Tell the Wolves I'm Home (5 page)

I don't like to overhear things, because, in my experience, things your parents are keeping quiet about are things you don't want to know. It doesn't feel good to know that your grandparents are getting separated because your grandfather lost his temper and gave your grandmother a slap across the face after fifty-two years of being married with no problems at all. It doesn't feel good to know ahead of time what you'll be getting for Christmas or birthdays so that you have to act surprised even though you're a terrible liar. It doesn't feel good to know that your teacher told your mother at a conference that you're an average student in math and English and that you should be happy with that.

Greta raced ahead to the door of the funeral home. When she got there, she stopped and turned around.

“On second thought,” she said in a loud clear voice. “On second thought, I will tell you.” She wiped melted snow off her cheek with the back of her hand.

I felt cold and sick. It was always the same with Greta's information. I wanted to know, but I was scared to know. I gave her the very slightest tip of my head.

She pointed to the man and said, “He's the guy who killed Uncle Finn.”

I twisted my head back to look at him, but he'd already turned to go. All I saw was a tall skinny man crouching to get into his small blue car.

I sat in the front row during the funeral service, trying to listen to all the nice things people had to say about Finn. It was stuffy in that room, and dim, and the chairs were the kind that forced you to sit up
straighter than you wanted to. Greta didn't sit up front with us. She said she wanted to sit in the back row, and when I turned to glance at her I saw that her head was down, her hands were over her ears, and her eyes were closed. Not just closed but squeezed tight, like she was trying to shut the whole thing out. For a second I thought she might have even been crying, but that didn't seem likely.

My mother gave a short speech about Finn and her as kids. About what a good brother he'd been. Everything she said was vague, like the details might stab her if they got too sharp. After my mother, a cousin from Pennsylvania said a few words. Then the funeral director babbled on for a little while. I tried to listen, but I couldn't stop thinking about the man outside.

I didn't want to think about how Finn got AIDS. It wasn't my job to think about that. If that guy was really the one who killed Finn, then he must have been Finn's boyfriend, and if he was Finn's boyfriend, then why didn't I know anything about him? And how did Greta know? If she'd known Finn had a secret boyfriend, she would have taunted me about it. She never missed an opportunity to let me know I knew less than she did. So there were two possibilities. Either she just found out about this guy or none of it was true.

I decided to believe the second one. It's hard to do that, to
decide
to believe one thing over another. Usually a mind makes itself up on its own. But I forced myself, because the idea that Finn would keep such a big secret from me made me want to throw up.

The service ended and everyone filed out of the building. A few people stopped to talk in the entry hall, but I went straight out the door and tried to find the little blue car. There was no sign of it. Or the man. The snow had started to come down harder, turning the streets and lawns white and perfect. I zipped my coat up as high as it would go, then I looked down the road in both directions, but there was nothing to see. He was gone.

Seven

After a snowstorm is one of the best times to be in the woods, because all the empty beer and soda cans and candy wrappers disappear, and you don't have to try as hard to be in another time. Plus there's just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on. It makes you believe you're special, even though you know you're not.

I was wearing this pair of orange mittens that Greta had knitted for me when she was in the knitting club in fifth grade. They were huge and sloppy and the thumbs were in the middle instead of on the edges. I didn't bother with the Gunne Sax dress, but I did change into my medieval boots. It wasn't actually all that cold, and I walked in farther than I usually did, across the little brook that ran along the bottom of the hill and then up the hill on the other side of it. I tried not to think about Finn and all the secrets he might have kept from me. I tried to keep my mind on the story I was telling myself, where I was the only one strong enough to hunt for my village and I had to trek across the snow to track deer. Girls weren't supposed to hunt, so I had to tie my hair up and pretend to be a boy. That's the kind of story it was.

There was a layer of old frozen snow under the fresh stuff, and for every step I took up the hill I slipped down a bit. By the time I finally got to the top, I sat down, exhausted. It was all quiet and I let my eyes fall closed. For a second I saw Finn's face and I smiled, pressing my eyes closed harder, hoping to keep him there. But the picture disappeared. I let myself tip backward so I was lying flat out in the snow, looking up
at the twisted patterns the bare tree branches made against the gray sky. After the land settled around my body, everything was still, and even though I tried to keep my brain in the Middle Ages, Finn kept sneaking into my head. I wished he'd been buried instead of cremated, because then I could take off my gloves and press my palms to the ground and know that he was there somewhere. That through all those molecules of frozen dirt there was still a connection. Then the guy from outside the funeral home came into my thoughts, and I felt a blush of stupidity. Of course someone as amazing as Finn would have a boyfriend. Why wouldn't he? This must have been the guy who'd called that day. The English guy who knew my name. The guy who was calling from Finn's apartment. He was actually
in
Finn's apartment. With
my
uncle Finn. A hot tear ran down my cheek.

