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Father sighed. “It happens sometimes.”
“Will she get better?”
My father never answered me.
“MI ABUELO went crazy,” Rico said. “All looney tunes. He gave me candy and money and farted a lot.”
Tanner elbowed him in the side.
“She’s not crazy,” Chris said. “Just sick. Like, the flu or something.”
“Yeah,” Rico muttered. “The crazy flu.”
The sounds of the cafeteria echoed around us. I hadn’t touched my lunch. I wasn’t very hungry.
“It’ll be okay,” Tanner said. “You’ll see.”
“Yeah,” Chris said. “What’s the worst thing that could happen?”
THERE CAME a scratching at my window in the middle of the night. I should have been scared, but I wasn’t.
I got up from my bed and walked to the window. Mark stared at me from the other side.
I pushed the window up. “What are you—”
He jumped inside.
He took me by the hand.
He led me to the bed.
I slept that night, Mark curled around my back.
HER NAME was Wendy.
She worked at the library in the next town over. She had a dog named Milo. She lived in a house near the park. She smiled a lot and laughed very loud. She didn’t know about wolves and witches. One time, she went away for months. No one told me why. But she came back. Eventually.
She was young and pretty, and when my mother killed her for being my father’s tether, everything changed.
“WHAT HAPPENS when you lose your tether?” I asked Abel one day when it was just him and me. Sometimes he would put his hand on my shoulder when we walked in the woods, and I felt at peace. “If it’s a single person?”
He didn’t speak for a long time. I thought he wasn’t going to answer.
Then, “If it’s illness or disease, a wolf or a witch can prepare themselves. They can rein in their wolf or shore up their magic. They can look to another person. Or a concept. Or an emotion.”
“But what if it’s not like that? What if you can’t prepare?”
He smiled down at me. “That’s life, Gordo. You can’t always prepare for everything. Sometimes you’ll never see it coming. You have to hold on with all of your might and believe that one day, everything will be okay again.”
“GORDO.”
I was still caught in a dream.
“Gordo, come on, you need to wake up. Please, please, please wake up.”
I opened my eyes.
There was a flare of orange above me in the dark.
