Linger

Grace looked up earnestly at him. “Do you think I could go to the nurse? My head—I think I have a sinus thing coming on or something.”

Mr. Grant looked down at her pink cheeks and pensive expression, and nodded his permission. “I want a note back from the office,” he told her, after Grace thanked him and stood up. She didn’t say anything to me as she left, just knocked on the back of my chair with her knuckles.

“And you—” Mr. Grant said. Then he dropped his gaze down to the encyclopedia and its still-open page, and he never finished his sentence. He just nodded, as if to himself, and walked away.

I turned back to my extracurricular study of death and disease. Because no matter what Grace thought, I knew that in Mercy Falls, it’s never over.

CHAPTER FOUR

• GRACE •

By the time Sam got home from the bookstore that evening, I was making New Year’s resolutions at the kitchen table.

I’d been making New Year’s resolutions ever since I was nine. Every year on Christmas, I’d sit down at the kitchen table under the dim yellow light, hunched over in a turtleneck sweater because of the draft from the glass door to the deck, and I’d write my goals for the year in a plain black journal I’d bought for myself. And every year on Christmas Eve, I’d sit down in the exact same place and open the exact same book to a new page and write down what I’d accomplished in the previous twelve months. Every year, the two lists looked identical.

Last Christmas, though, I hadn’t made any resolutions. I’d spent the month trying not to look through the glass door at the woods, trying not to think about the wolves and Sam. Sitting at the kitchen table and planning for the future had seemed like a cruel pretense more than anything else.

But now that I had Sam and a new year, that black journal, shelved neatly next to my career books and memoirs, haunted me. I had dreams about sitting at the kitchen table in a turtleneck sweater, dreams where I kept on writing and writing my resolutions without ever filling the page.

Today, waiting for Sam to get home, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I got the journal from my shelf and headed for the kitchen. Before I sat down, I took two more ibuprofen; the two the school nurse had given me had pretty much killed the headache I’d had earlier, but I wanted to make sure it didn’t make a reappearance. I had just clicked on the flower-shaped light over the table and sharpened my pencil when the phone rang. I stood and leaned over the counter to reach it.

“Hello?”

“Grace, hi.” It took me a moment to realize that it was my father’s voice. I was unused to hearing it, pressed and fuzzy, over the phone lines.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“What? No. Nothing’s wrong. I was just calling to let you know that your mother and I will be home around nine from Pat and Tina’s.”

“Okaay,” I said. I already knew this; Mom had told me this morning when we parted ways, me to school, her to the studio.

A pause. “Are you alone?”

So that’s what this call was about. For some reason, the question made my throat tighten. “No,” I said. “Elvis is here. Would you like to talk to him?”

Dad acted as if I hadn’t answered. “Is Sam there?”

I felt like answering yes, just to see what he would say, but instead, I told him the truth, my voice coming out strange and defensive. “No. I’m just doing homework.”

While Mom and Dad knew Sam was my boyfriend—Sam and I had made no secret of our relationship—they still didn’t know what was really going on. All the nights Sam stayed over, they thought I was sleeping alone. They had no idea about my hopes for our future. They thought it was a simple, innocent, bound-to-end teenage relationship. It wasn’t that I didn’t want them to know. Just that their obliviousness had its advantages, too, for now.

“Okay,” Dad said. There was an unspoken commendation in his answer, an approval of me being alone with my homework. This is what Graces did in the evening, and heaven forbid I should break the mold. “Planning a quiet night?”

I heard the front door open and Sam’s step in the hall. “Yes,” I replied as he walked into the living room, guitar case in hand.

“Good. Well, see you later on,” Dad said. “Happy studying.”

We hung up at the same time. I watched Sam silently shed his coat and go straight for the study.

“Hi, bucko,” I said when he returned holding his guitar minus the case. He smiled at me, but the skin around his eyes was tight. “You seem tense.”

He crashed down onto the sofa, only half sitting, and threw his fingers across the strings of the guitar. A discordant chord rang out. “Isabel came into the store today,” he said.

“Really? What did she want?”

“Just some books. And to tell me that she’d seen wolves by her house.”

My mind instantly slid to her father and to the wolf hunt he’d led in the woods behind my house. From Sam’s troubled expression, I knew his thoughts mirrored mine. “That’s not good.”

“No,” he said. His fingers moved restlessly over the guitar strings, effortlessly and instinctively picking out some beautiful minor chord. “Neither was the cop that came in.”

I set my pencil down and leaned across the table toward him. “What? What did a cop want?”

He hesitated. “Olivia. He wanted to know if I thought she might be living in the woods.”

“What?” I asked again, my skin prickling. There was no way that someone could guess that. No way. “How could he know?”

