Mongrels Read online

  “Make-believe is important,” he said, nodding his head up to me, like I could chime in here if I wanted.

  “Rich guys can do what they want,” I said. It’s a standard line. All werewolves know it.

  “Hey,” Brittany said, taking my hand again, “this is what I really wanted to show you.”

  I let her pull me but kept looking back to her grandfather, and his not-silver bullets. He was looking at me too.

  “Door open!” Brittany’s mom called from somewhere in the house, and Brittany sighed a whole-body sigh, pulled me into her room.

  It was all wolves. Every wall a poster. Posters on top of posters. Every flat place an action figure, a statuette salvaged from a thrift store, or ordered from a catalog.

  “My real family,” she said, holding her arms out to spin in the middle of the room.

  “Yours isn’t so bad,” I said, meaning her grandfather. Meaning the voice of her mom, trying to keep her safe from young wolves like me.

  Brittany kept spinning, her eyes shut.

  Darren couldn’t stop laughing about my new eyebrow, the one Brittany had inked in. Even Libby was having a hard time swallowing her smile.

  I stood at the sink until the water was as close to hot as it got and rubbed the bridge of my nose raw.

  If only high school had night classes.

  When I came back Darren held his hand up like to cup the back of my head, said, “Aw, here. Let me wolf-kiss it better . . .”

  I pushed his hand away, was ready to fight.

  He was trying so hard not to laugh that he was crying.

  Libby looked over to him, her eyes hot, her hand open by her chair and cutting once, back, like this stops now.

  It did, kind of.

  I ate my beans and rice with a hot dog cut up into it and glared at the game show. Used to I’d wondered why werewolves loved game shows on television so much. But then I got it. We never go to college, hardly ever even finish high school. A good game show, though, if you listen right, you can get an education for free.

  It’s stealing back what you had stole from you in the first place.

  Not that I would ever tell Darren or Libby this. Just one more thing for them to make fun about.

  Reading Romeo and Juliet the night before, I’d made sure my door was closed all the way, and that I was tuned one hundred percent in to the floorboards in the hall. If Darren ever opened the door and found me with an open rabbit on my bed, my hands and mouth bloody, then he’d just nod good, probably. A book, though. Every time he caught me with one of those, he’d always ask what that book could tell me that he didn’t already know?

  Before either of them could, I answered the final question on the game show out loud—“Eli Whitney”; cotton was big in Georgia state history—left before the host could come back from the station break, confirm my win.

  In my room I read Romeo and Juliet again. It was supposed to feel like revenge, but I forget that a scene or two in.

  It was about love.

  It was about me.

  The reason I didn’t want Darren opening the door, it was my eyes.

  The wolf kiss was three days away. A Friday, so Brittany could hide away for the weekend, for whenever her transformation came.

  I rubbed my tongue along my teeth. My flat, flat teeth.

  I was already counting the days until she was going to hate me forever.

  It didn’t matter. This was worth it.

  And I’d never hate her back, no matter what she said, no matter if she told the whole school I thought I was a werewolf.

  I touched the raw space between my eyes, held my finger there and closed my eyes.

  When I opened them, it was because of my window.

  Scratching. Fingernails on wet glass.

  My head fell back to the balcony scene and my heart swelled, but then the pane in the middle cracked, shattered, the night’s humid breath sighing in.

  I fell off the other side of the bed, tangled in my blanket, and now Brittany Andrews’s grandfather was stepping through the window.

  Darren had been right. Grandpa had known about an ancient old werewolf who forged silver bullets.

  I should have known by the trash can in their kitchen. It had been empty at four in the afternoon—after breakfast, after lunch, with two people in the house all day. And there’d been three eaters there in the morning.

  When you don’t have the right nose yet, you’ve got to sniff our kind out by other telltales.

  If I hadn’t been standing next to Brittney, I might have.

  If I hadn’t been so blind, what was happening now might not be happening at all. But it was.

  There was a dirty white werewolf standing half in, half out of my window, his hand shaking on the sill, his eyes rheumy, his nose still thick with the scent I must have been wearing when I walked into his kitchen, his white hair still pulled into the remnants of a ponytail.

  He was here to save his granddaughter.

  He hadn’t got his other leg all the way in before Darren crashed in. Not through the door—with the way time was slowed down, I would have heard the floorboards creaking with his heavy steps—but through the thin wall between my room and the kitchen.

  He must have started shifting when the sound of breaking glass pulled him from whatever movie he had on.

  By the time his feet hit the curled linoleum of the kitchen, the soles were already going leathery.

  And then he dove straight over the range. Because his nephew—because that sound, it was coming from his only nephew’s room.

  Darren had never taken one single hour of geometry in his whole stupid life, but he knew about the shortest distance between two points. He knew where I was.

  He landed half wolfed out, blind from the change, splinters in his face and hair, and never stopped for a second, even when I reached with one arm to stop him, to explain that this was all stupid, this was all a mistake, that Brittany’s grandfather, he was saving us, he was putting dummy rounds in rifles. And that he was too old to have shifted. That this, it was already killing him. That there was no way he could go back.

