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Dad had told me, Don’t let it get you, kid, all boys are jerks at that age.
Hilda had been saying all summer, Look, it doesn’t do any good to walk around all hunched up with your arms crossed, you should just throw your shoulders back and walk like a proud person who’s pleased that she’s growing up. You’re just a little early, that’s all, and I bet the other girls are secretly envious of you, with their cute little training bras, for Chrissake, as if there was something that needed to be trained.
It’s okay for her, she’s not in school, and she doesn’t remember what it’s like.
So I quit running and walked after Joey until the bell rang, and then I got my book bag back from the bushes outside where he threw it. I was crying a little, and I ducked into the girls’ room.
Stacey Buhl was in there doing her lipstick like usual and wouldn’t talk to me like usual, but Rita came bustling in and said somebody should off that dumb dork Joey, except of course it was really Billy that put him up to it. Like usual.
Rita is okay except she’s an outsider herself, being that her kid brother has AIDS, and lots of kids’ parents don’t think she should even be in the school. So I don’t hang around with her a lot. I’ve got enough trouble, and anyway I was late for Math.
I had to talk to somebody, though. After school I told Gerry-Anne, who’s been my best friend on and off since Fourth Grade. She was off at the moment, but I found her in the library and told her I’d had a weird dream about being a wolf. She wants to be a psychiatrist like her mother, so of course she listened.
She told me I was nuts. That was a big help.
That night I made sure the back door wasn’t exactly closed, and then I got in bed with no clothes on—imagine turning in to a wolf in your underpants and T-shirt!—and just shivered, waiting for something to happen.
The moon came up and shone in my window, and I changed again, just like before, which is not one bit like how it is in the movies—all struggling and screaming and bones snapping with horrible cracking and tearing noises, just the way I guess you would imagine it to be, if you knew it had to be done by building special machines to do that for the camera and make it look real: if you were a special-effects man, instead of a werewolf.
For me, it didn’t have to look real, it was real. It was this melting and drifting thing, which I got sort of excited by it this time. I mean it felt—interesting. Like something I was doing, instead of just another dumb body-mess happening to me because some brainless hormones said so.
I must have made a noise. Hilda came upstairs to the door of my bedroom, but luckily she didn’t come in. She’s tall, and my ceiling is low for her, so she often talks to me from the landing.
Anyway I’d heard her coming, so I was in my bed with my whole head shoved under my pillows, praying frantically that nothing showed.
I could smell her, it was the wildest thing—her own smell, sort of sweaty but sweet, and then on top of it her perfume, like an ice-pick stuck up my nose. I didn’t actually hear a word she said, I was too scared, and also I had this ripply shaking feeling inside me, a high that was only partly terror.
See, I realized all of a sudden, with this big blossom of surprise, that I didn’t have to be scared of Hilda or anybody. I was strong, my wolf-body was strong, and anyhow one clear look at me and she would drop dead.
What a relief, though, when she went away. I was dying to get out from under the weight of the covers, and besides I had to sneeze. Also I recognized that part of the energy roaring around inside me was hunger.
They went to bed—I heard their voices even in their bedroom, though not exactly what they said, which was fine. The words weren’t important any more, I could tell more from the tone of what they were saying.
Like I knew they were going to do it, and I was right. I could hear them messing around right through the walls, which was also something new, and I have never been so embarrassed in my life. I couldn’t even put my hands over my ears, because my hands were paws.
So while I was waiting for them to go to sleep, I looked myself over in the big mirror on my closet door.
There was this big wolf head with a long slim muzzle and a thick ruff around my neck. The ruff stood up as I growled and backed up a little.
Which was silly of course, there was no wolf in the bedroom with me. But I was all strung out, I guess, and one wolf, me in my wolf-body, was as much as I could handle the idea of, let alone two wolves, me and my reflection.
After that first shock, it was great. I kept turning one way and another for different views.
I was thin, with these long, slender legs, but strong, you could see the muscles, and feet a little bigger than I would have picked. But I’ll take four big feet over two big boobs any day.
My face was terrific, with jaggedy white ripsaw teeth and eyes that were small and clear and gleaming in the moonlight. The tail was a little bizarre, but I got used to it, and actually it had a nice plumey shape. My shoulders were big and covered with long, glossy-looking fur, and I had this neat coloring, dark on the back and a sor
t of melting silver on my front and underparts.
The thing was, though, my tongue, hanging out. I had a lot of trouble with that, it looked gross and silly at the same time. I mean, that was my tongue, about a foot long and neatly draped over the points of my bottom canines. That was when I realized that I didn’t have a whole lot of expressions to use, not with that face, which was more like a mask.
But it was alive, it was my face, those were my own long black lips that my tongue licked.
No doubt about it, this was me. I was a werewolf, like in movies they show over Halloween weekend. But it wasn’t anything like your ugly movie werewolf that’s just some guy loaded up with pounds and pounds of makeup. I was gorgeous.
I didn’t want to just hang around admiring myself in the mirror, though. I couldn’t stand being cooped up in that stuffy, smell-crowded room.
When everything else settled down and I could hear Dad and Hilda breathing the way people do when they’re asleep, I snuck out.
