Liar (22 page)

There's so much I don't know and that I can't ask Yayeko without making her eyebrows go sky-high.

Why am I
Canis lupus
while most werewolves are
Canis dirus
? Is that even true? How do I find other people like me? Does that mean there are two kinds of werewolves? Or are there more? Are there African werewolves who are
Canis simensis
? The sole African wolf? Or
Canis rufus
werewolves? Or are they both too small? There are many recognized wolf subspecies. Are there werewolves for every one? Or only the ones that are roughly human-sized?

I don't know where I come from. Or what I am. I don't know
how
I am. I don't know anything.

BEFORE

The real change came on me four weeks after the false alarm. The warning signs were the same but this time I ignored them. I did not want to sit in that cage waiting, getting filthier and more wound up and miserable by the hour.

The first sign was a tightening of my skin as I walked to school. It felt itchy in the exact same way it had with the false alarm. I kept walking. It didn't feel so bad. At recess there was a tiny bit of blood. Spotting, same as last time. I figured that even if the change was real I still had plenty of time to get through the school day and then walk home.

Like before, I didn't feel hot. My teeth didn't hurt.

It was in math class. Second-to-last class of the day. We were learning number puzzles. We had to draw three shapes but make sure they were all touching, then four, then five. Five was impossible. I was trying to make it work when the first wave of heat hit me. Then more itching. Then sharp pains in my belly, dots in front of my eyes. My head began to throb. My teeth hurt.

Inside me things were moving. I knew what it was. I had to get home.

I stood up.

“Micah, sit down,” the teacher said, without looking at me.

I fell down.

I didn't mean to but the muscles turned to liquid in my legs. At least it felt that way. But when I looked down they looked like human legs.

“Are you alright, Micah?” The teacher was staring at me.

“No,” I said, amazed that my tongue and mouth were cooperating. I tried to stand up, clutching the desk for support. My bones were turning into knives. “It's my illness.”

I had a file. The note about my illness was in the file. All the teachers knew about it.

“I have to call my dad.”

I think that's what I said but the next thing I knew my body was buckling. It felt as if the spine was coming out of my back. “I have to go. Call my dad. He knows.”

I have no idea if the words came out or not.

I reached for my bag while crawling to the door, groped inside for the cell phone. The pain was spreading all over my body.

I was sure I would die.

Somehow I got out of the classroom. Somehow I got the phone into my hands. Pressed for Dad. Screamed for him to come get me. Told him I would be getting home as fast as I could. The school was only five blocks from home: one avenue, four streets. Running was fastest. Ordinarily I would be home in minutes.

But liquid muscles, moving bones, pain in every fiber, every cell.

I kept moving: toward the exit, down the few steps, out onto the street.

I didn't know if I was going to make it, if I was going to turn into a wolf on First Avenue in the daylight of a busy Thursday afternoon.

The teacher was still hovering, I think. Had she followed me? Maybe it was someone else. More than one. My eyes weren't processing right. There were less colors. I saw red. I saw yellow. But mostly red. But I knew which way to go. Down. South. West.

I kept moving.

They were calling my name. I concentrated on breathing, willing the change to slow, for the one foot after the other to turn into a run. I think I progressed to a shuffle. I don't know how many blocks I got before Dad grabbed me, pulling me along.

I heard shouting and questions. I squeezed my eyes shut.

By the time Dad pushed me into the elevator there was fur all over my arms and I was bent double. I could smell the fear and sweat of my father. Or was that me?

I'd never been in so much pain. I was going back into the cage. I wasn't sure which was worse.

As Dad dragged me into the apartment, into my room, into the cage, the bones were trying to push their way out of my face. I could no longer see. Or hear. My eyeballs and eardrums had exploded.

Then I was a wolf.

In a three-by-six cage and hungrier than I have ever been in my life.

Dad told me afterward that I howled for twenty minutes straight. He'd lied to the neighbors to keep them from calling the police. I don't know what lies he told, but after that they all looked at me funny.

FAMILY HISTORY

My biology obsession ignited after my first change. I'd always been interested but now it was a passion, no, it was a
necessity
. I had to know what I was, how I was. I had to learn more.

How was it possible? How did mass reshape itself like that? I was a 105-pound twelve-year-old. I became a 105-pound wolf. It made sense when I thought of the conservation of matter. Equal weight. Both mammals. Both warm-blooded. It would be much weirder if I were to turn into a snake, go from warm-blooded to cold. From human to python. Or what if I changed into a slug? No blood, no bones. No slug has ever weighed even close to 100 pounds.

