Mongrels Read online

  It’s what the hurricane’s left of the cokes, the chips, the peanuts.

  Moving slow and deliberate, the biologist ignores the screaming behind him, ignores the end of the world pouring through the shattered windows at the end of the aisle. He simply picks this jar, not that jar. This bottle, not that bottle. He can take his time because he’s famous, now. He’s the one who finally figured out the real way to recognize a werewolf.

  They’re the ones who never grow up.

  CHAPTER 9

  Layla

  You can’t run away when you’re a werewolf.

  No, I’m not saying that right.

  You can’t run away when your aunt’s a werewolf.

  I’d tried once in Louisiana, and again the next year, in Texas, and that second time, in Texas, Libby even let it go on for three whole days.

  In Louisiana, because she couldn’t be late for her shift again, she’d just run me down, tracked me from the bus stop to this place back in the trees, half around the smelly lake. The lake hadn’t cut my scent like I wanted. Or, it didn’t cut it enough.

  My plan—I didn’t have a plan. I’d just got off the bus, kept walking.

  Texas was different.

  I could get away, I knew it. This state, it was big enough to hide in, wasn’t it? To disappear in.

  The first night I ate all three cans of beans I’d smuggled from the trailer. They were cold. The fire I’d meant to light wouldn’t catch. It didn’t matter. I was out there. I was doing it. The Texas sky was huge and empty, could swallow me whole if I’d only close my eyes, let it.

  The second day I hung around the pay phone in front of a grocery store until somebody left their station wagon unlocked, and then I stole the half a can of Dr Pepper they’d left in the cup holder. That was it for that day. The Dr Pepper was warm.

  The third night, when I finally hugged my knees and started crying, that kind where you can’t control your stupid lips, Libby stood up from where she’d been ever since the first night: not forty feet away.

  When she came in, stepping over my fire that would only make smoke, no flame, I pushed her away and even tried to hit her to keep her from hugging me.

  This was fifth grade.

  Everybody’s stupid when they’re eleven.

  By Georgia I was fourteen, and had found a different way to escape: high school.

  Instead of going home, I signed up for everything, came in early for study, stayed late for track.

  It made me feel like Darren, like when I did finally come back to the duplex we were renting out in the trees—the other half was empty, and the rest of them had burned—when I came back it was like I was a ghost, just moving through a place I used to know. A place I should know.

  I would touch this glass ashtray, that bunch of plastic orchids. The spoon that still had the scorch marks from jumping a solenoid. The screwdriver Darren had used to open a can of chili.

  Libby was working nights, so I just saw her to say hey. But the truant officer never knocked, and the principal wasn’t sending home notes that needed signatures, and two times in a row my report card came in passing.

  If it’d been all A’s, Libby would have known that Darren and me had forged it somehow, putting more effort into the process than it probably would have taken just to learn some Georgia state history.

  I was okay with a C average, though.

  Nobody expects anything different from a werewolf.

  That we show up is enough of a surprise, I mean.

  I did. For everything.

  At least until Brittany started watching me.

  Because I hadn’t asked, Darren had already told me all about girlfriends. Not girls, girlfriends. According to him, girlfriends were a completely different breed. And any girl could suddenly turn into one. He told me I was going to count them for a while, and then I would stop counting. He said I would think I was getting better at it, being a boyfriend, but that I was going to have to learn not to listen to that kind of bullshit from myself. Just when I thought I’d figured out what made a girlfriend happy, what would make one stay, I would do something wrong again and that would be that.

  “Something wrong, like, I don’t know, like eating their pet goat?” Libby’d said, without looking over from the game show glowing all our faces light blue.

  “It could have been anything ate that goat,” Darren cut back, pulling his lips from his teeth like he couldn’t help it.

  “Anything,” Libby said, and the way she moved her eyebrow on the right side—she knew exactly how to get Darren so pissed he’d have to stand up from the couch, pace to get his words straight.

  “It was just a goat,” he said. “One goat out of ten thousand goats.”

  “Did she have nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine others?”

  Darren just stared at the window. At the curtains over the windows.

  “I’m guessing this is the argument you used with her?” Libby went on. “What was her name? Sissy, Cecilia, Sicily . . .”

  “Nobody named Sicily has ever owned a goat in the whole history of the world,” Darren said.

  “Sierra,” Libby said, like she’d just answered the big question on the game show.

  Darren spun away, clattered around in the kitchen with the ice tray until it snapped in half. He threw it into the sink and half walked, half dove out the back door, disappearing into the night, his clothes spread all across the knee-high grass so that, for probably thirty seconds after he was gone, his pants and shirt were still rocking back and forth, slower and slower.

  Then it started to drizzle. On the only pair of pants he had left.

  I watched them darken.

  It rained all the time in Georgia.

  Maybe because we were there, I don’t know.

  “He’ll come back with a goat,” Libby said, stretching out on the couch she had all to herself now. “I like goat.”

