Linger

My voice came out small. “Thank you.”

She ruffled my hair when I came over to collect my guitar and my book from the counter. “Sam,” she said, just as I was heading past her, “I think you’re made of stronger stuff than you think.”

I made my face into a smile that didn’t last to the back door.

Opening the door, I stepped right into Rachel. Through a tremendous stroke of luck or personal dexterity, I kept from dumping my green tea all over her striped scarf. She snatched it out of my way well after the danger of hot liquids had passed, and gave me a warning look.

“The Boy should watch where he’s going,” she said.

“Rachel should not manifest in doorways,” I replied.

“Grace told me to come in this way!” Rachel protested. At my puzzled look, she explained, “My natural talents don’t extend to parallel parking, so Grace said if I parked behind the store, I could just pull in and that nobody would mind if I walked in the back door. Apparently she was wrong because you tried to repel me with vats of burning oil and—”

“Rachel,” I interrupted. “When did you talk to Grace?”

“Like, last? Two seconds ago.” Rachel stepped backward to allow me enough room to step outside and close the door behind me.

Relief fell through me so fast that I almost laughed. Suddenly, I could breathe the cold air tinged with exhaust and see the tired green paint of the trash bins and feel the icy wind reaching an experimental finger into my shirt collar.

I hadn’t expected to see her again.

It sounded melodramatic now that I knew Grace was well enough to talk to Rachel, and I didn’t know why I would’ve jumped to that conclusion, but it didn’t make it any less true.

“It is freezing cold out here,” I said, and gestured to the Volkswagen. “Do you mind?”

“Oh, let’s,” Rachel said, and waited until I unlocked the doors to get in. I started the engine and put the heat up and pressed my hands over the air vents until I felt less anxious about the cold that couldn’t harm me. Rachel was managing to fill the entire car with some very sweet, highly artificial scent that was probably meant to be strawberry. She had to fold her stocking-covered legs on the seat in order to make room for her overflowing bag.

“Okay. Now talk,” I said. “Tell me about Grace. Is she okay?”

“Yeah. She went to the hospital last night, but she’s back again. She didn’t even stay overnight. She was fevered, so they doped her up with Tylenol out the wazoo and she got unfevered. She said she feels fine.” Rachel shrugged. “I’m supposed to get her homework. Which is why”—she kicked her stuffed backpack—“I’m also supposed to give you this.” She held out a pink phone with a cyclops smiley-face sticker on the back.

“Is this your phone?” I asked.

“It is. She said yours goes straight to voicemail.”

This time I did laugh, a relieved, soundless one. “What about hers?”

“Her dad took it from her. I can’t believe you two got caught. What were you guys thinking! You could’ve died from humiliation!”

I just gave her a look that was invested with as much dolor as physically possible. Now that I’d heard that Grace was alive and well, I could afford some melancholy humor at my own expense.

“Poor Boy,” Rachel said, patting my shoulder. “Don’t worry. They won’t stay mad at you forever. Give them a few days and they’ll be back to forgetting they have a daughter. Here. The phone. She’s allowed to take calls again now.”

I gratefully accepted it, punched in her number—“Number two on speed dial,” Rachel said—and a moment later I heard, “Hey, Rach.”

“It’s me,” I said.

• GRACE •

I didn’t know what emotion it was that flooded me when I heard Sam’s voice instead of Rachel’s. I just knew that it was strong enough that it made two of my breaths stick together into one long, shuddering exhalation. I steamrollered over the unidentified feeling. “Sam.”

I heard him sigh, which desperately made me want to see his face. I said, “Did Rachel tell you? I’m okay. It was just a fever. I’m at home now.”

“Can I come over?” Sam’s voice was odd.

I tugged my comforter up farther on my lap, jerking it when it didn’t straighten the way I wanted it to, trying not to reinvoke the anger I’d felt earlier when talking to Dad. “I’m grounded. I’m not allowed to go to the studio on Sunday.” There was a dead silence on the other end of the line; I thought I could imagine Sam’s face, and it kind of hurt me, in a numb way that came from being upset for so long that you couldn’t sustain it. “Are you still there?”

Sam’s voice sounded brave, which hurt more than his silence. “I can reschedule.”

“Oh, no,” I said emphatically. And suddenly the anger broke through. I tried to speak through it. “I am making it to the studio on Sunday, I don’t care if I have to beg them. I don’t care if I have to sneak out. Sam, I’m so mad, I don’t know what to do. I want to run away right now. I don’t want to be in the house with them. Seriously, talk me down. Tell me I can’t come and live with you. Tell me you don’t want me over there.”

“You know I wouldn’t tell you that,” Sam said softly. “You know I wouldn’t stop you.”

