This Is Not a Werewolf Story (14 page)

I close the box.

She was good at being my mom.

In honor of my mom we decide to make grilled cheese sandwiches and canned tomato soup for lunch. Then Cook Patsy teaches me a couple of really good moves.

“The main thing,” she says, “is to be aggressive. Don't let him choose what's gonna happen next.
You
choose.”

After kitchen duty I go to my room. My mom was a rotten cook. Maybe it's weird, but this makes me happy. I know something about her now—something only her kid would know about her, something only I could tease her about. It's like Sparrow and his grandma's Dutch soup. I've got a joke with my mom now too.

I keep thinking about it, shaking my head. Liver in dessert? No wonder she messed up the recipe to change herself back.

Have you ever taken a joke too far? That's how that thought makes me feel. Bad and sad, like you would if you were teasing someone and took it too far.

How do I get her back? The question aches like a bruise. And how do I protect her from the cougar until I figure it out?

Last night it sounded like Dean Swift thought the cougar had something to do with the lens. My books are still spread out all over the floor. It sounds crazy, but I go ahead and look for words like “measurements” and “formula” in some of the BOBs. (That's what Ms. Tern calls the Back Of the Book.)

I find a few pages listed for the word “measurements” in a book about lighthouses during the Civil War. It turns out that in wartime lighthouse lenses got taken apart so enemy ships couldn't navigate the coastline. After the war some lenses got put back together wrong. That's not a big surprise, since all one thousand prisms have to be angled in just the right way. If the measurements are off, the beam won't be very strong.

It reminds me of what Dean Swift said about making the beam more powerful. I squint to remember how he said he figured out the correct measurements. Did he really say he found them in a “secret” book by Fresnel? I'm pretty sure the title was something like
The Generative Power of Light
. I pull out my dictionary. “Generative” is the adjective for “generation,” and that means “to bring into being or existence.” So to make something live.

I think about it for a while. Light makes things
live. But why would that be a secret? Even Little John knows about photosynthesis. We've all put dirt, water, and a bean in a plastic cup and set it in the light or out of the light or to the side of the light. The sprout is phototropic. That means it will grow toward the light.

I sigh. It's hard to believe that Dean Swift thinks the light made the cougar come here, like a sprout turns to the sun. A cougar is not a bean.

Maybe I didn't hear him right.

I feel like a dog biting his tail, going around in circles. My mom and her wolf skin and me and mine, the cougar and a light made by a flame and 1,032 prisms.

Then I stop. My mind sits down. It's all very simple. Who knows when Dean Swift will light the lens, or why he thinks the cougar has turned toward it. I can't control that—just like I can't tell my mom where to find her human skin.

But I do have a choice. There's one thing I can choose to do that will keep my mom safe and give us more time to figure out her recipe. I can get rid of the cougar.

A funny thought comes to me.

You want a hero, Mary Anne? You're looking right at him.

I wait until midnight. Then I put my flashlight in my pocket and stand at my door for a minute, listening. All is quiet.

“Come with me,” I whisper to Vincent five minutes later.

He pokes his head out from under his covers. He screams. I hold the flashlight up so that he can see it's me.

“What are you doing in here?” he asks. “How did you get in?”

“I opened your door. It wasn't locked,” I say. “I need your help for an undertaking of great importance.”

He hops out of bed and pulls on his jeans. “Do I need a jacket?” is all he asks.

That's a friend for you. The kind of kid who grabs a jacket and goes with you—even when you are waking him up in the middle of the night to sneak out a window and climb down a tree taller than a three-story building and walk out into the pitch black to
hunt a wild cougar
.

I lead him out of his room to the end of the hall. The madrona that goes past my bedroom window reaches all the way up here. The window groans as I lift it. I go out first and then point the flashlight up so Vincent can see where to step.

He drops from the lowest branch and lands even more quietly than I do.

The flashlight makes a circle of light at our feet. Outside of that circle, we can't see a thing. We walk very slowly, since we are walking toward a cliff. Very. Slowly. We step off the mowed lawn of the school grounds and onto the zigzag path.

We walk one behind the other, Vincent in front and me in back.

“Maybe we should get Bobo,” Vincent says. “Just to scare off the cougar if it's out there.”

“No,” I say. “That's our mission. We
want
to find the cougar.”

Vincent stops so suddenly that I run into him and we end up taking a shortcut down the hill to the beach. In the beginning we do something very like somersaults, but by the end we have crashed into enough stuff on our way down that we have straightened out a little and are rolling on our sides like kids do down grassy hills for fun.

Only this hill is not grassy. And we are not having fun.

Of course I drop the flashlight when we meet the raccoon.

When we finally fall onto the wet sand at the bottom of the hill, we lay there for a while, breathing. The air smells good, like fish and salt and the tar they paint on wood that sits near water. Sand fleas are jumping all over us. I pull some leaves and small branches out of my hair. I'm bleeding—just a little bit—in about twenty places.

After a minute I start to wonder, why is the sand so wet this far up the beach? I get a bad feeling.