  I bored my eyes into the game show, not learning anything from it, shaking my head no to myself once, that I wasn’t going to have a phone book of girlfriends like Darren. That just saying an old girlfriend’s name wasn’t going to drive me out into the wet night, so that when I came back I would smell like wet dog.

  Again, I was wrong.

  Brittany was the one who always wore the same black jeans every day. They fit her like the pants were fitting all the girls that year.

  The rest of the girls were wearing half shirts or big sweaters or their boyfriends’ jackets. Brittany wore black T-shirts with the sleeves cut off in a way that made me think of robots. And her boots were black and combat, never laced up all the way, but each of them not laced up the same as the other, the tongues always pulled up hard, so they could flop forward. And it must have taken her hours to raccoon her eyes up with black makeup. And when she could get out of the house with it, she had some kind of black lipstick too.

  I’d been watching her too, yeah.

  At the back of the class, or the group, or at assembly, it was always me and her. We were the two main members of the same-pants-every-day crowd.

  I would nod to her here and there, like acknowledging our position, our status, and maybe even suggesting some vague notion about how little we cared about it, but, unlike Darren, I had no idea what words to ever say to a real live girl.

  Hey, you don’t know me, and I’ll be gone in a few weeks. I remember my uncle eating roadkill off the actual road once. My aunt can open cans with her teeth, but she’ll only do it when she thinks nobody’s listening. We buried my grandpa with a tractor my uncle stole. I still remember how the diesel smelled on the night air. My aunt pulled her own hair to keep from crying, but then did anyway.

  As it turned out, Brittany talked to me first.

  Or, not talked. But she gave me something. Like a test. I could tell it was a test because her eyes were tracking my whole face all at once when she handed it to me, like if a muscle in my cheek twinged the slightest bit, she would know something. She would know everything.

  What s
he handed me could have gotten us both expelled.

  It was a bullet.

  Brass at the shoulder, dull silver for a rounded-off point.

  My guess is that I must have flinched. That a muscle on my cheek jumped. That the corner of my mouth jerked the slightest, most imperceptible bit.

  Brittany bit her lower lip in. This counted as a smile with her.

  “I knew it,” she said, trying to take the bullet back, her breath hot she was so close to me.

  I didn’t let her have the bullet.

  The silver didn’t burn my palm. But then neither did the old quarters and dimes that always made Darren and Libby hiss.

  I looked down the hall to geography or whatever I had next—I had no idea, couldn’t have even said what state we were in this month—and said it, my first words to Brittany Caine Andrews: “You knew what?”

  “That you’re a werewolf,” she said.

  I held her eyes for a few steps, backing away, then turned, lowered my head to push my way through the bodies to geography.

  If I smiled, then at least she didn’t see it.

  I don’t think.

  Three days later she sat down across from me in the cafeteria.

  “I need it back,” Brittany said. “He’s going to miss it.”

  “What?” I said.

  My vocabulary this close to her, it wasn’t much.

  “You know what,” she said.

  I slid my hand across the table, palm down, and the scraping sound told her I had the bullet.

  “I’m not what you said,” I told her.

  “Yeah,” she said, putting her hand over mine. “Prove it, then.”

  I shrugged.

  She looked around for a teacher, a white apron, then turned my hand over. “Put it in your mouth,” she said, exactly like the dare it was.

  The silver bullet.

  I hadn’t shown it to Libby. Not because she wasn’t there at dinner, but because she would have confiscated it.

  Darren had just held it up, rolled it in his fingers.

  “Quality work,” he said. “Where from?”

  “Found it,” I told him.

  Darren tongued his lower lip out, let that pass.

  “Your grandpa,” he said then, watching my eyes just as close as Brittany had, “he used to, when we were kids, he said he used to know a guy. He got him to make some of these for him once.”

  I took a bite of my hot dog. Hot dogs are quiet. You can chew them and not miss anything your uncle’s about to tell you.

  “Where’d you say you got this?” he said again, trying to push his thumbnail into the silver part.

  It didn’t leave a line.

  Silver is about a six on the hardness scale. I’d learned it in science. It can’t be scratched by a fingernail.

  If it scratches you, though.

  Darren sat the bullet down like a little rocket on the kitchen table.

  “Got it from a girl,” I said.

  “A girl,” he said, smiling around my word.

  “Grandpa’s friend,” I said then, because I knew how this barter session was working.

  “Not friend,” Darren said, holding my eyes. “He just knew of him. Old wolf, even back then. He used to make these. Your grandpa had to buy some once, for—”

  “For that time in Little Rock,” I filled in. Because I was a good student.

  “Old wolf’s probably dead and buried by now,” Darren said. “Mounted over somebody’s fireplace.”

  I wanted to shake my head no, that this wasn’t possible. That no werewolf would—

  “Didn’t live around these parts,” Darren said, still watching me. “But we didn’t used to either, did we?”

  I didn’t answer, was still trying to track this stupid, made-up legend. Trying to see an ancient old werewolf, melting down silver in one state, pouring it into molds fifty miles down the highway, pressing it into empty brass weeks later, the sounds of a different city all around.