Human to wolf: matter is conserved. But
how
do I change?

How does the hair come and go, bones shift and grow and shrink? How can I be a wolf
and
a human?

When I change back, am I the same human I was? Is it the same skin, the same cells? Or am I re-created each time? A new wolf, a new human. If so, why do my memories not change? Or do they and I just don't know it?

Who am I? What am I?

To understand, I was sure—I am sure—I had to learn how humans function. How we absorb and expend energy. What happens when we breathe. What we are made of. Genes, DNA. I had to learn the same about wolves.

I have to understand
how
I am in order to understand
what
I am.

I know so little. I don't know if I'll ever know enough.

I can say “werewolf.” But I don't know what that means. Not below the surface of my skin, of my hide.

I've asked Grandmother, Great-Aunt Dorothy. They have a few answers, but not enough. Most of the time they don't even understand my questions.

I asked Grandmother why she'd tried to breed the werewolf out of her children.

She denied it.

“But your story?” I asked. “About finding someone who wasn't a werewolf to have a baby with . . . about marrying out so you could weaken the family illness?”

Grandmother clucked. “That was a story for your father. I'm proud of the wolf in me. In you. I would never try to kill it. Why do you think I work so hard to keep this place the way it is? To make it bigger? Why do you think I want you here?”

“Then why?” I began. “Who, I mean. Who was my grandfather?”

“You won't tell your father?”

I thought of all the lies he'd told me, everything he'd kept hidden. “No. I promise I won't tell him.” I thought of the lies Grandmother had told me. I could break my promise.

“Your father's not a wolf. He doesn't understand.” For a second her eyes seemed yellow. “Your grandfather was a local boy. Never saw him more than once or twice. He wrote me letters. I never answered. That was that.”

“Is he still alive? My grandfather?”

Grandmother didn't answer at first, looking at her bony hands, her scarred knuckles. “He's long gone.”

HISTORY OF ME

Grandmother said that taking the pill to stop the change was an abomination. That we were killing an essential part of me. That if we kept the wolf in me down it would eat away at the human. It was too dangerous. I could explode. I
would
explode. Her arguments were not rational.

Grandmother says it gets easier. That putting it off only makes the next change worse.

I didn't care. I would not live on the farm. Not for more than the summer. I could not be a wolf in a cage. Even if it was possible, which it wasn't. The neighbors might not have called the police that first time, but it was unlikely they'd refrain twice. What would happen when the cops found a wolf in a cage? It's not legal to keep a wolf as a pet in New York City. What if they came and it was human me in the cage waiting to change? What if they saw me change?

Never again, Dad decided. Never again would he deal with me changing in the city.

They decided to send me to the farm.

Forever.

Living without electricity, without hot water, without my parents, without anything I cared about. With my grandmother, my great-aunt Dorothy, my aunts and uncles and cousins who could barely read and write, let alone do calculus or trigonometry. Who know as little about fast-twitch muscles or mitochondrial DNA as they know about how to catch a cab or how to order a pizza.

No college. No future. No life. I would never unlock werewolf DNA. I would never understand what I am.

I would rather die.

I cried for two days straight. While Mom and Dad told me in turns why my living in the city was impossible.

I would not listen. There had to be another way.

Dad found it.

He learned that the pill can be used to suppress menstruation. He figured it would stop me turning into a wolf, too.

It did. It does.

But the first time we tried it was on the farm where it wouldn't matter if it went wrong. I refused to go up unless they promised I'd get to go home. No matter what happened.

They promised, but I'm not sure what would have happened if it hadn't worked. It wasn't as if Dad had never broken a promise to me before. My hopes were pinned on Mom. If she let me down, then I was going to run all the way back to the city. I would not stay on the farm.

Didn't come to that because it worked. I didn't bleed, I didn't turn into a wolf. I can keep the wolf inside. One pill a day.

My life wasn't over. Though Grandmother kept telling me that it should be, about the terrible mistake I was making, Dad was making. That this would rebound on me a hundredfold.

She calmed down a bit when we agreed to my returning each summer. Not taking the pill, being a wolf, running wild. It makes her and Hilliard happy. I can give away three months of my life each year. For their sake.