Linger

I gave her a look. “If you crap out of school now, you won’t get into a good college, and then you’ll be stuck here in Mercy Falls forever.” Unlike Rachel and Isabel, I wasn’t filled with horror at that idea. But I knew that neither of them could imagine worse fates.

Isabel made a face. “Thanks, Mom. I’ll keep that in mind.”

I shrugged and tugged out the book that Rachel had brought over earlier. “Well, I do have homework, and I want to get into college. At the very least, I have to do my reading for history tonight. Is that okay?”

Isabel laid her cheek on my comforter and closed her eyes. “You don’t have to entertain me. It’s enough to get out of the house.”

I sat down at the head of the bed; the movement jostled Isabel but she kept her eyes shut. If Sam were here, and if he were me, he would have asked Isabel how bad things were and if she was doing okay. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask the question before I’d met him, but I’d heard him ask things like that often enough now to know how it was done.

“How are things?” I asked. It felt weird in my mouth, like it must not sound as sincere as when Sam asked it.

Isabel made a loud, bored noise and opened her eyes. “That’s what my mom’s therapist asks.” She stretched in a way that defined the word languorous and said, “I’m getting something to drink. Do you guys have soda?”

I was sort of relieved to be let off the hook so easily and wondered if I was supposed to ask again. Sam might have. I couldn’t think like him for that long, though, so I just said, “There are some in the door of the fridge, and some in the drawer on the right.”

“You want any?” Isabel asked, sliding off the bed. One of my bookmarks had fallen to the floor and stuck to her bare foot, and she made a triangle of one of her legs while she pulled it off.

I considered. My stomach felt a little twisty. “Ginger ale, if there’s any left.”

Isabel stalked out of the room and returned with a can of regular soda and a can of ginger ale, which she handed to me. She clicked on the clock radio by the bed stand; it began humming out Sam’s favorite alt station, a little fuzzy because it was from somewhere south of Duluth. I sighed; it wasn’t my favorite music, but it reminded me of him, even more than his book sitting on the bed stand or his forgotten backpack on the floor beside my shelves. Missing him seemed bigger now that the sun was almost down.

“I feel like I’m at an open-mic night,” Isabel said, and switched to a stronger Duluth pop station. She stretched on her stomach next to me where Sam would normally lie and popped the top of her soda. “What are you looking at? Read. I’m just chilling.”

She seemed to mean it, so there was no reason for me to not open my history text. I didn’t want to read, though. I just wanted to curl my arms around myself and lie on my bed and miss Sam.

• ISABEL •

It was nice at first, just lying in bed doing nothing, with no parents or memories intruding. The radio played quietly next to me, and Grace frowned at her book, turning her pages forward and occasionally backward to frown harder at something. Her mother clunked around in the rest of the house, and the smell of burnt toast wafted under the door. It was comfortingly someone else’s life. And it was nice to be with a friend but not have to talk. I could almost ignore the fact of Grace’s illness.

After a while, I reached across to the nightstand, where a book with tattered edges lay by the clock radio. I couldn’t imagine anyone ever reading a book enough to make it look like that. It looked like it had been driven over by a school bus after someone had taken a bath with it. The cover said it was poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, with facing translations from the German. It didn’t sound riveting, and I generally relegated poetry to one of the lower circles of hell, but I didn’t have anything else to do, so I picked it up and opened it.

It fell open to a dog-eared page marked up with blue handwriting in the margins, and a few lines underlined: “Ah, to whom can we fall apart? Not to angels, nor men, and even the most clever of animals see that we are not surely at home in our interpreted world,” and next to them was written, in ropey handwriting I didn’t recognize, findigen = knowing, gedeuteten = interpreted? and other notes and random bits of German. I lifted the page closer to me to look at a tiny notation in the corner and realized that the book must’ve been Sam’s, because it smelled like Beck’s house. That scent brought back a rush of memories: Jack lying in a bed, seeing him turn into a wolf in front of my eyes, watching him die.

My eyes dropped again to the page. “Oh and night, the night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.”

I didn’t think I liked poetry any better than before I’d picked up the book. I set the volume back down on the nightstand and laid my cheek on the bedspread stretched over the pillow. This must have been the side that Sam slept on when he snuck in here, because I recognized his scent. How ballsy he had been to come here night after night, just to be with Grace. I imagined him lying right here, Grace next to him. I had seen them kiss before—the way that Sam’s hands pressed on Grace’s back when he thought no one would see and the way that the hardness of Grace’s face disappeared entirely when he did. It was easy to picture them lying together here, kissing, tangled. Sharing breath, lips pressed urgently against necks and shoulders and fingertips. I felt hungry suddenly, for something that I didn’t have and couldn’t name. It made me think of Cole’s hand on my collarbone and how his breath had been so hot in my mouth, and suddenly I was sure that I was going to call him or find him tomorrow if such a thing was possible.