  A man would have caught Brittany’s grandfather with his shoulder in the midsection.

  Werewolves don’t come from football, though.

  Darren led with his claws, with his mouth, with his scream that was already becoming a roar, big dollops of saliva and blood slinging back from the corners of his blackening lips.

  The two of them exploded through the window, out the side of the duplex, into the soft rain.

  I vaulted out after them as best I could, a leftover shard of the window spearing my hand.

  I looked to the front door for Libby, but she would be at work.

  Meaning this was going to happen. This was already happening.

  “No!” I screamed as loud as I could, standing there in my underwear, my hand blooming red beside me.

  I don’t think Darren heard me, but he did stop.

  Because he wasn’t completely wolfed out, he could still step back, on two legs.

  I watched his skin ripple in folds. Heard his neck creak into place, his jaw pop hard like it always did.

  Brittany’s grandfather was trying to stand.

  His throat, though—this was what Darren did, what he was made for. Didn’t Brittany’s grandfather know that when he came here? Couldn’t he smell?

  “I was going to follow you today,” Darren said. “I was following you.”

  “He’s dying,” I said.

  Still, the old wolf, he was clawing forward through the mud. Trying to get to me.

  “I don’t think he wants you dating his granddaughter,” Darren said.

  I told him to shut up.

  Darren looked over to me, and for once he did shut up.

  “He’s not going to stop,” I said at last. Brittany’s grandfather was getting to us inch by inch, swiping at the air with his yellow claws, trying to hold his throat together with his other hand.

  “I’m not going
to live this long, am I?” Darren said, silvery rainwater dripping off the sharp point of his nose.

  I couldn’t answer.

  “I hope I don’t, I mean,” Darren said, wiping Brittany’s grandfather’s blood from his mouth, his tone so fake I couldn’t even call him on it.

  “Watch him,” he said, and stepped over to his truck, came back with his tire beater.

  “No,” I said, taking his wrist.

  “It’s for the best.”

  Instead of making me let go, be a part of this, Darren ripped his hand away, was already breathing hard the way he did when he was about to have to do something he didn’t want to.

  “Tell my dad hey,” he said, stepping in, and laid that tire-beater right into that sweet spot behind Brittany’s grandfather’s left ear.

  A werewolf in his prime, that would be a love tap.

  At Brittany’s grandfather’s age, it was a skull fracture. A skull collapse. A wet avalanche of bone in there, nine or ten decades crumbling into a pile at the bottom of his mind.

  He toppled over onto his right side, his left foot twitching.

  “On second thought,” Darren said, kneeling to finish it, “tell my dad to go to hell,” and then he raised the tire beater a second time and I looked away.

  The sound, though.

  You can’t close your ears.

  I was burrito’d in my blankets facing away from the door when Libby opened it, stared at my window to be sure she was seeing what her headlights had shown her.

  It was cardboard and tape now. Not glass.

  “We’re moving?” she said in her clipped way, like this was just another fact, one of a thousand.

  In my blankets, I nodded.

  I’d been crying all night.

  At fourteen years old.

  About an old man with a name I didn’t even know.

  “Let me get one more sleep in,” she said, and pulled my door closed.

  Until the bus stop at the end of our road, I didn’t know what Darren had done with the body.

  Brittany’s grandfather had been too old and frail to shift any of the way back, as it turned out. That made Darren’s job easier. Brittany’s grandfather had died wolf, and he’d stayed that way.

  Instead of mucking up his cab with gore—the battery was dead anyway, would have needed the Ambassador to jump it—Darren had carried this old white werewolf as far as he could in his arms. Not back into the trees of Georgia, to get dragged out into the light by coyotes or bears, but to the highway.

  The burial he’d given the oldest werewolf of our time, the werewolf who had to have saved all of our lives fifty times over, the werewolf who had played his granddaughter’s game as a way of educating her, at least until a real werewolf showed up, the burial Darren had given him, it was on the yellow stripes, about two hundred yards down from the mailboxes—the opposite way Libby came in from.

  By now Brittany’s grandfather was road mush.

  Darren would have made sure the teeth and skull were crushed, of course, but now the body was too. Over and over.

  Here a giant white dog had died.

  The birds were already there, stringing his insides away, spreading him all across the South.

  Maybe it was for the best.

  Still, when two of the football players at the bus stop with me started tossing rocks at the body, just to watch the birds rise up, annoyed, I had to fight them, and it went the way it usually does, two on one, when the one doesn’t even have his claws yet.

  Brittany cleared the girls’ bathroom to clean my face up.

  She’d been crying already when I’d found her.

  While she patted my cuts with the wet paper towels and rewrapped my bleeding hand, she told me about her grandfather. How he always made eggs with hot sauce for her and her mom. How he hadn’t been there this morning, for the first time ever. How this happens with old people. They just wander off, die of starvation out in some storm drain or beside a building they think they recognize.

  “Maybe he was a werewolf,” I said, quietly.

  “This isn’t funny,” she said. “He made silver bullets. Here.”

  She was having me hold the square-folded paper towel to my left eye.

