Liar (40 page)

From Yayeko's room I hear phone calls. First she calls Mom and Dad. Her side of the conversation is sparse. She must be talking to Dad. He doesn't want to hear what she has to say. I hear Yayeko straining not to raise her voice. Then the call's over. I wonder what Dad said. “Keep that monster away from me!” Or worse.

The next call isn't short. Nor the one after. No one wants to take me in.

Yayeko comes back into the kitchen, blinks at me, sits at the table opposite.

I can't imagine this working.

She talks about making the couch into a bed, wonders about whether I should go back to school. I'm all paid up, after all. She prattles on like this and I nod and grunt and think about whether I should go back to the farm.

Then her tone changes. “There's nothing wrong with being a girl, Micah. There really isn't.”

“This again,” I think, but I don't say it.

“You need to accept who you are.”

She's right, but not the way she thinks she is.

“I don't want to be a boy,” I tell her. “Honest.”

I don't know what Yayeko is thinking, not till later. But I can tell you now: while she talks about my denying my femininity, she's thinking about substituting sugar pills for my real ones, which she does.

On the third day in her home, I change.

AFTER

It's 5:00 a.m. and I wake out of a dream of forest and deer. I'm flushed and sweating and I know.

I've thrown off the blanket. There's spotting on the sheets.

I'm itchy, I'm worse than itchy, it's like my skin is trying to tear itself from my flesh. Coarse hair has sprouted across my arms, my back, my everywhere. My head throbs, my eyes. Everything blurs. My muscles ache, my bones. My teeth shift, get bigger, move. My jaw is breaking.

I roll off the couch, land heavily on the floor. The shudder goes through the apartment.

I hear stirring. Yayeko, her daughter, Megan, her mother. Their breathing hurts my ears. My hands and feet slip on the floor because they're not hands and feet anymore: paws, claws.

I'm crouching, my backbone ripples, lengthens. There's howling. I think it's me.

Smells flood me. Human smells: salt, sweat, meat, blood, fear.

I smell prey.

Lots of it.

I'm always hungry after the change.

HISTORY OF ME

My first memory is of looking into the eyes of a wolf. They were gigantic and blue. I was small enough that when the wolf looked at me, sniffed at me, and then licked me, it was all I could see. I stared up into those wolf eyes.

Except it wasn't a wolf, it was a husky. Owned by the old couple who used to live next door.

I remember that I liked its smell. I remember that it smelled like home to me. I couldn't have been more than a baby. Later I asked. My parents told me that the old couple and their dog moved away before Jordan was born. Before I was two. “So cruel,” Mom said. “Keeping such a big dog in so small a space.”

I wonder if the wolf in that dog could see the wolf in me?

It accepted me without question. Let me pull its tail, lean against its belly, and fall asleep.

Wolves don't lie. Nor do their dog relations. We recognize each other.

I didn't feel that at home again until I met Zach.

But there was no wolf in him.

AFTER

I smell blood moving in the veins of the tallest one. I smell it in the other two, hiding behind salt, water, and fear. Their fear smells delicious. It's the prey smell.

I move toward them, growling. I am hungry; saliva drips over my teeth, down my jaw. The smaller one backs away. The old one moves with her. Their movements are slow and awkward. Even without kin here, this is an easy hunt. But I wish Hilliard could see me corralling them.

The tallest one takes a step toward me. She does not smell like fear.

The young one moves again.

I leap.

But the tall one moves between me and my prey. I land on her, pushing her to the floor, my teeth bared.

The small one and the old one yelp and whine. I swipe a paw and knock the old one over. She lands hard and is quiet. I smell urine. The young one caterwauls as if I've already gutted her. I tense to leap again.

But the tall one is looking up at me, low sounds vibrating in her throat.

I know those sounds.

I turn back to the little one. I'm hungry and she's whining at me to eat her.

The tallest one reaches up and touches the fur around my neck, she digs her fingers in, pulls my gaze back to her. My saliva drips on her face.

Her low sounds continue, unwavering and steady and sure. “Micah,” she is saying. Over and over again.

My name.

“Micah,” Yayeko says.

I'm hungry. I'm a wolf.

“Micah, Micah, Micah, Micah, Micah, Micah, Micah.”

“Micah's a wolf,” I want to tell her. But wolves can't talk.

Megan is leaning over her grandmother, crying.

“Micah,” Yayeko says again and again. “Micah.”

Her words are making me sleepier than I am hungry.

I rest my snout on my paws, remembering what it's like to have fingers.

AFTER

Yayeko believes me now.

She wants to talk to people at the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at NYU. She studied there and a friend of hers works there. She has another friend in the sports science lab at Fordham. They could chart just how far outside the limits of human I am.

I'm not sure.

Wolfishness isn't my secret. It's the whole family's. Grandmother and Great-Aunt would eat anyone who tried to take their blood. They don't believe in science.

Or civilization.

They don't hold with outsiders. They don't want anyone to know what they are. Hell,
they
don't want to know what they are, or how werewolfism works.

But I want to know.

If I do more tests and they prove what we know they will, Yayeko thinks they'll get funding to study me. It could pay my college fees. I'd be someone's research project, a paid lab rat.

If I let them test me.

If I show them what I am.

But what kind of life will that be? I'll be a bigger freak than ever.

There are scholarships for running. Zach once asked me about it. The only thing stopping me was Dad telling me to hide my wolfishness. But I can tone it down: I can run fast enough for a scholarship, but not so fast I scare them.

I have choices.

This one is easy: I can't betray my family, my
real
family—the Greats, everyone up on the farm. I don't want Pete to lose his new home.

I'll go to school. A good school with a strong track program and a good biology department. I'll find out what I am.

LIE NUMBER TEN

This one's more of an omission than a lie. I don't know how to count it: is it just one omission or many? How many omissions add up to a lie?

I didn't mention all the reporters. I didn't mention what it was like going to school past a throng of press, questions screamed, cameras in my face. My photo in the paper. Tayshawn's. Sarah's.

And Zach's, of course. Almost every day. His parents started getting love letters from strangers. Truckloads of them. Love letters to a dead boy from people who never knew him. That's much sicker than anything I did, isn't it?

Reporters followed me to and from school.

People I didn't know pointed at me and whispered.

My parents had to get rid of their landline. It's another reason they were so determined to send me upstate. The reporters never found the farm. No one ever found it.

And the trial.

The trial was worst of all.

You're wondering why I didn't tell you about that?

It was a distraction. Doesn't add to the real story. Which is me and Zach and my wolfishness.

Yayeko Shoji understood—
understands
, I mean.

That's why she visits me so often.

THE TRUTH OF ME

The apartment is small. One tiny room. The kitchen is along one wall, the bed along another, and a desk and a bookshelf along the third. There's a view of a park, and no cage disguised as a desk.

I'm not in the city anymore, but it's a good school in a good town, and I have a full ride.