Mongrels Read online

  “Wolf kiss,” she said.

  Brittany had told me about it.

  “It’s where you, like,” I said, not sure how to say it right without her looking at me, for me to act it out, “you put your mouth on somebody’s skin, and then you, you know. Change. So the teeth—”

  “So your teeth push right in, like a bite,” she said. “Only it’s a different kind of bite. A kiss, but with teeth.”

  “It’s supposed to be a safe way,” I said. “A work-around. A fluke. Like, that first saliva, it’s special, to protect human gums from getting infected. Like colostrum.”

  She shook her pan again.

  “Colostrum,” she repeated, hunting the word down.

  “First milk,” I said, straight from Life Science. “Full of vitamins and antibiotics and enzymes and all that.”

  She nodded, kept nodding.

  From what Darren had told me, newborns that have the blood, that are born into this life, something about our chemistry or hormones makes us lactose intolerant for the first few months. It’d be bad news for a, you know, mammal, except raw meat can be chewed down to gruel, spit into a newborn’s mouth.

  He’d told me this over a bowl of vanilla ice cream we were supposed to be splitting, though, so I don’t know.

  Werewolf stories, they always have a reason. His was right in front of him, melting in the bowl. Or, it was in me, wanting so bad to be lactose intolerant.

  “Enzymes,” Libby repeated now.

  “Is it real?” I asked again. “The wolf kiss?”

  Libby shook her eggs again, said, “Darren told me about the bullet.”

  I touched my pocket when she said it, only realized just then that my pocket was empty.

  Libby held the bullet up beside her shoulder.

  “Maybe this girl isn’t someone you should listen to so much,” she said. “I’m just—”

  The reason I didn’t hear the rest was that I was already gone from the kitchen.

  Not to my room either, like usual.

  I’d taken the back door, like Darren.

  Until it sounded like Libby was asleep, I sat in the empty half of the duplex, throwing lit matches at the wall, watching them smolder on the carpet. Stepping on the ones that needed stepping on. On the ones that needed stepping on that I could reach without having to get up. If the others caught, well, then they caught.

  None of them did.

  “How does your grandfather know so much?”

  We were sitting high up in the old gym. It was lunch. You only hauled your tray all the way down to the old gym if you didn’t want to eat. The old gym was for making out. Most of the lights had been knocked dim with twenty years of dodgeballs, and the one that was left on the side with bleachers had become a target for chewed gum. The wads that made it to the hot bulb melted back off, strung down to the light’s metal cage, hung down like a giant dying kaleidoscope.

  It was perfect.

  Brittany snapped a carrot between her teeth and didn’t answer my question about her grandfather. Instead she said that she’d tried everything else. Rolling in the sand under the light of a full moon. Drinking from a wolf’s paw print—she wasn’t sure it was a wolf, she guessed. She maybe could have turned into a Weimaraner. She’d tried drinking downstream from a wolf too, but the rules weren’t clear on how far downstream still counted.

  The water had made her sick for two days. She’d refused to go to the doctor, was sure she was transforming.

  “But now there’s you,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t he use one of those bullets on you if you . . . you know?” I said.

  She just stared down at the shiny floor of the gym, considering this.

  “My grandpa’s dead,” I said. “Arkansas.”

  “That a disease?”

  I smiled until she looked up, saw it.

  “He wouldn’t shoot me,” she said. “He doesn’t even have any guns. He just sells the bullets to collectors. He’s the only one who makes them in all the sizes.”

  “All the calibers,” I corrected.

  “Calibers,” she said, making the word stupid and obvious the way she regurgitated it.

  How close I was sitting to her was maybe four inches. I told myself I could feel her body heat.

  Up in the corner behind us, Tim Lawson and Gina Ross were going at it.

  Brittany stood up all at once, held her hand out sideways for me to take. It was a gesture I’d only ever seen in the movies on television.

  “Want to show you something,” she said.

  I followed where she led, her hand soft and rough and hot and perfect. Where she took me was around beside the wooden bleachers, under the bleachers, all the galvanized metal of the scaffolding holding the wooden slats up.

  We ducked under and, about halfway across the length of them, like crouching through a secret cave, she held her lighter out in front of us, sparked it.

  The flame caught on the first scratchy roll and I looked around us.

  At first I thought it was pep-rally trash, streamers and ribbons.

  It was panties. They’d slipped through from above.

  Brittany was still holding my hand.

  “Wolf kiss,” I heard myself saying.

  She let the lighter go dark.

  Two days later the silver bullet showed back up.

  It was in the refrigerator, on a cracked saucer beside the ketchup. It had a coat of frost on it. Meaning it had been there for hours. Since Libby’d left. I could almost see her leaned over to balance it there. Setting it down then nudging it over to the exact center of the saucer. Going slow enough not to tip it over.

  Darren was sitting behind me, eating his cereal without milk. Meaning he hadn’t been in the refrigerator. This was for me.

  I kept the door open, studied the bullet.

  Its tip had been snipped off.

  I reached in like for ketchup or leftovers, palmed the bullet. The way it frost-welded to my palm, I thought with a thrill that it was burning me.

