Linger

His eyebrows spiked as if he could tell I was lying. “Rematch?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I pressed a finger into one of my eyebrows. “I think it’s time for you to go.”

I was afraid he was going to ask where he was supposed to go, but he just tugged on the sweatshirt and zipped up the jeans with an air of finality. “You’re probably right.”

Even though I saw that the soles of his feet were cut up pretty bad, he didn’t ask for shoes and I didn’t offer them. The weight of not explaining myself to him was choking the words out of me, so I just led him downstairs and back toward the door he’d come in.

I saw him hesitate, just a moment, as we passed by the door to the kitchen, and I remembered the feel of his ribs against mine. Part of me knew I should offer him something to eat, but most of me just wanted him gone as quickly as possible. Why was it so much easier to leave a dish out for the wolves?

Probably because wolves didn’t have arrogant smirks.

In the mudroom, I stopped by the door and crossed my arms again. “My dad shoots wolves,” I told him. “Just for the record. So you might want to keep out of the woods behind the house.”

“I’ll keep that in mind when I’m in the body of an animal with no higher thought,” Cole said. “Thanks for that.”

“I live to please,” I said, throwing open the door. Sleet, coming in sideways from the dark night, dotted my arm.

I expected a hangdog expression, or something else meant to elicit sympathy, but Cole just looked at me, a weird, firm smile on his face. Then he walked right out into the sleet, pulling the door out of my hands to shut it behind him.

After the door had closed, I stood there for a long moment, softly cursing under my breath, not knowing why I was letting it bother me. Then I went to the kitchen and got the first thing I could see—a bagged loaf of bread—and returned to the back door.

I planned in my head what I would say—something like, Don’t expect anything else—but when I opened the door, he was already gone.

I flicked on the back light. Dim yellow light splashed across the frozen yard, odd reflections thrown by the thin layer of crusted sleet. About ten feet from the door, I saw the jeans and tattered sweatshirt lying in a haphazard pile.

My ears and nose burning in the cold, I crunched slowly out to the clothing, stopping to study the shape of it. One of the sleeves of the sweatshirt was flung out, as if pointing to the distant pine woods. I lifted my eyes and, sure enough, there he was. A gray-brown wolf standing just a few yards beyond me, staring at me with Cole’s green eyes.

“My brother died,” I told him.

The wolf didn’t flick an ear; sleet and snow drifted down and clung to his fur.

“I’m not a nice person,” I said.

Still motionless. My mind bent, just a little, trying to reconcile Cole’s eyes and that wolf’s face.

I unwrapped the bread and held the bag so that the slices tumbled onto the ground next to my feet. He didn’t flinch—just stared, unblinking, human eyes in an animal’s face. “But I shouldn’t have told you your kiss sucked,” I added, trembling a little with the cold. Then I wasn’t sure what else to say about the kiss, so I shut up.

I turned back to the door. Before I went in, I folded the clothing and flipped the empty planter by the door over it to protect it from the weather. Then I left him out in the night.

I could still remember his human eyes in that wolf face; they’d looked as empty as I felt.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

• SAM •

I missed my mother.

I couldn’t explain this to Grace, because I knew all she could see when she thought of my mother were the savage scars that my parents had left on my wrists. And it was true, the memories of them trying to kill the tiny monster I had become were stuffed into my head so tightly that sometimes they seemed like they would split my skull; the old wounds dug so deep that I felt the razor blades again whenever I was near a bathtub.

But I had other memories of my mother, too, that snuck in between the cracks when I least expected them. Like now, when I was curled over the counter in The Crooked Shelf, my books lying inches from my empty hands, my eyes looking out the windows at the creeping brown evening. The last words I had read rested on my lips—Mandelstam, who wrote about me without having any way to know me:

But by blood no wolf am I

Outside, the last bit of sun glazed the corners of the parked cars with blinding amber and filled the puddles in the street with liquid gold. Inside, the store was already out of the reach of the dying day, dim and empty and half-asleep.

It was twenty minutes to closing.

It was my birthday.

I remembered my mother making me cupcakes on my birthdays. Never a cake, since it was just my parents and me, and I had the appetite of a bird, picking and choosing my culinary battles carefully. A cake would’ve gone stale before it was eaten.

So my mother made cupcakes. I remembered the vanilla scent of the frosting, hastily swirled onto the cake with a butter knife. By itself, it would’ve been ordinary, but this particular cupcake had a candle poked through the frosting. A tiny flame stretched from the wick, a bead of melted wax trembling just beneath it, and the cupcake was transformed to something bright and beautiful and special.

I could still smell the church scent of the blown-out match, see the reflection of the flame in my mother’s eyes, feel the soft cushion of the kitchen chairs under my skinny, folded-up legs. I heard my mother tell me to put my hands in my lap and saw her set the cupcake in front of me—she wouldn’t let me hold the plate, in case I knocked the candle onto my lap.

