Liar (25 page)

“It was weird,” I say, because he needs to hear something. “I mean, the funeral was weird. All these people I never saw before and the preacher said stuff that was all wrong. Not like Zach at all. It was like no one had even
met
him, let alone knew him well. They were all talking about imaginary Zach.”

“Funerals are always that way,” Dad says, closing his laptop to show that I have his full attention. “Everyone talks about an idealized version of the dearly departed. All their warts are removed and they become someone they're not . . .”

I lean against the fridge, knocking off a magnet and causing one of Jordan's vomits on paper to fall to the floor. I ignore it. “The party after was worse. I only knew his friends from school and none of them like me. And they were all drinking—”

“You didn't—” Dad begins.

“No, Dad. Of course not.” I'm not allowed to drink because they're afraid I'll turn wolfish even though the Greats say that's horseshit. Well, mostly horseshit. Great-Aunt Dorothy remembered that it had happened once with her grandfather, but only once, and she doesn't remember it happening to any other wolf. “I've still never had a sip of alcohol. Even if I wanted to try it, I wouldn't surrounded by those creeps. They think I'm a freak. Which is true, just not the way they think I am. I can't wait till school's done,” I finish, hoping I've said enough for Dad to feel as if we've had a talk and he's done his fatherly duty. I'm pretty sure that's how it would have been if I had gone to Will's place.

“I'm sorry,” Dad says. “You okay?”

I nod. Even though I'm not. I wonder what he'd say if I told him about the white boy. About what I suspect.

“Your mom wants to talk to you.”

“She in bed?” I ask, even though it's obvious. It's not as if there's anywhere else she could be.

“Uh-huh,” Dad says, reaching out to pat my shoulder. I don't brush his hand off though I want to. “You sure you're okay?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Tired.” Confused, guilty, sad, angry, worried, mourning. I am many things. I want to know who that boy is, why he's following me, what he wants. I want to know if he killed Zach. I want to know why.

I want Zach to be alive.

I knock on the door to Mom and Dad's room. “Mom?” I call, not bothering to be quiet for Jordan asleep a thin wall away.

“Come in,” Mom says.

I open the door. Mom's in bed, wearing her frilly pajamas that make us both giggle. She pats the bed. I sit. She pulls me into a hug and kisses the top of my head. My throat hurts so much it closes over. For a moment I can't breathe, tears stream out of my eyes. I can't seem to stop. I cry and cry and cry.

“There, there,
chérie
,” she says, stroking my hair. “There, there, my love.”

BEFORE

Me and Zach, we raced each other a lot after that first time in Central Park. The result was never in question. He was fast, I was faster. I knew that. He knew that.

But it was Zach who taught me how to run right.

Running beside him, matching stride for stride, hearing his breath, smelling it. Duplicating it. Teaching myself to run as he did. No one ever taught me, you see. I had no technique. Learning from Zach made me even faster, copying all the things Zach learned from his coach: landing light on my heels, knees higher, longer stride. Fists pumping, elbows in tight by my side.

I even tried to get my heart to beat at the same pace as his.

I could hear his beating when I slept, taste his breath. It was as if he had crawled into my skin. Under it, always there.

Even after he died.

Maybe
more
after he died.

I've never been as comfortable, as happy with another person as I was with Zach.

I wish I hadn't had to lie to him. I wish he knew what I really am.

If he had lived longer I think I would have told him.

Maybe.

I told the police that I would never hurt him. I don't think they believed me.

Biology was Zach's favorite class. Mine, too.

Maybe if he'd known about me he would have wanted to help me figure out how my wolfishness works.

Right now I'm thinking about how Zach was made, was unmade.

Once in class we had to put together a model of the human body. We looked at how the organs sat together: spleen and pancreas behind stomach. Gallbladder behind liver. Kidneys in the middle of the back. Large intestine nestling the small. All shiny and plastic.

Yayeko warned us that real bodies were only vaguely like the model. That spleens, pancreas, stomachs, gallbladders, livers, kidneys, large and small intestines are as varied as the nose and eyes and mouths on our faces.

Does that mean the model is a lie?

Zach's organs are even less like that model than they were. They no longer fit together. Even before they started to rot, they were pulled apart, shredded, blood breaking through the veins and capillary walls that were supposed to keep them housed safe, sound, and circulating.