  It was only the cold.

  “Leave it open,” Darren said, about my time in the refrigerator. “Feels like Alaska.”

  “Like you’ve been to Alaska,” I said to him from behind the door.

  “I’ve been everywhere, man,” he sung back, and then crunched another handful of cereal into his mouth, having to work it in in stages it sounded like.

  I rolled the bullet in my hand, breaking the frost free. I looked at it from the top, where it had been snipped.

  Inside the silver point, the metal changed, went dark and normal. Just lead, like from a car battery. Probably from a car battery. Meaning the silver on the outside, it was probably melted aluminum cans, or chrome trim from a truck, hammered to paste.

  This wasn’t a silver bullet.

  I pocketed it, stood, let the door magnet shut.

  Darren was sitting tall like a prairie dog, trying to see the television in the living room. It was the commercial he liked, with the guy falling backward into a series of swimming pools.

  “You shouldn’t hang your tongue out like that,” I said.

  He looked over to me, his mouth still open.

  “Like what?” he said.

  In the living room the car salesman fell into another pool and Darren laughed like every time, then stood, his chair scraping away, and held his Jesus arms out to the side, tried to get that same blank look on his face the salesman always had, falling back.

  “Classic,” Darren said, wrist-deep in the cereal again, the duplex already heating up for the day like the fire had never gone all the way out.

  I ran away to school.

  Brittany had a quiz for me from one of her mom’s magazines. She wouldn’t let me see it, would just read the questions aloud then look down to me with her teacher eyes all heated up and serious.

  “Does your guy disappear each month for two or three days at a time?”

  We were skipping English II, were up on the roof. For once it wasn’t raining. Still, this was Geo
rgia. You could about drink the air.

  “Werewolves don’t have gills,” I said.

  “That wasn’t the question,” she said, the magazine already rolled up to bop me on the top of the head.

  I was lying down on the gravel roof, my head on the right thigh of her black jeans. My head on Brittany Andrews’s leg. With her middle name, “Caine,” she was ABC all at once. All the ABCs I’d ever need.

  When I stood later the tar the gravel was swimming in would have ruined my shirt.

  I was already planning not to care.

  Somewhere below us a classroom of freshmen was reading Romeo and Juliet aloud, up and down the rows of desks, Shakespeare snaking from the window to the door, to escape like we had.

  “Does your guy disappear each month for two or three days at a time?” she said again, with more push.

  “That’s the movies,” I said. “The moon. Your grandpa already told you the moon is stupid.”

  “A thousand truck-stop T-shirts can’t be wrong.”

  “Those are just wolf-wolves.”

  Because I hadn’t put the silver bullet in my mouth, I could just be pretending to be a werewolf, I was telling myself. Meaning this was pretend too. Meaning I was making it all up.

  If it was the right answers, that didn’t matter. I wasn’t betraying anything. I was just lucky.

  It was the first time I’d ever felt like that.

  “When your guy gives you jewelry, is it gems and gold, or is it silver?”

  Far above some bird was circling slow. Just looking around.

  “Werewolf jewelry is usually from those quarter machines,” I told her. “Sometimes it’s candy.”

  She pushed my head with her elbow.

  No.

  In the most tender way possible, she pushed my head with her elbow.

  “Do dogs react unfavorably to your guy?”

  “We can test,” I said. “Do you have a dog?”

  She shook her head no and narrowed her eyes, like having a dog was a thing that had never really occurred to her.

  “Do y’all?” she asked.

  “We have cousins,” I said, trying not to smile all the way.

  “You’re not doing this right,” she said.

  “If this was a real test . . .” I said back. Then: “Next.”

  “Does your guy like his hamburgers rare?”

  “I like ketchup,” I told her. “On my hot dogs.”

  She hissed through her teeth and shook her head, made like she was skipping down to the hard questions.

  “Here. Do your guy’s eyebrows meet in the middle?”

  I made a V out of mine, trying to look up to them.

  “Is that something?” I said.

  “They don’t,” she said, disappointed. “How about fingers. Your ring one’s supposed to be longer.”

  I held my hands out.

  “What would it help to have a long ring finger?” I asked. “It take longer to get married, that way?”

  “It’s just a thing,” she said, scanning for a question I could pass.

  The sun turned up a few degrees. It was like some giant invisible kid had squatted down over us with a magnifying glass.

  “Do you have a balcony at your house?” I asked.

  She looked down at me, said, “You knew we were skipping class today. You didn’t have to read.”

  I shrugged.

  “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,” I recited up through the magnifying glass, the fingertips of my right hand to my chest to show how earnest and dramatic a real werewolf could be.

  She swatted me with the magazine again, then stopped, smiled her mischievous smile.

  “Ay, me,” she said, having to dig deep in her head for Juliet’s words: “It’s not hand or foot, not arm or face, not any part belonging to man.”

  “To wolf,” I said. It was where she was going.

  “I take thee at thy word,” she said, threading her fingers into my hair.

  “That’s my line,” I said up to her.

  Next was that I knew not how to tell her who I was.

  Instead I laid my head into her lap, let her use her black pen to connect my eyebrows.