My parents had always been so careful with me, until the day they decided I needed to die.

In the store, I put my forehead in my hands and stared down at the curled corner of the book cover lying between my elbows. I could see how the cover was not really a single piece of paper, how it was really a printed piece of stock with a protective layer over the top, and how the topmost layer had peeled back to let a corner of the true cover get stained and yellow and tattered.

I wondered if I was really remembering my mother making me cupcakes, or if it was something my brain had stolen from one of the thousands of books I had read. Someone else’s mother, pasted onto my own, slinking in to fill the void.

Without raising my head, I lifted my gaze, putting the matching scars on my wrists directly at eye level. In the dull evening light, my veins were visible below the translucent skin of my arms, but the light blue forks disappeared beneath the uneven scar tissue. In my head, I reached to take the cupcake from the plate with arms smooth and unmarked, still pristine with my parents’ love. My mother smiled at me.

Happy birthday.

I closed my eyes.

I didn’t know how long they’d been closed when the ding of the shop door made me jerk up. I was about to tell the newcomer that we were no longer open, but then Grace turned around, shoving the door shut behind her with her shoulder. She clutched a drink tray in one hand and a Subway bag in the other. It was like another light had been turned on in the store; the entire place seemed brighter.

I was too stunned to jump up to help her, and by the time it occurred to me, she’d already deposited her loot on the counter. Coming around the back of the counter, Grace threw her arms around my shoulders and whispered in my ear, “Happy birthday.”

I wriggled my arms free of her embrace to wrap them around her waist. I held her tightly to me and pressed my face to her neck, hiding my surprise. “How did you know?”

“Beck told me before he changed,” Grace said. “You should’ve mentioned it.” She pulled back to look at my face. “What were you thinking about? When I came in?”

“Being Sam,” I said.

“What a nice thing to be,” Grace said. And then she smiled, bigger and bigger, until I felt my expression mirror hers, our noses touching. Grace finally stepped away to gesture to her offering on the counter, wrapped around my stack of books in a rather intimate way. “I’m sorry this is not more swank. There’s not really a place to do romantic in Mercy Falls, and even if there were, I’m somewhat poor at this moment, anyway. Can you eat now?”

I slid around her and went to the front door, locking it and turning the open sign around. “Well, it’s closing time. Do you want to go home with it? Or upstairs?”

Grace glanced toward the burgundy-carpeted stairs that led to the loft, and I knew she’d made up her mind. “You carry the drinks with your big muscles,” she said, with considerable irony. “And I’ll take the sandwiches, since they’re not breakable.”

Switching off the lights for the first floor, I followed her up the stairs, cardboard drink tray in hand. Our feet went swoof swoof in the thick carpet as we climbed to the dim loft with its slanted ceilings. With every step we took, I felt like I was ascending further and further above that remembered birthday to something infinitely more real.

“What did you get me?” I asked.

“Birthday sandwich,” Grace replied. “Duh.”

I flicked on the lily lamp that sat on the low bookshelves; eight small bulbs cast an erratic pattern of rose-colored light over us both as I joined Grace on the battered love seat.

My birthday sandwich turned out to be roast beef with mayonnaise, the same as Grace’s. We spread out the papers between us so that the edges overlapped and Grace hummed “Happy Birthday” in a terribly off-key way.

“And many more,” she added in an entirely new key.

“Why, thanks,” I said. I touched her chin, and she smiled at me.

After we’d finished our sandwiches—well, I had nearly finished mine, Grace had eaten the bread off hers—she gestured to the sandwich wrappers and said, “You should crumple up those papers. And I’ll get your present out.”

I looked at her, eyebrows raised, as she pulled her backpack from the floor onto her lap. “You shouldn’t have gotten me anything,” I said. “I feel silly getting a present.”

“I wanted to,” Grace said. “Don’t ruin it by going all bashful. I said get rid of those papers!”

I bent my head and started to fold.

“You and those cranes!” She laughed as she saw that I was folding the tidier of the two sandwich papers into a big, floppy bird printed with the Subway logo. “What is it with you and them?”

“I used to make them for good times. To remember the moment.” I waved the Subway crane at her; it flapped its loose, wrinkled wings. “You know you’ll never forget where this crane came from.”

Grace studied it. “I think that’s a pretty safe assumption.”

“Mission accomplished,” I said softly, and rested the crane on the floor beside the love seat. I knew I was stalling the moment before she presented her gift. It gave me a weird knot in my stomach to think she’d gotten me something. But Grace wouldn’t be put off.

“Now, close your eyes,” she said. Her voice had a little catch in it—anticipation. Hope. I silently said a prayer: Please let me like whatever it is she got. In my head, I tried to imagine the face that went with perfect delight, so that I could have it ready to pull out no matter what she had given me.