I glared at my closed bedroom door. My mother—my jailer—was somewhere on the other side of it. Inside me, my stomach still felt fever sick; I didn’t want to be here. “Then why don’t I?” My voice sounded aggressive.

Sam was silent for a long moment. Finally, he said, his voice low, “Because you know that’s not how you want it to end. You know I’d love to have you with me, and it will be that way, one day. But this isn’t the way it ought to happen.”

For some reason, that made my eyes prick with tears. Surprised, I scrubbed them away with a fist. I didn’t know what to say. I was used to me being the practical one and Sam being the emotional one. I felt alone in my fury.

“I was worried about you,” Sam said.

I was worried about me, too, I thought, but instead I said, “I’m okay. I really want to get out of town with you. I wish it were Sunday already.”

• SAM •

It was weird to hear Grace this way. It was weird to be here, sitting in my car with her best friend when Grace was home, needing me for once. It was weird to want to tell her that we didn’t need to go to the studio until things calmed down. But I couldn’t tell her no. I physically couldn’t say it to her. Hearing her like this…she was a different thing than I’d ever seen her be, and I felt some dangerous and lovely future whispering secrets in my ear. I said, “I wish it were Sunday, too.”

“I don’t want to be alone tonight,” Grace said.

Something in my heart twinged. I closed my eyes for a moment and opened them again. I thought about sneaking over myself; I thought about telling her to sneak out. I imagined lying in my bedroom beneath my paper cranes, with the warm shape of her tucked against me, not having to worry about hiding in the morning, just having her with me on our terms, and I ached and ached some more with the force of wanting it. I echoed, “I miss you, too.”

“I have your phone charger here,” Grace whispered. “Call me from Beck’s tonight, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

After she’d hung up, I handed the phone back to Rachel. I wasn’t sure what was wrong with me. It was only forty-eight hours until I saw her again. That wasn’t long. A drop in the bucket in the ocean of time that was our lives together.

We had forever now. I had to start believing that.

“Sam?” Rachel asked. “Do you know you have the saddest sad face ever?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

• SAM •

After I parted ways with Rachel, I headed back to Beck’s house. The day had become sunny; not so much warm as the promise of warm—summer in the making. I couldn’t remember weather like this. It had been so many years since this nearly-spring hadn’t kept me locked inside my wolf form. It was hard to convince myself that I didn’t need to cling to the shelter of the warm car.

I would not be afraid. Believe in your cure.

I shut the car door, but I didn’t go into the house; if Cole was still in there, I wasn’t ready to face him. Instead, I headed around the back of the house, across the slimy dead grass from last year and into the woods. I had the thought that I ought to check the shed to see if there were any wolves inside. The building, buried a few hundred yards in the woods behind Beck’s house, was a haven for new wolves as they shifted back and forth. It was stocked with clothing and tinned food and flashlights. Even a little combo TV/VCR and a space heater that could run off the boat battery. Everything a volatile new wolf would need to be comfortable while waiting to see if its human form would stick.

Sometimes, however, a new pack member would shift back to a wolf while inside the shed too fast to open the door, and then there was a wild animal, slave to instinct, trapped in walls that stank of humans and shifting and uncertainty.

I remembered one spring, when I was nine and still relatively uncertain in my wolf skin, the warm day had stripped my pelt from me and left me naked and embarrassed, curled on the forest like a pale new shoot. Once I was certain I was alone, I’d made my way to the shed as Beck had told me to. My stomach was still aching, like it did between the shifts back then. It was enough to double me over, my sharp ribs pressing against the tops of my legs as I crouched, biting my finger until the spasm passed and let me straighten up and open the door to the shed.

I spooked like a colt at the sound of a voice as I came through the door. After a minute, my heart quieted enough for me to realize that the voice was singing; whoever had been inside last had left the boom box on. Elvis asked whether I was lonely tonight while I dug through the bin marked sam. I pulled on my jeans but didn’t bother to find a shirt before I went for the food bin. I tore open a bag of chips, my stomach growling only when it was sure that it was about to be filled. Sitting there on the bin, scrawny knees pulled up to my chin, I listened to Elvis croon and thought about how song lyrics were just another sort of poetry. The summer before, Ulrik had been making me memorize famous poems—I could still remember the first half of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I tried to remember the second half as I crunched through the entire bag of corn chips, hoping to get rid of my stomach pains.

In the time it took me to notice that the hand holding the bag of chips was shaking, the ache in my abdomen had turned into the inside-out squeeze of the change. I had no time to get to the door before my fingers were useless and stubby, my nails ineffective against the wood. My last human thought was a memory: my parents slamming my bedroom door, the lock snicking shut as the wolf bubbled out of me.

My wolf memories were hard to remember, but I did remember this: It took me hours to give up trying to get out that day.