Linger

I saved my own bedroom for last. Memories floated on strings from the ceiling. Books lined the walls, stacked and sloped against the desk. The room smelled stale and unused; the boy who had grown up in it hadn’t stayed here for a long time.

I’d be staying in it now. One person rattling around in this house, waiting and hoping for the reappearance of the rest of his family.

But just before I reached inside the dark room for the light switch on the wall, I heard the sound of an engine outside.

I was no longer alone.

“Are you trying to land airplanes?” Isabel asked me. She didn’t look real, standing in the middle of the living room in silky pajama bottoms and a padded white coat with a fur collar. I had never seen her without makeup, and she looked a lot younger. “I could see the house from a mile away. You must have every light turned on.”

I didn’t reply. I was still trying to work out how Isabel had ended up here at four o’clock in the morning with the boy I’d last seen changing into a wolf in the middle of the kitchen floor. He stood there in a battered sweatshirt and jeans that hung on him like they belonged to someone else, his bare feet an alarming mottled shade, and his fingers hooked in his pockets as if their terrible swelling and discoloration didn’t bother him. The way that he was looking at Isabel and the way she going out of her way not to look at him made it seem, impossibly, like they had some kind of history.

“You’re frostbitten,” I said to the guy, because it was something to say that didn’t require much thought. “You need to warm up those fingers or you’re going to be very unhappy later. Isabel, you had to know that.”

“I’m not an idiot,” Isabel said. “But if my parents caught him in my house, he’d be dead, and that would make him even more unhappy. I decided the outside chance of them noticing my car missing in the middle of the night was a happier option.” If Isabel noticed me swallowing, she didn’t pause. “By the way, this is Sam. The Sam.” It took me a moment to realize that she was now talking to the cocky frostbitten guy.

The Sam. I wondered what she’d told him about me. I looked at him. Again, the familiarity of his face pricked at me. It was not a real familiarity, like someone I had met in person, but more like the familiarity of meeting a person who looks like an actor whose name you can’t recall.

“So you’re the one in charge now?” he said, with a smile that struck me as sardonic. “I’m Cole.”

The one in charge now. That’s the way it was, wasn’t it?

“Have you seen any of the other wolves change yet?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I thought it was too cold for me to be changing.”

His grotesquely colored fingers were bothering me enough that I moved away from him and Isabel, toward the kitchen, where I found a bottle of ibuprofen. I tossed it toward Isabel, who surprised me by catching it. “It’s because you were just bitten. I mean, last year. Temperature doesn’t have so much to do with you shifting yet. It’s just going to be…unpredictable.”

“Unpredictable,” echoed Cole.

Sam, no, please, not again, stop—I blinked, and my mother’s voice was gone, back into the past where it belonged.

“What are these for? Him?” Isabel held up the bottle of pills and jerked her chin toward Cole. Again, I got that flash of history between them.

“Yeah. It’s going to hurt like hell when he warms up his fingers,” I said. “That’ll keep it bearable. Bathroom’s that way.”

• ISABEL •

Cole took the ibuprofen from me, but I could tell he wasn’t going to use it. Whether because he thought he was some macho tough guy or for religious reasons or what, I didn’t know. But when he went into the downstairs bathroom, I heard him hit the light switch and set down the pill bottle without opening it. Then I heard the water begin to run into the bath. Sam turned away with this strange, disgusted look on his face, and I knew that he didn’t like Cole.

“So, Romulus,” I said, and Sam turned around, his yellow eyes open wide. “Why are you here, all alone? I thought Grace would have to be surgically removed from your side.” After spending the last hour with Cole, whose face revealed only the emotions he wanted me to see, it was strange to see undisguised pain on Sam’s face. His thick dark eyebrows showed misery all by themselves. It occurred to me that he and Grace might have had a fight.

“Her parents kicked me out,” Sam said, and he smiled for just a second, like people do when something’s really not funny and they don’t want to be telling you but they don’t know what else to do. “Grace, uh, got sick and they, uh, found us together, and they kicked me out.”

“Tonight?”

He nodded, very broken and honest, and I couldn’t quite look at him. “Yeah. I got here a little before you did.”

The fierce glow of every light in the house suddenly seemed more significant. I wasn’t sure if I admired him for feeling everything so hard and fiercely, or if I was contemptuous of him for having so much emotion that he had to spill it out every window of the house. I didn’t know how I felt.

“But, um…” Sam said, and in just those two words, I heard him getting himself back together, like a horse assembling its legs beneath itself before standing up. “Anyway. Tell me about Cole. How did you end up with him?”