  Then—“Don’t listen,” she said—she stepped into one of the stalls, locked it closed, and peed.

  My heart was more alive in my chest than it had ever been.

  By English II she was crying at the back of the class, the hood of her black sweatshirt not quite making her as invisible as she wanted.

  The whole football team was calling me Roadkill by now. As in, I ate it. As in, I’d been protecting my next meal.

  The class was still reading Romeo and Juliet.

  The second football player to have to read aloud—it was like this was meant to be. Like I should have seen it coming.

  The balcony scene.

  “But I’m a guy . . .” he said to Mr. Preston.

  “All the roles were played by boys back then,” Mr. Preston said back, hitting boy a touch harder than necessary, rolling his hand for the play to continue.

  The football player shrugged, looked back to his teammates to be sure this was a go, and did as he was asked: He stepped up from his desk with his book, knelt right behind my shoulder, and said, his voice syrupy-sweet, “Roadkill, Roadkill, wherefore art thou?”

  I stood from my desk so fast that it stood with me.

  It slowed me down enough for Brittany to get expelled.

  In a flash, like a true werewolf, she was on this football player, crawling up his back like an animal, biting into him hard on his thick neck, clawing his face wide open with her black fingernails.

  My girl.

  We met in the old gym for lunch. She had all her books in her backpack, was supposed to be off school grounds with them. I was just going to leave my books in my locker, because screw them. Screw all of them.

  Nobody else was there, for once.

  “I’m just thinking about him out there,” she said, her fingers laced in mine, the clump of our hands pressed between the sides of our legs.

  “I love you,” I said, barely out loud enough.

  She lowered her forehead into the hollow of my shoulder.

  “He doesn’t have his juice or his toast or anything,” she said into my chest. “He’s—he’s . . .” then couldn’t finish.

  The football player she’d gone after was the quarterback, I was pretty sure. He was going to miss his depth perception.

  I smiled above Brittany’s head, smoothed her long hair down along her back.

  “I think we’re leaving,” I said.

  Brittany nodded, sat up, said, “He told me that too. That you’re always moving. Like we do. But that’s because of Mom’s job. He said other than that, we were like werewolves.”

  “I’m not going to forget you,” I said.

  “You will,” she said. “Mom told me that.”

  I shook my head no, I wouldn’t.

  She shrugged, was looking down to the gym floor again. That single gummed-up light flickering above us.

  “I could find him,” she said, like speaking from a dream.

  She turned up to me.

  “If I—if I could use my nose like . . . like you can.”

  “You don’t want this,” I told her.

  In answer, she guided the hair away from her neck, clearing the pale skin there.

  “You’re my only chance,” she said, her other hand holding mine even tighter now. Even more forever. Then, quieter: “I’ve already picked out my werewolf name too.”

  “Your werewolf name?”

  “Layla,” she said like the best, most thrilling secret ever, stretching her neck out flatter for me.

  “Layla” was “Juliet” for Arabia. We’d learned it in English, when English still mattered.

  “Layla,” I said to her.

  “Not too hard,” she said, still holding her hair out of the way.

  I breathed in, breathed out, looked to make sure no t
eachers were standing in the door—this was happening, this was really happening—and I lowered my lips to her neck, opened my mouth, and set my teeth against her tangy skin. Her hair when she let it go fell like a silk curtain across my face, my arm circled her waist, my hand drawing her to me, making her take a gulp of air in, and I closed my eyes, prayed to the god of werewolves that could I please not change for just one more minute. For just one minute more. For just a little longer, please.

  CHAPTER 10

  Here There Be Werewolves

  The mechanic needed a bowl of chocolate ice cream at the truck stop after a job like that. Most nine-year-olds don’t get to work on the big trucks, his uncle told him.

  It had taken all morning. First they had to remove the old grab bar from beside the driver’s door of his uncle’s rig—the faded red Kenworth with the white stripe sweeping back under the windshield like robot cheekbones—then they’d had to install the new one. Two bolts up top, two at bottom. His uncle had offered to hold the mechanic up but the mechanic had climbed up himself. The radio was on in the cab the whole time.

  Because the grab bar’s so shiny and new, his uncle requested the booth by the front window, so they could watch it. Because everybody was going to want that grab bar, he said. Nobody’s ever had one that pretty, and that well installed. Not in the whole history of trucking. If either of them were strong enough, they could probably lift the whole truck with just that grab bar, those four bolts were so tight.

  Instead of reminding his uncle of his age again, of the stories he will and won’t buy into, the mechanic digs into his ice cream. There was only enough change in the ashtray for one scoop.

  “Whoa, whoah,” the uncle says, scooting forward in his seat, his hands spread wide on the table, his eyes large on the parking lot.

  The mechanic plays along, looks through the window as well.

  Another trucker’s stepped down from his rig, is walking past the uncle’s rig.

  “He’s looking, he’s looking . . .” the uncle is saying, ready to jack-in-the-box up from that booth, explode out into the parking lot.

  The other trucker ends up just beating his cap against his thigh.

  “Of course,” the mechanic’s uncle says, leaning back into his seat, disappointed with himself.