Linger (18 page)

• COLE •

I couldn't get the smell of her blood out of my nostrils.

Sam was gone by the time I got to the house; the driveway was empty and the house felt echoey and hollow. I burst into the downstairs bathroom — the bath mat was still twisted from where Sam and I had struggled the night before — and turned the tap on as hot as I could get it. Then I stood in it and watched blood run down the drain. It looked black in the dull filtered light behind the shower curtain. Scrubbing my palms together and scratching my arms, I tried to get every last trace of the doe off me, but no matter how hard I worked my skin, I could still smell her. And every time I caught a whiff of her scent, I saw her. That dark, resigned eye looking up at me while I stared at her insides.

Then I remembered Victor looking up at me, lying on the floor of the shed, bitter, simultaneously Victor and wolf. My fault.

It occurred to me then that I was the opposite of my father. Because I was very, very good at destroying things.

I reached forward and turned the water temperature all the way to cold. There was a brief moment when there was enough hot water to make it the exact temperature of my body, turning me invisible. Then it became frigid. I swore and fought my instincts to jump out of the tub.

Goose bumps rose immediately on my skin, so fast that they hurt, and I let my head fall back. The water coursed over my neck.

Shift. Shift now.

But the water wasn't cold enough to force me to change; it was just cold enough to make my gut twist and nausea bubble through me. I used my foot to shut off the water.

Why was I still human?

It didn't make sense. If being a wolf was scientific, not magical, then it had to follow rules and logic. And the fact that the new wolves changed at different temperatures at different times … it didn't make sense. My head was full of Victor shifting back and forth, the white wolf watching me silently, sure in her wolf body, and me, pacing the halls of the house, waiting to shift. I grabbed the hand towel from the sink and used it to dry myself as I riffled through the downstairs closets for clothing. I found a dark blue sweatshirt that said
NAVY
on it and some jeans that were a bit loose but didn't fall off. The entire time that I was looking for clothing, my head hummed, turning over possibilities for new logic.

Maybe Beck had been wrong about hot and cold being the cause of the shifts. Maybe they weren't really causes; maybe they were just catalysts. In which case there might be other ways to trigger the shift.

I needed paper. I couldn't think without writing my thoughts down.

I got some paper from Beck's office, and Beck's day planner as well. I sat down at the dining room table, pen in hand, the heat rushing out softly through the vents making me feel warm and drowsy. My brain instantly traveled back to my parents' dining room table. I'd sat there every morning with my brainstorming notebook — my father's idea — and I would do my homework or write song lyrics or journal on something I'd seen on the news. That was back when I'd been sure I was going to change the world.

I thought about Victor, his eyes closed as he rode some new high. My mother's face when I told her she could go to hell with Dad. The countless girls waking up to find out they'd slept with a ghost, because I was already gone, if not in actuality, in some spiraling trip contained in a bottle or syringe. The way that Angie had one hand pressed flat against her breastbone when I told her I'd cheated on her.

Oh, yeah, I'd changed the world all right.

I opened the day planner and browsed through it, not even really reading, just skimming, looking for clues. There were little bits and pieces that might be useful but were meaningless on their own:
I found one of the wolves dead today; I looked at her eyes but she was no one to me. Paul said she'd stopped shifting fourteen years ago. There was blood on her face. Smelled like hell.
And
Derek changed into a wolf for two hours in the heat of summer; Ulrik and I have been trying to work that one out all afternoon.
And
Why does Sam get so many fewer years than the rest of us? He is the best of all of us. Why does life have to be so unfair?

My gaze dropped to my hand. There was still a little bit of blood underneath the nail of my thumb. I didn't think that blood could stay on your skin when you shifted; it would've been on my fur, anyway, not on my skin. So that meant that blood underneath my fingernail had gotten there after I'd become a human. In those unmeasured minutes after I got my human body back but before I'd become Cole again.

I rested my head on the table; the wood seemed freezing cold on my skin. It seemed like far too much work to work out the werewolf logic. Even if I did — even if I figured out what really made us shift and where our minds went when they weren't following our bodies — what was the point? To become a wolf forever? All that work, just to preserve a life that I wouldn't remember. A life not worth preserving.

I knew from experience that there were easier ways to get rid of conscious thought. And I knew of one, one that until now I'd just been too cowardly to attempt, that worked permanently.

I'd told Angie once. It was back before she hated me, I think. I'd been playing the keyboard, home from my first tour, when the whole world lay out before me like I was both king and conqueror, full of possibilities. Angie didn't know yet that I'd cheated on her during the tour. Or maybe she did. When I'd stopped playing, my fingers still hovering over the keys, I said to her, “I've been thinking about killing myself.”

Angie hadn't looked up from her position in the old La-Z-Boy we kept in the garage. “Yeah, I guessed that. How's that working out for you?”