I looked at him sharply until I realized he meant How did you end up here with him? “Long story, wolf-boy,” I said, and crashed down on the sofa. “I couldn’t sleep, and I heard him outside the house. It was pretty obvious what he was, and pretty obvious that he wasn’t going to change back. I didn’t want my parents to find out and freak, so, the end.”

Sam’s mouth did something unreadable. “That’s awfully nice of you.”

I smiled thinly. “It happens.”

“Does it?” Sam asked. “I think most people would’ve left a naked stranger outside.”

“I didn’t want to step in a pile of his fingers tomorrow on my way to the car,” I said. I felt like Sam was probing me to say something else, like he’d somehow guessed that this was the second time that we’d met and that the first time had involved my tongue introducing itself to Cole’s, and vice versa. I used the topic of Cole’s fingers to redirect the conversation. “Speaking of which, I wonder how he’s getting along in there.” I looked down the hallway toward the bathroom.

Sam hesitated. For some reason, I remembered that the light in the bathroom had been the only light not turned on. Finally, Sam said, “Why don’t you go knock on the door and find out? I’m going to go upstairs to get a room ready for him. I just—I need a minute to think.”

“Okay, whatever,” I said.

He nodded, and just as he turned to go upstairs, I caught a glimpse of some private emotion on his face that made me think he wasn’t as much of an open book as I’d thought. It made me want to stop him and ask him to fill in the blanks of our conversation—how Grace was sick, why the bathroom light wasn’t on, what he was going to do now—but it was way too late, and, anyway, I wasn’t that girl yet.

• COLE •

The worst of the pain was already over, and I was just lying in the water, floating my hands on top of the bathwater and imagining falling asleep in it, when I heard a knock on the bathroom door.

Isabel’s voice followed the knock, the force of which opened the unlatched door an inch. “Have you drowned?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Mind if I come in?” But she didn’t wait for my answer; she just let herself in, sitting on the toilet beside the tub. The fluffy, fur-lined hood of her jacket made her look like she had a hunchback. Her hair was jagged on her cheek. She looked like an ad for something. For toilets. For jackets. For antidepressants. Whatever it was for, I’d buy it. She looked down at me.

“I’m naked,” I said.

“So am I,” Isabel replied. “Under my clothing.”

I cracked a grin. Had to give credit where credit was due.

“Are your feet going to fall off?” she asked.

Because of the size of the bathtub, I had to lift and straighten my leg to look at my toes. They were a little red, but I could wiggle them and feel all of them except for my pinkie toe, which was still mostly numb. “Not today, I don’t think.”

“Are you going to stay in there forever?”

“Probably.” I sank my shoulders farther into the water to show my commitment to the plan. I glanced up at her. “Care to join me?”

She raised a knowing eyebrow. “Looks a little small in there.”

I closed my eyes with another smile. “Zing.” With my eyes shut, I felt warm and floaty and invisible. They should invent a drug that made you feel like this. “I miss my Mustang,” I said, mostly because it was the sort of statement that would make her react.

“Lying naked in a bathtub made you think of your car?”

“It had a rockin’ heater. You could really cook the hell out of yourself in there,” I said. It was a lot easier to talk to her with my eyes closed, too. Not so much of a pissing contest. “I wish I’d had it earlier tonight.”

“Where is it?”

“Home.”

I heard her take her coat off; it shushed on the bathroom counter. The toilet creaked as she sat back down. “Where’s home?”

“New York.”

“City?”

“State.” I thought about the Mustang. Black, shiny, soupedup, sitting in my parents’ garage because I was never home to drive it. It had been the first thing that I’d bought when my first big check came in, and, in the irony of the century, I’d been on tour too much to ever drive it.

“I thought you came from Canada.”

“I was on”—I stopped just short of saying tour. I was liking my anonymity too much—“vacation.” I opened my eyes and saw in her hard expression that she’d heard the lie. I was beginning to realize that she didn’t miss much.

“Some vacation,” she replied. “Must’ve sucked for you to choose this.” She was looking now at the track-mark scars on my arms, but not in the way that I expected her to. Not like judging. More like hungry. Between that and the fact that she was wearing only a camisole beneath her coat, I was having a hard time focusing.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “How about you? How do you know about the wolves?”

Isabel’s eyes betrayed something for just a second, so fast that I couldn’t tell what it was. In between that and her makeupless face, young and soft-looking, I felt bad for asking.

Then I wondered why I bothered to feel bad for this girl I hardly knew.

“I’m friends with Sam’s girlfriend,” Isabel said. I’d done enough lying, or at least telling of partial truths, to know what it sounded like. But since she hadn’t called me out on my own partial truth, I returned the favor.

“Right. Sam,” I echoed. “Tell me more about him.”