“He didn’t think she was a wolf, obviously, but I think he was hoping we were hiding her or that she was living nearby and we were helping her or something. I said she didn’t strike me as the outdoorsy type, and he thanked me and left.”

“Wow.” I leaned back in my chair and considered. It was really only surprising that they hadn’t questioned Sam sooner. They’d already talked to me soon after Olivia “ran away,” and had probably only just recently made the connection between Sam and me. I shrugged. “They’re just being thorough. I don’t think there’s anything for us to worry about. I mean, she reappears when she reappears, right? How long do you think it will be until the new wolves start to change back into humans?”

Sam didn’t reply right away. “They won’t stay human at first. They’ll be really unstable. It depends how warm the day is. It varies from person to person, too, sometimes a lot. It’s like how on certain days some people wear sweaters when other people can wear T-shirts and still feel comfortable—different reactions to the same temperature. But I guess it’s possible some might have already shifted into humans once this year.”

I imagined Olivia darting through the woods in her new wolf body, before pulling my mind back to what Sam was saying. “Really? Already? So someone might have seen her?”

Sam shook his head. “She’ll only have a few minutes as a human in this weather; I really doubt anyone could’ve seen her. It’s just…it’s just a practice run for later.” He was lost to me then, his eyes someplace far away. Maybe remembering what it was like for him back when he was a new wolf. I inadvertently shuddered; thinking about Sam and his parents always got to me. A nasty chill clenched in my stomach until Sam went back to playing his guitar. For several long minutes, he walked his fingers up and down chords, and when it became obvious that he was done speaking for the moment, I dropped my gaze back to my resolutions. My mind wasn’t really on them, though; it was circling the idea of young Sam shifting back and forth while his parents looked on in horror. I doodled a 3-D rectangle on the corner of the page.

Finally, Sam said, “What are you doing? It looks suspiciously creative.”

“Slightly creative,” I said. I looked at him, eyebrow raised, until he smiled. Strumming a chord, he sang, “Has Grace quitted herself of numbers / and given herself to words?”

“That doesn’t even rhyme.”

“Abandoned all her algebra / and taken to penning verbs?” Sam finished.

I made a face at him. “Words and verbs don’t really rhyme. I’m writing my New Year’s resolutions.”

“They do rhyme,” he insisted. Bringing his guitar over to the table and sitting across from me—the guitar made a low, musical thump as it lightly struck the edge of the table—he added, “I’m going to watch. I’ve never written any resolutions before. I’d like to see what organization in progress looks like.”

He drew the open journal across the table toward him, his eyebrows tipping low over his eyes. “What’s this?” he asked. “Resolution number three: Choose a college. You’ve already picked a college?”

I slid the journal back to my side of the table and turned quickly to a blank page. “I did not. I got distracted by this cute boy who turned into a wolf. This is the first year I haven’t made all of my resolutions, and it’s all your fault. I need to get back on track.”

Smile slightly faded, Sam scraped his chair back and rested his guitar against the wall. From the countertop next to the phone he got a pen and an index card. “Okay, then. Let’s make new ones.”

I wrote Get a job. He wrote Keep loving my job. I wrote Stay madly in love. He wrote Stay human.

“Because I’ll always be madly in love,” he said, looking at his index card instead of my face.

I kept looking at him, his eyes hidden behind his lashes, until he lifted them back up to me.

“So are you going to put Pick a college on there again?” he asked.

“Are you?” I asked back, keeping my voice light. The question felt loaded—we were edging into the first conversation that really addressed what life would look like this side of winter, now that Sam could live a real life. The closest college to Mercy Falls was in Duluth, an hour away, and all of my other, pre-Sam choices were even farther.

“I asked first.”

“Sure,” I said, sounding glib rather than carefree. I scribbled down Pick a college in a hand that looked completely different from the rest of my list. “Now, are you?” My heart was unexpectedly thrumming with something like panic.

But instead of answering, Sam stood and went to the kitchen. I swiveled to watch him put on the teakettle. He brought down two mugs from the cabinet over the stove; for some reason, the familiarity of this easy movement filled me with affection. I fought the urge to go stand behind him and wrap my arms around his chest.

“Beck wanted me to go to law school,” Sam said, fingering the edge of my favorite robin’s-egg-blue mug. “He never told me, but I heard him tell Ulrik.”

“It’s hard to imagine you as a lawyer,” I said.

Sam smiled a self-deprecating smile and shook his head. “I can’t imagine myself as a lawyer, either. I can’t imagine myself as anything yet, to tell you the truth. I know that sounds…terrible. Like I have no ambition.” Again, his eyebrows drew together, pensive. “But this idea of a future is really new to me. Until this month, I never thought I could go to college. I don’t want to rush into it.”