Memoirs of a Girl Wolf (10 page)

My eyes fixated on him. He noticed me and lifted his hand, waving. I turned my head quickly pretending I didn’t see him and laid my head on my knees and closed my eyes until the bell to ring for fourth period.

The week dragged on. I went straight from school to home and then back to school. At least I had the “I’m still grounded” excuse to hide behind so that Mom wouldn’t become suspicious as to why I no longer had a social life.

I figured I was mildly depressed because most days I would get home, eat dinner, and then go to bed. Sometimes I fell asleep in the middle of doing my homework. When I would wake in the morning, I’d be in my bed, but I’d still feel groggy like I hadn’t gotten any rest the night before.

Mom’s answer to my fatigue and migraines, I continued experiencing, was to drink tea and more tea. Every night after dinner she’d fix me a cup, and sit across from me encouraging me to drink all of it and have some more. She wouldn’t leave me alone until I was finished. Her explanation for her insistent behavior was that she was concerned about my odd symptoms I had been experiencing since the morning I woke up in the woods behind the house.

No matter how many hot mugs of tea I drank, it wasn’t doing anything to help. Every time I complained Mom said to give it some time to build up in my system and then I’d see results.

My only social life at the moment were the twins. We played video games in the attic, I actually got pretty good and almost beat Josh’s score at Mario Kart. Neither of my brothers were as happy about my high score as I was, and suddenly I was no longer asked to play.

I was then reduced to spending most of my afternoons on the back deck in a black lawn chair drinking bitter coffee and reading.

The leaves were starting to change as did the temperature a little, so it was pleasant to be outside soaking in nature. The only nuisance was the house across from us and that was mainly because of the obnoxious noises.

Everyday people worked on the house from when I left for school in the mornings to when the sun set.

One chilly afternoon in mid-September, I sat on the back deck reading
The Great Gatsby
when I heard a dog barking among the drilling and jack hammering. I looked up from my book and saw a familiar dark brown coonhound bouncing out of the house.

The energetic dog came to a jumping stop in front of a big man in boots and a camouflage vest. The lower half of the man’s face was covered in a full beard, and on his head was an orange hat. He had an intense, domineering look about him. Even sitting this far away from him, my skin prickled with goose bumps. I blamed it on the breeze. The man kneeled down and pet the dog and then lifted his head and looked straight at me. I gasped, scared, but I collected myself quickly and dropped my attention to the open book in my lap, pretending to read. My heart raced and I read the same sentence about ten times before glancing back his way. He was no longer looking at me instead he stood and disappeared in the house.

The dog remained in the front yard until I heard the man call, “Phoebe!” and the dog’s ears lifted and it ran inside after the man, but the dog’s booming bark echoed behind it all the way across the pond.

I sat up straighter.

Phoebe?

I knew the name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t figure out why until Reign’s face flashed in my mind and I remembered he had mentioned his dog’s name was Phoebe.

I moved my bookmark, the black and white photo of the pregnant woman, and closed the book then stood and walked to the railing of the porch.

Squinting my eyes, I studied the house which was an eye sore no more. Just in the past weeks it had evolved into a charming two story white house.

I shuddered. It was probably a coincidence.

A lot of people could have a dog named Phoebe.

But I knew that in a small town like Petoskey there weren’t a lot of coincidences.

11

Near the end of September we had an encounter again. I tried my best to avoid Reign which meant carrying most of my books with me at all times. This year was sharing a lot of similarities with last year. But on a rainy Tuesday morning, I didn’t want to lug around my umbrella and wet coat, so I was forced to use my locker. I waited until the hallway was mostly cleared of students and dangerously close to the bell, but I figured the longer I waited the more likely it was Reign would be sitting in class. When I felt like I couldn’t spare another second, I ran down the hall and to my locker. As if he had been secretly waiting for me the entire time, I was almost immediately joined by him, unlocking his own locker. He didn’t say anything to me, but he didn’t have to just his presence annoyed me and his smell: wood smoke, which actually happened to be one of my favorite scents, but I didn’t like it on him.

“Do we have a quiz today in Ms. Stewart’s class?” he asked, with a small grin.

I didn’t look at him instead I fished out
The Great Gatsby
from my bag and dropped it into my locker. During lunch and free time during class, I found solace in reading since I had no one to talk with.

“I don’t have her for English. I have Mr. Arnold,” I replied.

He closed his locker. “I guess I’ll ask Kristy.”

I slammed my locker shut and turned to face him with a tense expression. “Her name is Kristen,” I said, turning on my heel to walk away briskly with my head held high as I flipped my wavy, red hair over my shoulder.

“Hey, wait,” he said.

I didn’t stop until he called to me again and said, “You dropped something.”

My first thought was that it was a tampon and I died a little inside. I turned slowly, my face as red as my hair, but I was relieved to see it was nothing personal. The black and white photo of the pregnant woman had slipped from in between the pages of my book and had fallen on to the muddy, wet floor. He kneeled down to pick up the photo, but froze with it in his hand when he flipped it over.

I walked up to him and snatched it from his long fingers. I tucked it into my back pocket and turned dramatically again, but this time I slid a little because the floors were wet and when I tried flipping my hair my fingers got caught in the strands. I checked to see if he was staring after me. He wasn’t. Instead, he still stood staring at his hand where the picture had been with a perplexed and astonished look on his face.

I stopped sitting in the cafeteria. It was too much for me to have to sit alone at a table in the back under the dim, flickering lights and put up with the snickering and glances of my peers. Though it had subsided some. I went from the center of gossip and rumors to regressing to the status I was the year before: invisible.