Zach's blood got free, drowned all his organs.

But I don't know how. I don't know who did that to him. At least, I'm not sure. My suspicions are without any proof.

All I know is that he's gone forever.

I wonder if I would have loved his lungs, his voice box, his pancreas if I'd seen them nestled safe within him. If you love someone, do you love all of them? Even the mucus in their throat, the cankers in their mouth, the cavities in their teeth?

I want it to be winter always. Because I met Zach in winter. Really met him. Talked to him. Kissed him. Ran with him. All the things we did together. Those were winter things.

In winter he was alive. Organs well-knit.

In summer I was away, aching for him, being a wolf.

But here in the fall, he's gone. All the layers gone, too. Right down to his skin.

I'm not sure what to do without him.

The last time I saw him we were running. All the way from Central Park to his apartment building in Inwood. But I kept running, turned, ran backward slowly, waved, and then ran all the way down to the Lower East Side. To my apartment building, my tiny little room, where he had never been.

I never saw him again.

Not alive. Not with organs intact.

LIE NUMBER THREE

There were never any doctors.

My parents were too afraid of blood samples being taken. Too afraid of what the doctors would find. Of what lives in my blood.

I have never been to a doctor. Not one. I've never had any tests done. Never been vaccinated. Never had my ears or eyes tested. When I run a fever my parents give me aspirin, put cold cloths on my forehead, and hope that it will come down.

No doctor ever told me to keep taking the pill. Mom wasn't horrified by the suggestion. She's the one who gets the prescription from her doctor. I added that detail to make it seem more real.

There were hair-removal specialists though. By the time I was ten I swear we'd been to every single one in the city: electrolysis, waxing, laser, creams, and unguents. Mom found an old French woman who made me drink a foul-smelling herbal drink that tasted like dirt and made me throw up. Chinese and Spanish herbs and ointments. There was acupuncture, even a spirit worker.

None of it worked.

The hair came, stayed for more than a year, then the hair went, to return only when I am a wolf.

SCHOOL HISTORY

My school was founded by Quakers. They believed in equality and justice and wanted to make a school in that image. One of them was very wealthy, that's why there's so much scholarship money—that's how they've kept the school fees low. Well, not low by my standards, but low compared to most private schools in the city. Low enough that with scrimping and saving my parents can pay the half of my tuition that isn't covered by my scholarship.

But that rich Quaker—isn't that a contradiction? I thought Quakers were supposed to be poor—anyway, that Quaker left his Quaker wife and his many Quaker children and ran away with a much younger woman who was a dancer, not a Quaker. He moved to New York City to watch her dance every night. Until she up and left him, leaving him with a broken heart and—according to Chantal—a bad case of the clap.

That's when he founded the school and poured all his money into it.

He founded it in this building that used to be a prison. A women's prison. They kept the bars on the windows.

None of the students at the school are Quakers and only one of the teachers: Principal Paul.

I wonder if the Quaker sense of equality and justice extends to werewolves. Does it extend to me?

I realize I don't know much about Quakers.

But I know a lot about cages, about prisons. I've been kept hostage by lies all my life. Imprisoned by them.

This is how it is:

I'm alone.

Bars surround me. Prison guards bind my arms, bring me pills several times a day. They ask me—beg me—to tell them the truth.

I am.

Every single word.

Truth.

They don't believe in my wolves.

AFTER

The day after the funeral, I almost stay home from school. I'm not sure I can face Sarah and Tayshawn. The thought of seeing them makes my cheeks hot. I don't want to have a conversation about how it was a mistake, how we should forget about it, move on. I don't want to talk about it.

I keep my head down and go back into invisibility mode, which is much harder than it used to be. Zach is buried, but they still talk about him, still look sideways at me. Except now it feels as if there's more reason for them to be staring. I'm sure everyone knows what we did after the funeral.

No, not after.
During
. That makes it so much worse. Who noticed us leave together? Does everyone already know what happened? My cheeks get hotter.

I take my lunch—burned meatballs—into Yayeko Shoji's classroom, pretty sure I'll be safe from them there. I sit down under the poster of the carnivores' evolutionary tree, noting the branch where the gray wolf and the domestic dog split apart. It's very recent. There's 0.2 percent of mtDNA sequence difference between a wolf and a Pekingese . . . dogs and wolves can still interbreed.