again even before I checked and found fingers on my hands again instead of claws.
I zipped upstairs and stood under the shower so long that Hilda yelled at me for using up the hot water when she had a load of wash to do. I was only trying to steam the stiffness out of my muscles, but I couldn’t tell her that.
It was really weird to just dress and go to school after a night like that. One good thing, I had stopped bleeding after only one day, which Hilda said wasn’t so strange for the first time. So it had to be the huge greenish bruise on my face from Billy’s punch that everybody kept staring at.
That and the usual thing, of course. Well, why not? They didn’t know I’d spent the night as a wolf.
So Fat Joey grabbed my book bag in the hallway outside the Science lab and tossed it to some kid from Eight B. I had to run after them to get it back, which of course was set up so the boys could cheer the jouncing of my boobs under my shirt.
I was so mad I almost caught Fat Joey, except I was afraid if I grabbed him, maybe he would sock me like Billy had.