I pushed myself back up onto my elbows, trying to pull my brain from thoughts clouded with hands on hips and the smell of Sam on the pillow, and said, “I wonder what Sam’s doing right now.”

Grace had a page pinched between two fingers; she wasn’t quite frowning—my words had wiped the frown off her face and replaced it with something more uncertain. I kicked myself for saying what I was actually thinking.

Grace gently laid down the page and smoothed it. Then she pressed her fingers to one of her flushed cheeks and smoothed the skin down to her chin with the same gesture. Finally, she said, “He said he’d try to call me tonight.”

She was still looking at me in that blank, unsure way, so I added, “I was just wondering if any of the wolves are human right now, besides him. I met one of them.” It was a line close enough to the truth that no bishops would blush while delivering it.

Grace’s face cleared. “I know. He told me about one. You really met him?”

What the hell. I told her. “I brought him to Beck’s the night you went to the hospital.”

Her eyes widened, but before she had time to ask me more, the doorbell sounded—a loud, obnoxious bell that went on and on in multiple tones.

“Pizza!” her mom shouted, her voice too bright, and anything else Grace and I might have said to each other was lost.

• GRACE •

The pizza arrived and Isabel gave a piece to Mom, which I wouldn’t have done, and Mom retreated to her studio so we could have the living room. By now, the sky was black outside the glass door to the deck, and it was impossible to tell if it was seven p.m. or midnight. I sat on one end of the couch with a plate in my lap and a single piece of pizza staring back at me, and Isabel sat on the other end with two pieces on her plate. She blotted her pieces delicately with a paper towel, careful not to disturb the mushrooms. In the background, Pretty Woman was on and Julia Roberts’s character was shopping at stores that Isabel would look at home in. The pizza lay in its box on the coffee table in between us and the television. There was a mountain of toppings.

“Eat, Grace,” Isabel said. She offered me the roll of paper towels.

I looked at the pizza and tried to imagine it as food. It was amazing how just a single slice of cheese and mushroom pizza lying on a plate, with oozing, greasy strings of mozzarella trailing from it, could do what a walk in the woods hadn’t: make me feel utterly sick. Looking at the food, my stomach was rolling inside me, but it was more than nausea. It was whatever had consumed me before: the fever that wasn’t a fever. The sickness that was more than just a headache, more than just a stomachache. The illness that was me, somehow.

Isabel was looking at me, and I knew a question was coming. But I didn’t really want to open my mouth. The vague something I’d felt in the woods was chewing at my belly now, and I was afraid of what I would say if I spoke.

The pizza sat in front of me, looking like nothing I could imagine swallowing.

I felt so much more vulnerable than I’d felt in the woods with the wolves around me. I didn’t want Isabel with me now. Not Mom. I wanted Sam.

• ISABEL •

Grace looked gray. She was staring at her pizza as if she was waiting for it to bite her, and finally she said, her hand on her stomach, “I’ll be right back.”

She pushed up off the couch, a little lethargic, and headed into the kitchen. When she returned, holding another ginger ale and a palm full of pills, I asked, “Are you feeling sick again?” I turned down the volume on the television a little, even though it was my favorite part of the movie.

Grace tipped all the pills into her mouth and swallowed them with a quick, efficient slug of ginger ale. “A little. People feel sicker in the evenings, right? That’s what I read.”

I looked at her. I thought that probably she knew. I thought probably she was already thinking what I was thinking, but I didn’t want to say it. Instead, I asked, “What did they tell you at the hospital?”

“That it was just a fever. Just the flu,” she said, and the way she said it, I knew she was remembering telling me about when she first got bitten. How she had thought she had the flu. How we both knew that it hadn’t been the flu then.

So, finally, I said the thing that had been bothering me since I’d gotten to her house. “Grace, you smell. Like that wolf we found. You know this has to do with the wolves.”

She rubbed a single finger back and forth on the rim of her plate where the decorative swirl was, as if she would rub it right off. “I know.”

The phone rang, just then, and we both knew who it was. Grace looked at me and her fingers all went perfectly still.

“Don’t tell Sam,” she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

• SAM •

That night, because I couldn’t sleep, I made bread.

Most of my sleeplessness was because of Grace; the idea of going up to bed and lying there alone, waiting for sleep again, was completely intolerable. But part of it was because Cole was still in the house. He was so full of restless energy—pacing the floor, trying out the sound system, sitting on the couch, watching television, then jumping up—that I was, too. It was like being in the presence of an exploding star.

So, bread making. It was something I had learned from Ulrik, who was a tremendous bread snob. He refused to eat most store-bought bread, and combined with the fact that when I was ten, I refused to eat anything but bread, a lot of baking got done that year. Beck thought we were both impossible, and wouldn’t have anything to do with our neuroses. So that meant plenty of mornings were spent in each other’s company, me on the floor leaning against the kitchen cabinets, curled around the guitar that Paul had gifted me, and Ulrik pounding some dough into submission and swearing pleasantly about me being in the way.