Memoirs of a Girl Wolf (14 page)

Once feeling returned to my legs, I sprinted forward, not bothering to look behind me to make sure the wolf was out of sight or to even check if it was following me. I ran as fast as I my legs allowed me. I jumped over fallen branches and sped all the way to the door of my house where I threw open the wooden front door and jumped inside. I slammed the door shut, locked it, and pressed my back against it, breathing in deep breaths to calm myself. Part of me wanted to sob from terror and the other part wanted to jump up and down in excitement and relief. The adrenaline was overpowering and I had to close my eyes and mentally force myself to calm down. Once I stopped trembling, I pushed myself off the door and opening my eyes, I noticed Mom and Max sitting on the couch staring at me with forced, tense smiles.

“Everything alright?” Mom asked in a fake, hostess voice. She was clearly uncomfortable and because she had sent that first text message a while ago that meant that her and Max had been sitting awkwardly for almost forty minutes waiting on me.

I nodded a little more speechless at seeing Max than when I saw the wolf.

“Where were you?” Mom’s question was accompanied with a nervous laugh. She stood, walked over to me, placed an arm around my shoulder and guided me over to the couch where she sat me next to Max who sat on the edge of the couch with his legs spread far apart and his hands folded. He avoided my eyes.

“Hiking,” I lied.

Mom examined me suspiciously, but with Max in the room she wouldn’t question me more about my mysterious whereabouts so she told us she was going to put some coffee on and if we needed her she’d be in the kitchen as soon as she left the room I turned toward Max who was still avoiding my eye contact. I wanted him out of my house.

“Why are you here?” I asked, rudely.

He scoffed. “Nice to see you too.”

I crossed my arms and narrowed my eyes. “You should go.”

He fell back a little, surprised at my tone. Max wasn’t used to rejection. Although his initial reaction was to meet my cold stare with a cold stare of his own, when he picked up on how much I really didn’t want him there on my couch, in my living room, in my house, his stare and tone turned warmer and it became his mission to get me to like him.

“You still have my sweatshirt,” he said with a smile. “Beautiful,” he added.

I sighed. The yellow U of M sweatshirt he had given me to wear the night of my party was somewhere in my room. My original plan was to burn it, after our horrible date, but over the weeks I had forgotten about the yellow hoodie because I had forgotten about him and could care less.

I stood from the couch and started walking, tensely, toward the stairwell, but once I noticed he was close behind me and following me up the stairs I came to a stop and spun around with my hand clutching hold of the thick, varnished banister so tightly my knuckles turned white.

“You can wait here,” I said in a stern tone.

He stopped and gave me that dumbfounded, surprised look again, but he obeyed and stayed at the foot of the stairs while I ran upstairs and into my room.

I found the sweatshirt, dirty and a little bloody, because I hadn’t washed it, in the corner of my bedroom. I carried it into my bathroom and tried to wash out some of the dried blood by holding the sweatshirt under the faucet and rubbing the bloody spots with my index finger.

“Cool room,” Max said from behind me.

I turned off the faucet of the bathroom sink and walked back into my bedroom where I found him standing in the doorway moving his eyes across the walls of my room.

“Really?” I didn’t believe him. Didn’t Sydney imply my room was an embarrassment? She had made me feel so ashamed and insecure for my superhero posters and Mickey Mouse collection.

“Yeah, I love old maps of the US,” he said, pointing to my map of Middle Earth above my bed.

Laughing, I tossed the damp, yellow sweatshirt at him which he caught with one hand. I ushered him out of my room, closing the door behind me as I walked into the hall, but I came to a stop at the top of the stairs. I didn’t care to walk him to the front door. Leaning against the wall, I crossed my arms and kept my eyes on his back as he descended the stairs. He looked behind his shoulder at me. I met his goofy grin with a roll of my eyes and pursed lips, hoping my appearance was indication enough of my wanting him to hurry up and leave. Instead, he came to a stop halfway. He turned and looked up at me.