“It's got its definite pros,” I replied. “I can only think of one con.”

She didn't say anything for a long moment, and then she said, “Why would you say something like that, anyway? You want me to talk you out of it? The only person who can talk you out of or into that is yourself. You're the genius. You know that. So that means you're just saying it for effect.”

“Bull,” I said. “I really wanted your advice. But whatever.”

“What do you think I'm going to say?
‘You're my boyfriend, go on, kill yourself. It's a nice easy way out.'
I'm sure that's what I would say.”

In my head, I was in a hotel letting some girl named Rochelle who I'd never see again slide my pants off, just because I could. I closed my eyes and let self-loathing gently sing a siren song to me. “I don't know, Angie. I don't know. I didn't think. I just said what I was thinking, okay?”

She bit her knuckle and looked at the floor for a moment. “Okay, how about this. Redemption. That's the biggest con I can think of. You kill yourself, that's the end. That's the way you'll be remembered. That, and hell. You still believe in that?”

I'd lost my cross somewhere on the road. The chain had broken and now it was probably in some gas station bathroom or tangled in hotel sheets or kept as some shining souvenir by someone I hadn't meant to leave it with.

“Yeah,” I said, because I still believed in hell. It was heaven I wasn't so sure about anymore.

I didn't mention it to her again. Because she was right: The only person who could talk me into it or out of it was me.

• GRACE •

Every minute took us farther away from Mercy Falls and everything in it.

We took Sam's car, because it was a diesel and got better mileage, but Sam let me drive, because he knew I liked to. The CD player still had one of my Mozart CDs in it when we got in, but I switched it to the fuzzy indie alt-rock station I knew he liked. Sam blinked over at me in surprise, and I tried not to look too smug that I was learning his language. Slower, maybe, than he was learning mine, but still, I was impressed with myself.

The day was beautiful and blue, the low areas of the road coated with a thin, pale mist that began to burn off as soon as the sun got above the trees. Some guy with a mellow voice and persuasive guitar hummed out of the speakers; he reminded me of Sam. Beside me, Sam leaned his arm across the back of my seat to softly pinch one of the vertebrae in my neck, and murmured along to the lyrics with a voice that conveyed both fondness and familiarity. Despite my slightly achy limbs, it was hard to shake the feeling of utter rightness with the world.

“Do you know what you're going to sing?” I asked.

Sam leaned his cheek on his outstretched arm and drew lazy circles on the back of my neck. “I don't know. You sprang it on me suddenly. And I was a bit preoccupied with being ostracized for the last few days. I guess I will sing — something. I may suck.”

“I don't think you will suck. What were you singing in the shower?”

He was unself-conscious as he answered, both endearing and unusual for him. I was beginning to realize that music was the only skin he was truly comfortable in. “Something new. Maybe something new. Well … maybe something.”

I got onto the interstate; this time of day, the road was lonely and we had the lanes to ourselves. “A baby song?”

“A baby song. More like a fetal song. I don't think it's even got legs yet. Wait, I think I'm getting babies confused with tadpoles.”

I struggled to think of what it was that developed first on babies and failed utterly to manage it in a timely enough manner for a comeback. So I just said, “About me?”

“They're all about you,” Sam said.

“No pressure.”

“Not for you. You get to just float along through life being Grace and I'm the one who has to run to keep up creatively and lyrically with the ways you change. You're not a fixed target, you know.”

I frowned. I thought of myself as frustratingly unchangeable.

“I know what you're thinking. But you're right here, aren't you?” Sam asked, using his free hand to point a finger into the
fuzzy seat of the car. “You fought to be with me instead of letting yourself get grounded for a week. That's the stuff entire albums are based on.”

He didn't even know the half of it. I was awash with some multicolored emotion that was guilt and self-pity and uncertainty and nerves all rolled into one. I didn't know what was worse: not telling him about still being grounded and the growing sickness inside me, or telling him. I did know this one thing: I wouldn't be able to untell either thing. And I didn't want to ruin this day for him. His one perfect birthday day. Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

I was more complex than I'd thought. I still didn't see how it would be album fodder, though I appreciated the idea that I had, in fact, done something that impressed Sam, who knew me better than I did. I changed the subject, a little. “What will you name your album?”

“Well, I'm not doing an album today. I'm doing a demo.”

I waved off the clarification. “When you do an album, what will it be called?”

“Self-titled,” Sam said.

“I hate those.”

“Broken Toys.”

I shook my head. “That sounds like a band name.”

He pinched a tiny bit of my skin, just hard enough for me to squeal and say
ow
.
“Chasing Grace.”

“Nothing with my name in it,” I said sternly.

“Well, you're just making this impossible.
Paper Memories
?”

I considered. “Why? Oh, the birds. It seems weird that I never knew about those birds in your room.”