  “Stop sweating,” she said, her lips so close to mine, the tips of her bangs brushing my face on both sides.

  I tried.

  After school—or, after what would have been school if we hadn’t been on the roof the whole time, her skin red everywhere from it now—we went to the gas station like all the kids did. Just a herd of high schoolers, the glass doors never closed enough to have to open again.

  Because we’d skipped lunch, Brittany had seventy-nine cents for a fountain drink.

  We put two candy bars in the cup before hiding them with ice, drowning them in syrup. If you just barely pushed the paddle of the fountain in, you could fill the whole cup with syrup.

  She was taking me to meet her grandfather.

  Except, suddenly, Darren was in front of us in line.

  “Children,” he said to us, like he was so grown-up.

  “This is my uncle,” I said to Brittany. “He’s a—a mechanic.”

  “A mechanic,” Darren said, like saying it out loud so he could be sure to remember it. “Just a mechanic.”

  “Same as your nephew,” Brittany said, her lips pursed tight because otherwise she’d be smiling big enough to give us all away.

  “Big family of mechanics, yeah,” Darren said.

  “Nice buckle,” Brittany said, in that meaningful way she’d been using with me, and Darren looked down at his belt buckle, smiled one side of his mouth out, showing off how many teeth he had.

  The buckle was twice as big as it needed to be. The wolf on it was turquoise and running left to right, and the moon behind it was that yellowy resin that, with a belt buckle, usually has a scorpion in it. Darren had it to back up his “Wolf Man in the Sky” CB handle, like it could somehow serve as proof to all the other truckers that this was really him.

  But this chance encounter, it wasn’t supposed to be about him, I could tell.

  “Here,” he said, taking the coke from me, to pay for it, an ability I didn’t know he had. Then he hefted it a couple of times, looked up to us like we were smarter than he’d thought.

  Out front, he asked if we needed a ride.

  I looked around for his truck, idling in the ditch or parked at the edge of the parking lot, or staring us down from the white clapboard church. It wasn’t any of those places.

  “Oh yeah,” Darren said, looking around like he hadn’t even considered how he’d got here. When there was no easy fix for giving us a ride with a truck that wasn’t here, he just lifted his own coke in farewell, walked backward a few steps then turned, didn’t look back.

  “He leaves just like you do,” Brittany said, taking the coke from me, finding the straw with her mouth.

  Then she handed it back.

  I let the straw find my mouth as well.

  “Canteen kiss,” she said, skipping ahead a step.

  A block later we pincered our fingers into the ice for the candy bars. It was the only flaw in this kind of stealing: You had to be a certain distance from the gas station before lifting the lid, but by that time you’ve usually drank all your drink, and now you eat the candy bar, and you won’t have anything to wash it down with.

  “Sure he’s there?” I said, about wherever her house was.

  “He’s always home,” she said. “What was your uncle doing in town?”

  I hadn’t considered that. I did know to look behind us, though.

  There was nothing, no one.

  But there wouldn’t have been.

  If Darren had been in Brittany’s kitchen to meet her grandfather with us, he would have whistled about how old the guy was. The same way you whistle when you see a custom bike parked across a curb in front of a grocery store.

  In some book I’d read on my own, not for class, this old guy down on the Texas border had been described as having decades of sun folded
into his face. That’s how Brittany’s grandfather was. Touching his face—I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like.

  His hair was a white bird nest. It had been in some version of a ponytail a week ago, I’d guess, but he’d slept since then. A few times.

  “Granddad,” she said, stepping aside to present me.

  He looked up from the cast-iron torture machine bolted to the counter.

  It was for pressing bullets into shells.

  The ceiling above him had three ragged holes in it.

  He followed my eyes up there, then came back down to me. “It’s why you don’t want to live in a two-story job,” he said.

  “Or ever get a deposit back,” Brittany added.

  Her grandfather smiled, never taking his eyes from me.

  “So this is the young werewolf,” he said, studying me from a slightly different angle now.

  My face heated up.

  It’s exactly how it would heat up if I was lying, I told myself. If I was just saying I was a werewolf so this man’s granddaughter wouldn’t start sitting at some other table at lunch.

  “You make the bullets,” I said.

  It was the only thing I could think of.

  He waggled his eyebrows like a clown, shrugged. “Cartridges,” he corrected, gently, as if it hardly mattered. “Or shells. The bullet is the little part at the end, that the gunpowder shoots through the barrel.”

  “At werewolves,” Brittany said, with a thrill.

  “‘Silver cartridge’ doesn’t sound the same, though,” her grandfather said, chuckling.

  “Where do you get the silver?” I said, tipping the last block of the syrupy ice into my mouth.

  “Customer brings it,” he said, and like that I got the scam: pocket the silver, paint the lead up pretty, and be on down the road next month.

  “So you two are like enemies . . .” Brittany said, about me and her grandfather. We looked at each other.

  “If werewolves were real,” he said at last. “Present company excluded, of course.”

  I lifted my cup in some stupid gesture and stepped over to the trash, dropped it into the new bag.

  “He mostly makes them for collectors,” Brittany said. “Rich guys who want to play make-believe.”