“We should go out again,” he said with a half-smile.

“Absolutely not.” I laughed.

With a bewildered look, he continued walking down the stairs. I watched him as he unlocked the front door and left the house before I trudged down the stairs myself.

Mom met me at the bottom of the steps holding a mug of coffee which she sipped carefully before asking me, “What did he want?”

“His sweatshirt,” I said.

“Mickey, why do you have the boys clothing?” Mom asked with concern.

“Mom! I just borrowed his sweatshirt a long time ago.”

She followed me to the kitchen where I poured myself a cup of coffee. The entire day kept unfolding through my mind as I thought about Reign in the woods, the black wolf, and then Max. My emotions morphed from happy to terror to anger.

“What’s wrong?” Mom asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You look upset. Don’t get upset.”

“Where are the boys?” I asked, noticing how quiet the house was.

“At a sleep over.”

Mom and I looked at each other and smiled as we both realized that meant we had the attic and big screen television to ourselves. We wouldn’t have to wrangle the remote from my little brothers or be forced to watch cartoons. Without saying anything we both started running, then slowing our pace to fast a walk so that we wouldn’t spill our coffee, up the two flights of stairs to the attic.

I collapsed on the couch and put my feet up on the coffee table while Mom turned on Netflix and we started the annoying process of trying to agree on what to binge watch for the rest of the night.

“What time is it?” I asked when I looked out the round attic window and noticed the sun already disappearing from the sky and a faded sliver of a chalky white moon in its place. 

Mom shook the dainty, white gold watch on her freckled wrist. “Five,” she said.

I didn’t realize it was already so late. I hadn’t kept track of the time I had spent in the woods with Reign. We must have talked for hours without realizing it. He was so easy to talk with. I was deliriously happy, but then my mind quickly switched to Max’s face as he looked back up at me from the stairs and asked me out again as if nothing had transpired between us, as if he hadn’t done anything to hurt me and that made me so mad.

The more I thought of it the more furious I became. My body started reacting to my anger. My body temperature rose and soon I was sweating, my hands went from trembling to shaking, and my heart beat quickened. I tried saying something to Mom, but instead I growled and when I did Mom looked at me dreadfully afraid.

“Calm down,” she said in a pleading voice. Then shooting a look out of the window she said, “It’s not even dark.”

I kept closing and opening my eyes as my sight was going in and out of focus, and sound was slipping away then rushing back ten times the normal volume. It was like I was underwater and there was a ton of pressure weighing me down. Everything was happening in a faded, dark, slow motion way so I was unable to react or question when I saw Mom walk to the back of the attic take a gun from behind the book shelf, aim it at me, and shoot me. The last thing I saw was an orange dart sticking out of my thigh and I remembered thinking
that better not have left a tear in my jeans.

16

I woke in a dark room with a cold wash cloth on my forehead. As soon as I started to stir a little under the goose feather comforter that covered me, I heard someone walk across the room and sit at the end of the bed.

The washcloth was removed from my damp forehead and I opened my eyes to see mom looking into my face.

“You shot me,” I mumbled.

“Shot you? Honey, you have a fever,” Mom said, dabbing at my face with the wash cloth.

She left the bed and returned with an icepack that she set on my forehead. I shivered.

“A fever?” I asked. My throat was parched. When I tried to sit up, Mom gently pushed me back down into the bed, but I noticed that I wasn’t in my room, but her room. The curtains were closed over her windows and the lights were off. A fan above me rotated, but did little to cool me off. The ice helped some.

“You were delirious as soon as your friend left I put you to bed,” Mom said.

“Max?” I mumbled trying to figure out what happened.

She nodded. “Are you feeling better? You look better than yesterday. I stayed up all night checking in on you. I thought you’d be more comfortable in the bigger bed.”

As I listened to her, I covered my warm face with my hands and started to cry. Mom wrapped her arms around me and tried to shush me.