“I haven't made any since I met you for real,” Sam reminded me. “The newest one is from the summer before last. All of my new cranes are at the store or in your room. That room is like a museum.”

“Not anymore,” I said, glancing over at him. He looked pale and wintery in this morning light. I changed lanes just to change lanes.

“True enough,” he admitted. He sat back from me, pulling his hand from behind my head; he ran his fingers along the plastic divider in the air vent in front of him instead. I had missed his fingers. He said, not looking at me, “What sort of guy do you think your parents expect you to marry? Someone better than me?”

I scoffed. “Who cares what they think?” I realized, too late, what he had said, and by then, I didn't know what to say about it. I didn't know if he really meant it, or what. It wasn't like he'd actually asked me to marry him. It wasn't the same thing. I didn't know how it made me feel.

Sam swallowed and flicked the air vent open and shut, open and shut. “I wonder what would've happened if you hadn't met me. If you went on to finish high school and got that scholarship to be a math whiz at wherever it is that math geniuses go. And met some extremely charming, successful, and funny brain major.”

Of all the things I found puzzling about Sam, this one was always the most puzzling: his sudden, self-deprecating mood swings. I'd heard Dad talk Mom out of her funks, though, and the content of them was similar enough to Sam's for me to recognize them as the same species. Was this what it meant to be creative?

“Don't be stupid,” I told him. “I don't go around wondering what would've happened if you'd pulled some other girl out of the snow.”

“You don't? That's sort of relieving.” He turned up the heat and rested his wrists on the vents. The sun was already cooking both of us through the windshield, but Sam was like a cat — he was never too hot. “It's hard to get used to this idea of being a boy forever. I actually get to grow up. It makes me think I should get another job.”

“Another one? You mean, other than the bookstore?”

“I don't know exactly how the finances of the house work. I know there is some money in the bank, and I see that it's making interest, and there are occasional payments into it from some fund or something, and the deductions come out for the bills, but I don't really know the details. I don't want to use up that money, so …”

“Why don't you talk to someone at the bank? I'm sure they'd be able to look at the statements and work it all out with you.”

“I don't want to talk to anybody about it until I'm sure that B —” Sam stopped. Not just a pause. A full stop, the sort of stop that is better than a period. He looked out the window.

It took me a minute to work out what he'd been about to say. Beck. He didn't want to talk to anybody about it until he was sure that Beck was really not shifting back. Sam's fingertips were white on the dashboard where he had them pressed above the vents, and his shoulders were drawn up stiffly by his ears.

“Sam,” I said, glancing at him as much as I dared while still keeping my eyes on the road. “Are you okay?”

Sam drew his hands into his lap, hard fists resting on top of each other. “Why did he have to make those new wolves, Grace?” he asked, finally. “It makes it that much harder. We were doing okay.”

“He couldn't have known about you,” I said, glancing at him. He was running a slow finger down his nose from his forehead and back again. I looked for an exit; somewhere to pull over. “He thought that” — and now I was the one who couldn't finish my sentence the way I'd meant to:
it was your last year
.

“But Cole — I don't know what to do about Cole,” Sam confessed. “I just feel like there is something about him I should be getting, and I'm not. And if you saw his eyes, Grace. Oh, God, if you saw his eyes, you'd know there was something really wrong with him. There's something broken in there. And the other two, and Olivia, and I want you to go to college, and I need to — someone has to — I don't know what's expected of me, but it feels so huge. I don't know how much of it is what Beck would've wanted me to do and how much of it is what I expect myself to do. I'm just …” His voice faded off, and I didn't know how to comfort him.

We drove in silence for several long minutes, a bright guitar plucking rapid chords in the background while infinite white stripes flew by the car. Sam's fingers were pressed against his upper lip as if he had amazed himself by admitting his uncertainty.

“Still waking up,”
I said.

He looked at me.

“Your album.
Still Waking Up.
”

He looked at me, expression intense. Surprised, maybe, that I'd come close. “That's exactly how it feels. That's exactly it. One of these days, I'm going to get used to the idea that it's morning and I'm going to be a guy for the rest of the day. For all the rest of all the days. But until then, I'm stumbling around.”

I darted a glance over at him, catching his eye. “Everybody does that, though. We all, one day, realize that we're not going to be kids forever and we're going to grow up. You just got to have that moment a little later than most people. You'll figure it out.”

Sam's slow smile was rueful but genuine. “You and Beck were totally cut from the same cloth.”

“Guess that's why you love both of us,” I said.

Sam made the shape of a guitar chord on his seat belt and just nodded. A few moments later, he said, thoughtfully, “
Still Waking Up.
One day, Grace, I'm going to write a song for you and I'm going to call it that. And then I'll name my album after it.”

“Because I am wise,” I said.

“Yes,” Sam said.

He looked out the window then, and I was glad, because it gave me time to dig in my pocket for a tissue without him seeing. My nose had started to bleed.