Linger (23 page)

Cole gave me a strange look, and then he threw up on the road. Jerking and shivering, he backed out of his human form, tearing his T-shirt as he thrashed against the side of my car. Cole as a wolf shuddered on the pavement for a long time before I was able to convince him to head toward the woods behind Grace's house.

After Cole had gone, I lingered by the open door of my car, looking at Grace's house, waiting for the light to come on in her bedroom and imagining myself there. I missed the sound of her shuffling her homework while I listened to music on her bed. I missed the cold of her feet against my legs when she climbed into bed. I missed the shape of her shadow where it fell across the page of my book. I missed the smell of her hair and the sound of her breath and my Rilke on her nightstand and her wet towel thrown over the back of her desk chair. It felt like I should be sated after having a whole day with her, but it just made me miss her more.

• GRACE •

It was oddly freeing, knowing that I was walking into trouble. I realized that all day I'd been wondering if I was going to get caught, what would happen, if they would find out later. And now I didn't have to wonder anymore.

I knew.

I shut the front door behind me and stepped into the hall. At the end of it, I could see my father standing with his arms crossed over his chest. My mother stood a few feet away from him, partially hidden by the door to the kitchen, her posture identical. They didn't say anything, and I didn't, either.

I wanted them to scream at me. I was ready for screaming. My whole body felt like it was shaking on the inside.

“Well?” my father asked when I got to the kitchen. That was it. No shouting. Just “Well?” as if he expected me to confess any number of sins.

“How was the show?” I asked.

My father gazed at me.

Mom broke first. “Don't pretend like nothing happened, Grace!”

“I'm not pretending,” I said. “I'll say it: You told me not to go out, and I went out.”

Mom's knuckles were white, pressed into fists at her sides. “You're acting like you didn't do anything wrong.”

I felt deadly calm inside. It had been right to tell Sam not to come in; I wouldn't have been able to be this resolute with him here. “I didn't. I went to a studio in Duluth with my boyfriend, had dinner, and then came back home before midnight.”

“We told you not to,” Dad said. “That's what makes it wrong. You're grounded, and you went out anyway. I cannot believe how deeply you have betrayed our faith in you.”

“You are completely blowing this out of proportion!” I snapped. I expected my voice to sound louder than his, but it sounded thin in comparison; the second wind I'd gotten driving back with Sam was gone. I could feel my pulse in my stomach and throat, hot and sick, but I pushed through it and kept my voice steady. “I'm not doing drugs or failing school or getting any hidden body parts pierced.”

“How about —” He couldn't even say it.

“Having sex?” Mom finished for him. “In our house? How about being amazingly disrespectful. We've given you room to roam and you have —”

Now I found the fuel to be loud. “
Room to roam?
You've given me a planet to myself! I have sat in this house alone for hundreds and hundreds of nights, waiting for you two to come home. I've answered the phone a million times to hear ‘Oh, we'll be late, honey.' I've arranged my own way home from school a thousand times.
Room to roam.
I finally have someone I've chosen for myself, and you guys can't handle it. You —”

“You're a teenager,” Dad said dismissively. As if I hadn't just shouted. I would've doubted that I'd even raised my voice if my blood hadn't been pounding in my ears, punishingly painful. He continued, “What do you know about a responsible relationship? He's your first boyfriend. If you want us to believe you're responsible, prove it. And that doesn't involve underage sex and ignoring a direct order from your parents. Which is what you did.”

“I did,” I said. “I'm not sorry.”

Dad's face turned red, the color rising from his collar to his hairline. In the light of the kitchen, it made him look very, very tanned. “How about this, then, Grace? You're never seeing him again. Does that make you sorry?”

“Oh, come on,” I said. His words were starting to sound faraway and unimportant. I needed to sit down — lie down — sleep — something.

Dad's words were nails in my temples. “No,
you
come on. I'm not fooling around here. I don't like the person you are with him. He clearly doesn't respect us as your parents. I'm not letting you ruin your life for him.”

I crossed my arms over my chest to hide that they were shaking. Part of me was in the kitchen having this conversation and part of me was thinking,
What is wrong with me?
My cheekbones pinched, warmed. I finally found my voice. “You can't do that. You can't keep me from seeing him.”

“Oh, I can,” Dad said. “You're seventeen and living under my roof, and as long as both those things are true, I absolutely can. When you're eighteen and out of high school, I can't tell
you what to do, but right now, the entire state of Minnesota is on my side.”

My stomach did something weird, a little twist, like nerves, at the same time that my forehead tingled. I put my finger to my nose, and it came away with a touch of red. I wouldn't let them see it; put me on the spot even more. Grabbing a tissue from the table and pressing it to my nostrils, I said, “He's not just a boy.”

Mom turned away, waving her hand in the air like she was just tired of the whole thing. “Right.”

At that moment, I hated her.

Dad said, “Well, for the next four months he is. You're not seeing him again, as long as I have anything to say about it. We're not doing more nights like this. And this conversation is over.”

I couldn't stand to be in the same room as them a second longer. I couldn't stand to see the way Mom was looking back over her shoulder at me, eyebrow lifted like she was waiting for my next move. And I couldn't stand the pain.

I rushed to my room and slammed the door hard enough that I felt everything inside me shake.

• GRACE •

“Dying is a wild night and a new road.”

