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When I was nice and clean, including licking off my own bottom which seemed like a perfectly normal and nice thing to do at the time, I jumped up on the bed, curled up, and corked right off. When I woke up with the sun in my eyes, there I was, my own self again.
It was very strange, grabbing breakfast and wearing my old sweatshirt that wallowed all over me so I didn’t stick out so much, while Hilda yawned and shuffled around in her robe and slippers and acted like her and Dad hadn’t been doing it last night, which I knew different.
And plus, it was perfectly clear that she didn’t have a clue about what I had been doing, which gave me a strange feeling.
One of the things about growing up which they’re careful not to tell you is, you start having more things you don’t talk to your parents about. And I had a doozie.
Hilda goes, “What’s the matter, are you off Sugar Pops now? Honestly, Kelsey, I can’t keep up with you! And why can’t you wear something nicer than that old shirt to school? Oh, I get it; disguise, right?”
She sighed and looked at me kind of sad but smiling, her hands on her hips. “Kelsey, Kelsey,” she goes, “if only I’d had half of what you’ve got when I was a girl—I was as flat as an ironing board, and it made me so miserable, I can’t tell you.”
She’s real thin and neat-looking, so what does she know about it? But she meant well, and anyhow I was feeling so good I didn’t argue.
I didn’t change my shirt, though.
That night I didn’t turn into a wolf. I laid there waiting, but though the moon came up, nothing happened no matter how hard I tried, and after a while I went and looked out the window and realized that the moon wasn’t really full any more, it was getting smaller.
I wasn’t so much relieved as sorry. I bought a calendar at the school book sale two weeks later, and I checked the full moon nights coming up and waited anxiously to see what happened.
Meantime, things rolled along as usual. I got a rash of zits on my chin. I would look in the mirror and think about my wolf-face, that had beautiful sleek fur instead of zits.
Zits and all I went to Angela Durkin’s party, and the next day Billy Linden told everybody that I went in one of the bedrooms at Angela’s and made out with him, which I did not. But since no grown-ups were home and Fat Joey brought grass to the party, most of the kids were stoned and didn’t know who did what or where anyhow.
As a matter of fact, Billy once actually did get a girl in Seven B high one time out in his parents’ garage and him and two of his friends did it to her while she was zonked out of her mind, or anyway they said they did, and she was too embarrassed to say anything one way or another, and a little while later she changed schools.
How I know about it as the same way everybody else does, which is because Billy was the biggest boaster in the whole school, and you could never tell if he was lying or not.
So I guess it wasn’t so surprising that some people believed what Billy said about me. Gerry-Anne quit talking to me after that. Meantime, Hilda got pregnant.
This turned into a huge discussion about how Hilda had been worried about her biological clock so she and Dad had decided to have a kid, and I shouldn’t mind, it would be fun for me and good preparation for being a mother myself later on, when I found some nice guy and got married.
Sure. Great preparation. Like Mary O’Hare in my class, who gets to change her baby sister’s diapers all the time, yick. She jokes about it, but you can tell she really hates it. Now it looked like it was my turn coming up, as usual.
The only thing that made life bearable was my secret.
“You’re laid back today,” Devon Brown
said to me in the lunchroom one day after Billy had been specially obnoxious, trying to flick rolled up bits of bread from his table so they would land on my chest. Devon was sitting with me because he was bad at French, my only good subject, and I was helping him out with some verbs. I guess he wanted to know why I wasn’t upset because of Billy picking on me. He goes, “How come?”
“That’s a secret,” I said, thinking about what Devon would say if he knew a werewolf was helping him with his French: loup, manger.
He goes, “What secret?” Devon has freckles and is actually kind of cute-looking.
“A secret,” I go, “so I can’t tell you, dummy.”
He looks real superior and he goes, “Well, it can’t be much of a secret, because girls can’t keep secrets, everybody knows that.”
Sure, like that kid Sara in Eight B who it turned out her own father had been molesting her for years, but she never told anybody until some psychologist caught on from some tests we all had to take in seventh grade. Up ’til then, Sara kept her secret fine.
And I kept mine, marking off the days on the calendar. The only part I didn’t look forward to was having a period again, which last time came right before the change.
When the time came, I got crampy and more zits popped out on my face, but I didn’t have a period.
I changed, though.
The next morning they were talking in school about a couple of prize miniature schnauzers at the Wanscombes that had been hauled out of their yard by somebody and killed, and almost nothing left of them.
Well, my stomach turned a little when I heard some kids describing what Mr. Wanscombe had found over in Baker’s Park, “the remains,” as people said. I felt a little guilty, too, because Mrs. Wanscombe really loved those little dogs, which somehow I didn’t think about at all when I was a wolf the night before, trotting around hungry in the moonlight.