“What’s wrong with me?” I sobbed.

“Nothing, it’s just a fever,” Mom said gently as she rocked me back and forth.

“I saw a wolf. The black wolf it came up to me,” I said as I wiped my tears away with my fingers.

Mom shook her head. “Oh honey, that was probably the fever.”

I closed my eyes and listened to the thud of Mom’s heart and her hushing sounds as she cradled me. Maybe I was hallucinating things yesterday, but that worried me that my picnic with Reign wasn’t real either.

“You can stay home from school tomorrow,” Mom said.

“No, I’m fine,” I replied, quickly. I needed to see Reign.

Monday morning he stood waiting for me in front of my locker holding a flower which he gave to me as soon as I walked up to him.

Before I had time to thank him, we were interrupted by Max who leaned against the row of lockers on the other side of me and picked up a few strands of my hair which he rubbed in between his fingers until I pulled my hair away from him.

“What?” I asked him.

“Go to homecoming with me,” Max said.

I scoffed. “No.”

His jaw dropped. “No?”

“Ask Sydney or Kristy,” I said.

Max stared at me in disbelief and because he wasn’t going anywhere, I shut my locker and grabbed hold of Reign’s hand and pulled him a few feet down the hallway away from a stunned Max.

“Heartbreaker,” Reign teased, but then balling his hands into fists he added, “That guys such a jerk.”

“I don’t want to go to Homecoming with him.”

“Who do you want to go to homecoming with?” Reign asked in a lighter tone.

“I don’t know,” I mumbled, feeling suddenly nervous.

The first bell echoed through the building. Reign glanced over his shoulder in the direction of his class at the end of the dim hallway.

“See you at lunch?” he said, as he started to walk backwards.

My nervousness bubbled into laughter, which erupted in quiet giggles when he bumped into someone and nearly fell over. His face turned red as he apologized to the innocent bystander and then the second bell rang and we both ran to our classes though in opposite directions. I was late to class, but finally being at school wasn’t unbearable.

We soon fell into a pattern. Meet at our lockers in the mornings, eat lunch together, and by the end of that week he was giving me rides to and from school which Mom wasn’t thrilled about, but it did help her out some so she didn’t complain more than a scowl.

In the afternoons, we met in the woods, but after a few meetings I disclosed to him that the woods gave me the creeps. I kept having flash backs to the night I was attacked. He figured out a way for us to be together without me breaking any of Mom’s rules. He bought a canoe and he would row over and pick me up at my dock and then row out into the center of the pond about where we decided the perimeters were; and we would anchor ourselves in the water; and sit in the canoe and talk or do homework or fish or read whatever as long as we were together. Mom never knew anyway and I bribed my brothers to refrain from tattling. I didn’t think it was an issue of being grounded. I was fairly sure she had probably forgot I was still grounded, but that she had kind of warned me about seeing Reign and I didn’t want to deal with her disapproval so I kept it a secret as best I could and as much fun as it was to joke about me remaining on my property I was ready to break free and go on a real date in town with him and I knew he was probably ready to take me up on that though he was still shy and timid around me.

He talked a lot which I attributed to a nervous habit along with the way he constantly ran his hand through his hair or bit his lip when he watched me and the way he would often break away and look elsewhere when I would stare back at him. The more nervous I made him, the more my confidence grew and so I found myself being the one to make the first move like I did when I reached for his hand during our picnic. I suggested we go out on a date in town which he eagerly took me up on. The one move I promised myself I wouldn’t make first was our first kiss. I wanted him to sweep me off my feet at the perfect moment and I’d wait for it. 

So after talking with Mom she agreed I was no longer grounded, but she didn’t let up on the curfew. Because of my strange sickness that kept occurring, she thought it best if I be home early before dark. This put a time limit on our date which I wasn’t thrilled about, but when I told Reign he said, with a smile, that he’d make it work.