I started eating lunch in the library, but I was told by the librarian, Mr. Jones, a bald, wrinkly, liver spotted man who wore worn loafers and navy blue, flannel shirts that no food was allowed in his library, so I ended up outside on the stoop near the cafeteria doors with my back against the brick wall. I conveniently had a perfect view of Reign who, after I told him I wanted to eat alone, had continued sitting in the courtyard at the cement table by himself. I wasn’t the only loner in school after all. We spent most of the lunch hour stealing glances at one another. I was too proud to admit that I wanted to sit with him. I just wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t twelve or my mother.

On that rainy Tuesday, it continued to rain through lunch, but I still sat outside. I was dry on the stoop by the cafeteria doors, but surrounding the stoop were shallow muddy puddles. The rain wasn’t awful, but the chill was. I kept my icy, cold hands stuffed in the pockets of my wool pea coat. Every now and then I would quickly pick up my sandwich and take a bite, drop it back in my lap and warm my hands up in my pockets before trying to eat again.

About half way through lunch Reign came through the door holding tightly onto his brown paper bag. He came to a stop beside me on the edge of the stoop and looked, narrowing his eyes, at the wet scene before him. There was no way he could eat at his table with it raining.

He looked down at me and frowned and then sat slowly against the wall opposite me.

Unlike me, he had on big, brown work gloves and a gray cap that covered his ears. I was jealous instantly of his warmth.

“Don’t worry I won’t talk to you,” he said.

He sounded, for the first time ever, upset with me. I deserved it. I hadn’t been welcoming at all no matter how nice he tried being to me. It was immature of me to dump my bad mood on him, so I had a bit of a change of heart.

“That’s okay,” I said.

He was silent as he pulled his lunch out of the brown bag: an orange, a sandwich, and a hostess cupcake. He started with the cupcake and when he bit into a little whip cream was left on his top lip. I stifled a laugh. He looked really cute in his cap and rosy cheeks and his obliviousness to the whip cream on his lip.

“Did you have a quiz today?” I asked.

He looked up at me. “I haven’t had English yet. Seventh period.”

“Me too,” I said.

Then we were silent again and the only noise we could hear was the patter of rain drops falling from the dark clouds above.

“Where’d you get that picture?” he asked.

I blinked at him. That was an odd question. Why did he care? Besides, I didn’t really want to tell him. I didn’t even know why I still hung on to the photo.

“It’s a picture of my aunt,” I lied.

And he knew. He tilted his head at me and smiled. “Really, how’d you get it?”

“I told you,” I said.

“You’re lying.”

His tone was cold, and the warmth in his eyes disappeared, but only for a flicker of a second. His dark eyes lit up a little again and he smiled.

“You have something,” I said, wiping my own upper lip so he’d catch on.

He laughed as he dragged his thumb across his mouth.

“I got it from a house,” I said. “An abandoned house.”

“Do you hang out in abandoned houses a lot?” he asked.

“No,” I snapped then sighed. “I live next door or across the pond from it. My friends—or a group of us went and explored a month ago and I found the picture.”

“You live in that log cabin?” he asked, perking up a little.

I nodded slowly and waited for him to explain how he knew where I lived.

“I’m moving into that house across from you.”

So it was his dog the other day and the man with the beard and orange hat, I realized, was his dad.

He was smiling more at me now that he figured out we were going to be neighbors. I looked away from him at the closed doors because it was always hard for me to not return his smile with my own. I didn’t want him to know that I liked him and that I was excited to know he’d be so close.

“It’s haunted,” I said.

He laughed. “It is?”

“Yeah, there was a skeleton in it.”

“Nah,” he said, still laughing. “It was just an animal.”

“I was attacked that night I checked out the house,” I said as I recalled the haunting memory. Maybe it didn’t really happen, and now I felt hot like he was going to catch me in a lie.

“Attacked?” he said. The smile slid from his face.

I nodded. “By an animal,” I said.

He pulled his cap down further as a burst of wind carried the rain in and we were splashed with cold water. “You live in the woods that could be any animal. It doesn’t mean my house is haunted.”

Shrugging my shoulders, I took my hands out of my warm pockets and took another quick bite of my sandwich. He watched me and once he figured out what I was doing he bit down on the tip of his right glove and pulled it off then he did the other hand and he tossed the pair of gloves at me. They landed near me. I looked up at him he nodded for me to put them on. I was too cold to object so I slipped my icy hands into the gloves which were nearly two times too big for me.

He got up, finished with his lunch, and headed toward the doors.

“Hey,” I said.

He paused with his hand on the door and turned his head to look at me.

“How’d you know I was lying?” I asked.

“Because that picture is of my mom,” he said then opened the door and disappeared into the noisy cafeteria.

Despite the warm gloves now protecting my hands, I was left feeling even colder than I was moments before.

I spent the rest of the day in a sort of daze. I wanted to find him and give him the picture now knowing that it belonged to him, but the revelation also raised a lot of curiosity like why was a picture of his mother in the abandoned house to begin with? My new neighbor was suddenly very interesting and I planned to find out more about him. But it wasn’t just the golden haired, Southern, boy who churned through my thoughts more than before, but also the picture which I held, folded in my hand the rest of the day, While in class I’d unfold the black and white photo and study the woman with a warm smile, that looked more familiar, and freckled arms, and long fingers that caressed her protruding stomach, and I wondered if in the photo the woman, Reign’s mother, was pregnant with him.

Suddenly the photo changed in significance. Not only did it hold more meaning than before, but it also no longer belonged to me and I realized it never had. I don’t know why I liked it so much when I saw it alone in the broken frame on the cracked wall in the dirty basement, but I guess I felt it was too beautiful to leave alone for another odd amount of years in a sinking house. Once he returned to the house, did go straight to the basement to seek the forgotten photo? Did he even know it was in the house?