Then I hear it.

Keep in mind, it's pitch-black.

But I know a killer wave coming when I hear it.

“Get up!” I yell to Vincent. We barely have time to jump up onto the driftwood pile behind us before it hits.

We hang on to a big log as the wave washes over us, bashing us against the wood and leaving us sputtering and coughing.

“Move!” I shout as I hear another wave gathering itself up.

Vincent and I scuttle over the rest of the driftwood logs. We find the zigzag path and sit down. Our teeth are chattering. Sand crunches between my molars. My nose and throat have that scratchy feeling you get after you throw up.

“At least it washed all the twigs out of my hair,” Vincent says.

“And the salt in the salt water is antiseptic,” I say, trying to look on the bright side too. “That's why all of our cuts and welts and scrapes and abrasions hurt so especially bad.”

“Yes,” says Vincent. “It's good to think that we won't have to worry about any minor infections.”

We find the flashlight at the top of the path, right near where we bumped into each other. I pick it up and we set out across the lawn to the school.

“Try again tomorrow night?” I ask.

Vincent takes a long time to answer.

“Listen,” I say, “I'll get us headlamps. And I'll check the tide tables in Dean Swift's office to make sure no waves sneak up on us.”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Vincent. He sounds a little grumpy. “I'm in.”

I sigh. I'm sticky, soaked, bruised, and battered. But I'm glad to have a friend like Vincent.

We start up the tree. When he gets to the window and I'm in the fork of the two biggest branches, we hear it.

The cougar's screech fills the night. I can see the sound like a funnel cloud, almost, narrow where it begins and then opening out into the sky. The sound is coming from the edge of the fort closest to the beach.
The cougar screams again, and a shudder jerks my head hard to the side. That animal is close.

It's on the beach.

Near the driftwood pile.

Where we were standing ten minutes ago.

We climb through the window. Vincent is shaking now, and I don't think it's just the wind and his wet clothes. I think he can see the cougar in his mind the way I can see it in mine, the huge cat pacing, sniffing the wet wood, leaping onto the pile and pausing, one paw up, its nose in the air, tracking a scent.

Our
scent.

“Tomorrow night, same time,” I say when we get to his room.

“But why are we doing this?” Vincent asks.

“We need to get that cougar,” I whisper. “I think it's trying to hurt someone I love.”

Vincent turns his back to me. He opens his door without saying a word.

I can't blame him for bailing out. The mission tonight was a ridiculous disaster, a miserable failure, a complete catastrophe. And that's only if you look at it in a really, really positive light.

He steps into his room and then turns around to face me.

“Then we'll take care of it. You and me together. We'll get it.” His eyes are scared, but he bobs his head up and down like he really means it.

“You know why?” he says. He pulls me into his room. “It's a secret. Nobody at the school but Dean Swift knows. And he only knows part of it.”

I sit down on the desk chair next to his bed. He sits facing me.

“This summer there was a fire in my house. Me and my baby brother were sleeping upstairs. I tried to run out the door, but there was too much smoke. I ran to the window. My mom was down there. She was crying. She said to get the baby and climb out the window. I couldn't move. I started shaking and shaking and I fell down. I was so scared. Then a fireman broke through the door. Another one came through the window. They picked us both up and got us out of there.” He stops talking, and I let him. I'm soaked and frozen to the bone, but I know better than to rush a kid through his secret.

“The firemen gave me a sticker and said I was really brave. But that was a lie. I didn't think about my brother once. I didn't try to save him or anything.” His mouth pulls out into a straight line, and I can tell he's trying really hard not to cry.

“I think it's why my mom sent me here,” he says. “She wants me to get tough.”

After a minute he looks up at me sideways, so I can only see half his face.

“You know how that fire started?”

I shake my head.

“It was me. I found some matches in my stepdad's jacket. I wanted to see what it felt like to light one. Right before bed, while they were giving my brother a bath, I hid in the coat closet and lit them all up. I thought I stomped them out. But I missed one.” He covers his mouth with his hand. “You're the only person who knows. My mom would leave me here forever if she knew.”

“I won't ever tell,” I say.

Then all of a sudden he grins. “My mom blamed my stepdad for the fire. She almost kicked him out for it. Wouldn't that have been great? She made him give up smoking. He'd
kill
me if he knew it was me. Whenever they argue, she brings it up and says how his smoking almost fried us all.”

I try to smile, but I don't think that's funny. I know Vincent hates his stepdad. But that's a whale of a lie.

“This time I'm not gonna let anyone down.” Vincent keeps talking. “You're gonna put a rock in that sling of yours and you're gonna hit that cat between the eyes. You're gonna knock him out, and we're gonna hog-tie him. When we get back to school, I'll tell everyone the whole story and you'll be a big hero.”

I imagine the look on Mary Anne's face when she hears about it.

“Yeah, then that Mary Anne will notice you for sure,” he says with a grin.

My cheeks get hot.

“What, you think I didn't know you're crushing on her?” He rolls his eyes. “She likes you already, but this will show her what you're made of.”