  Why, though?

  “What’s this girl’s name?” Darren said then, taking the bullet between his thumb and index finger, tapping it onto the tabletop like seeing if it would fire.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  “Sicily,” I said, and snatched the bullet before he could pocket it, kept on moving down the hall, to my precious homework. None of which I’d done for the last two nights. Because I’d been mentally prepping for this specific possibility in the cafeteria—for Brittany, talking to me. Brittany, sitting right across from me.

  “You want me to put it in my mouth,” I repeated to her, to be sure I was hearing what she was saying.

  “Unless it’ll burn you . . .” she said back.

  What she was doing now was cleaning the bullet with a bright white napkin, so I wouldn’t have germs to argue about.

  When she handed it across I took it, held it by the brass, studied it.

  “You’re stalling,” she said.

  “If what you say—if you’re right,” I said. “How did you know?”

  “He told me.”

  “He?”

  She nodded down to the bullet.

  “The one who made this,” I filled in.

  Yes.

  “He told me what to watch for,” she said.

  I smiled what I was pretty sure was my cool smile, leaned back in my chair, the bullet still in my hand.

  I wasn’t stupid, I mean.

  As soon as I put that silver in my mouth and didn’t exhale the smoke of scorched gums, Brittany was going to be gone, on to the next hopeful.

  If Darren had known her name, he’d have nodded his serious nod, said that was good, she was at the front of the alphabet—of my alphabet. Now I just had to work through all the other letters, and then back around again.

  What he didn’t know, it was that you can stop at B, if you want.

  I wanted.

  After school, when I was supposed to be running forties for off-season football—like I was going to be in Georgia next fall—Brittany led me to a place behind the gym between the industrial-air-conditioner unit and a temporary classroom shed-on-wheels.

  We sat with our backs against the dusty green metal of the air conditioner, its deep thrumming making our chests shake, and she smoked a cigarette like a poker player and told me she knew I was a werewolf because of algebra.

  “Maybe I’m just bad at math,” I told her.

  She ashed by tapping the spine of the cigarette with the pad of her index finger—I’d never seen anything so perfect, so deliberate—and shook her head no.

  “Algebra’s at the other end of the building from this,” she said, patting the air conditioner.

  I shrugged that this was common knowledge. That all the other classrooms had first dibs on the cool air coming through the ductwork, so that there wasn’t any left over by the end of the line, where algebra happened seventh period, the sun staring hard at Georgia, like accusing it.

  “You do this,” she said, holding her cigarette away from her mouth so she could nudge the flat of her tongue forward a bit and pant over it lightly, her lungs taking the shallowest gulps.

  It made me close my lips tight.

  She rubbed her cigarette out on the concrete.

  “Wolves’ sweat glands are in the pads of their feet, and—” at which point she somehow reached into my actual mouth, touched my tongue “—their tongues.”

  I could taste her, now.

  Not with special werewolf taste buds. With fourteen-year-old taste buds. My whole body was suddenly coated in them.

  I swallowed, wiped my lips, and told her I didn’t do that, I’d never pant like a dog.

  “Whatever,” she said. “He told me that werewolves can hide—”

  “He?” I interrupted.

  “My grandfather,” she said, watching the football off-seasoners huddling up for some reason. “He says that werewolves can hide all of it except that. It’s like a habit. Something they forget to think about, it’s so natural.”

  I promised myself
to never breathe like that again. Maybe to never breathe again in public at all.

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “Silver,” she said, like about to tick off a big list. “And that the moon, that’s all made up for the movies. And that this”—she flashed her palm, a pentagram drawn there—“is junk too.”

  “Why do you do it then?” I asked, taking the excuse to hold her hand in mine, study that faded blue star.

  She took her hand back, used it to pull up a second cigarette.

  “Because I’m going to be one,” she said one hundred percent matter-of-fact, looking across the flame of her lighter at me.

  “A werewolf?” I said.

  “And you’re going to help me.”

  The next time she breathed out, she was looking away from me again. The thin grey smoke drifted back around her, to me.

  Already breaking my promise, I opened my mouth to taste it.

  I waited until Darren was gone for the night to ask Libby.

  I had to accidentally wake up early to catch her just getting in, her hair down because leaving it in a ponytail all night gave her a headache, made it hard for her to fall asleep.

  “Stranger stranger,” she said about me, guiding her hair out of her eyes, trying to act like she still had enough energy to carry on a conversation.

  Outside, our Ambassador wagon was still coughing. It was so stupid that you could turn the car off and it would keep trying to run for two or three minutes. Darren said it was this sea-level oxygen, the plankton and krill he always said were microscopic in the air, in the Gulf states. Libby said it was that AMCs were cursed.

  I believed Libby. It was why I was coming to her for this, not Darren.

  “Is the wolf kiss real?” I said, just all at once and as absolutely casual and offhand as possible.

  Instead of answering at first, she broke two eggs carefully into the pan and shook it by the handle to keep the whites from sticking.