I had words stuck in my head instead of a song. I couldn't remember who wrote them, only that I had heard Sam read them out loud, looking up from the book and trying out the way they sounded. I remembered the moment, even: sitting in my dad's old office here in the house, riffling through notes for an oral presentation while Sam slouched over a book. In the comfort of that room, icy rain sliding down the windows, spoken in Sam's soft voice, the quote had seemed innocent. Clever, maybe.

Now, in the dark, empty silence of my room, the words running feverishly through my head again and again, they seemed terrifying.

The sickness inside me was impossible to ignore now. I waited a long time for my nose to stop bleeding, using toilet paper after I ran out of tissues. It seemed like it wouldn't ever stop. My guts were twisted inside me, my skin boiling.

All I wanted was to know what was really wrong with me. How long it would take. What it would do to me at the end. If
I knew all those things, if I had something concrete to hold on to instead of the pain, I could make my peace with it.

But I didn't have any answers.

So I could not sleep. I could not move.

I kept my eyes closed. The space beside me where Sam was supposed to be seemed huge. Before all this, when I had him with me, I would just roll over and press my face into his back when I woke up in the night. Let his breathing lull me back to sleep. But Sam wasn't here tonight, and sleep seemed far away and irrelevant with the crawling heat inside me.

In my head, I heard Dad forbidding me to see him again. My breathing caught a little at the memory. He'd change his mind. He couldn't mean that. I pushed my thoughts onto something else. My red coffeepot. I didn't know if such a thing actually existed, but if it did, I was buying one. Immediately. It seemed incredibly important to make it a goal. Get some money, buy a red coffeepot, move out. Find a new place to plug it in.

I flipped onto my back and laid my hand on my stomach, trying to see if I could actually feel the rolling of stomach under my fingers. I was so hot again, and my head felt weird and floaty, disconnected from the rest of me.

The back of my mouth tasted like copper. No matter how much I swallowed, I couldn't get the taste out of my mouth.

I felt
wrong
.

What's happening to me?

There was no one to ask, so I added up the clues for myself. The stomachache. The fever. Nosebleeds. Fatigue. The smell of wolf. The way the wolves had looked at me; the way Isabel had
looked at me. Sam's fingers on my arm as I left, turning to me for one last hug. They all seemed like so many good-byes.

Finally, my denial fell away.

Even though it could be just a virus. Even though it could be something serious but treatable. Even though I really had no way of knowing …

I knew.

This pain I was feeling — it was my future. A change I couldn't control. I could dream about red coffeepots all I wanted. But my body would have the final say.

I sat up in the darkness, pushing back against the wolf inside me, tugging the blankets so they pooled in my lap. I wanted to be with Sam. The cool air bit at my cheeks and bare shoulders. I wished I were still at Beck's house, back in Sam's bed under his bedroom sky of birds. I swallowed down the pain, forced it deeper. If I were there now, he would wrap his arms around me and he'd tell me it would be all right, and it
would
be all right, at least for tonight.

I imagined myself driving back there tonight. The look on his face.

I rubbed the bare bottoms of my feet against each other. It was foolish, of course. There were a thousand reasons to stay, but …

I pushed back the barbed static in my head. Focused. Mentally made a list of what I needed. I'd get a pair of jeans from the middle drawer of my dresser and slide on a sweater and some socks. My parents wouldn't hear. The floor didn't creak much. It was possible. I hadn't heard any movement upstairs for a long time now. If I didn't turn on my car lights, they might not notice me pulling out of the driveway.

My heart was pounding now with the idea of escape.

I knew it wasn't worth getting in more trouble with my parents, not as angry as they were. I knew it wasn't going to be easy to drive with this roar of blood in my ears, the fever trailing across my skin.

But I couldn't really
get
into more trouble. They'd already forbidden me to see him. What could they do that was beyond that?

And I didn't know how many more nights I had.

My thoughts went to Mom, scoffing over the difference between love and lust. Me walking in the woods afterward, trying to dredge up guilt for yelling at her. I thought about my dad opening my door to look for Sam. How long it had been since they had asked me where I'd been, how I was doing, if I needed anything from them.

I'd seen my parents together; they were family. They still cared about the little details in each other's lives. I'd seen Beck, too, and the way that he
knew
Sam. The way he loved him. And Sam, the way he still orbited Beck's memory like a lost satellite. That was family. My parents and me … we lived together, sometimes.

Could you outgrow your parents?

I remembered the way the wolves had watched me. Remembered wondering how much time I had. How many nights I had to spend with Sam, how many nights I was wasting here alone.

I could still taste the copper. The sickness inside me wasn't getting any smaller. It raged, but I was still stronger than it. There were still things I had control over.

I got out of bed.

A sort of deadly calm filled me as I padded around my room, getting my jeans and underwear and shirts and two extra pairs of socks. The eye of the hurricane. I stuffed the clothes in my backpack with my homework and Sam's beloved copy of Rilke from the bed stand. I touched the edge of my dresser, held my pillow, stood by the window where I'd once stared down a wolf. My heart hummed in my chest, expecting at any moment for my mother or my father to open the door and find me in the midst of my preparations. Surely someone would have to just
feel
the seriousness of what I was doing.

But nothing happened. I got my toothbrush and hairbrush from the bathroom on my way down the hall, and the house stayed silent. I hesitated by the front door, my shoes in my hand, and listened.

Nothing.

Was I really doing this?

“Good-bye,” I whispered. My hands were trembling.

The door
shushed
across the welcome mat as I pulled it shut behind me.

I didn't know when I'd come back.