Then, into the silence, over the top of everything, came a long, sad howl. For a second it felt like the sound had come from inside me. Like the world had taken everything I was feeling and turned it into sound.

By the time I sat up, there were two howls. Dogs maybe. Coyotes or wolves. The howls weren't steady. Both of them had a kind of cracked-voice sound to them, and they were staggered. One would start, then a few seconds later the second one would come in. Then more. Three or four. I listened hard, trying to hear how far away they were, but it was like the sound was everywhere. Near and far. Wrapped around the trees and the clouds. The howls grew louder, and a picture of a big lunging gray wolf with tons of matted fur popped into my mind. For a single dumb moment it really did feel like I was in the woods in the Middle Ages, when wolves could take away babies or eat a person whole.

“I'm not afraid,” I called out across the hills. Then I ran, stumbling and tripping. I misjudged the jump and plunged one boot into the brook, then scrambled up the other side, grabbing on to thin saplings, steadying myself. A few minutes later I came out of the woods, into the school parking lot. Almost all the cars were gone and I stood there for a minute, doubled over, catching my breath.

“Shoot,” I said, looking down at my right hand. I kicked at the big pile of dirty plowed snow at the edge of the parking lot. One of the mittens Greta had made me was gone.

Eight

“Do you want to go to a party?”

Greta wasn't smiling when she asked me. She wasn't even looking at me. She was bent over her dresser as I walked past the door to her room on my way down for breakfast.

I was sure I'd heard her wrong, so I stopped and waited for her to say something else. I must have looked like an idiot standing there in the hallway with my mouth hanging open.

Greta turned and eyed me up and down.

“Par-ty,” she said, enunciating every syllable and exaggerating her lip movements. “Do. You. Want. To. Go.”

I stepped into her room, which still had the same white furniture it had when she was seven and the same pink walls with that thin strip of Holly Hobby wallpaper across the top. From the way the room was decorated, someone who didn't know anything about Greta would think a nice little girl lived there. I sat on the edge of her bed.

“What kind of party?”

“The good kind.”

“Yeah, right.”

Greta knows that for me there are no good parties. I'm okay with one or two people, but more than that and I turn into a naked mole rat. That's what being shy feels like. Like my skin is too thin, the light too bright. Like the best place I could possibly be is in a tunnel far under the cool, dark earth. Someone asks me a question and I stare at
them, empty-faced, my brain jammed up with how hard I'm trying to find something interesting to say. And in the end, all I can do is nod or shrug, because the light of their eyes looking at me, waiting for me, is just too much to take. And then it's over and there's one more person in the world who thinks I'm a complete and total waste of space.

The worst thing is the stupid hopefulness. Every new party, every new bunch of people, and I start thinking that maybe this is my chance. That I'm going to be normal this time. A new leaf. A fresh start. But then I find myself at the party, thinking,
Oh, yeah. This again
.

So I stand on the edge of things, crossing my fingers, praying nobody will try to look me in the eye. And the good thing is, they usually don't.

“I don't think so,” I said.

“Oh, come on, June. I promise it won't be awful.”

I raised my eyebrows at her. The whole thing sounded too sincere. Not like Greta at all.

“Really. Cross my heart.” She put both hands over the middle of her chest. I tried hard not to smile, but I could feel my face betraying me.

“Well, where is it?” I said after a while.

“Don't know yet, but Jillian Lampton's organizing it. You know Jillian Lampton, right?”

I did know Jillian. She was one of the lighting people for
South Pacific
. She had dyed black hair that she wore in a sharp bob. I always thought she looked kind of how I'd like to look someday. Jillian was a junior, a class below Greta, but she was probably older than Greta.

This is something that only a few people know. Greta's a senior, but she's only sixteen. None of her friends know her real age. Not a single one. We moved from Queens to our town when I was five and Greta was seven. Greta was supposed to go into second grade, but instead she got put in third. Her last teacher had recommended it. She said Greta wasn't being challenged and told my parents she could easily hold her own if she skipped a grade. Apparently my father wasn't sure, but my mother thought it was a fantastic idea. “Opportunities don't come swimming back to you if you throw them away.” That was her big motto. Mostly for Greta. As if opportunities were slippery little fish.
Greta didn't care either way. So they did it. Even though she was already one of the youngest kids in her class, she skipped a grade. Now she's at least a year younger than everybody else in her class, almost two years younger than most. But she keeps it quiet. At her birthday parties, my mother would put an extra candle on her cake, just for show. The tradition was that every year Greta would decide which one was the “liar candle” and, if she could, she'd leave that one burning. She was scared that blowing that one out would reverse all her wishes. The age thing is on her school records, but other than that it seems like it's mostly forgotten. Sometimes I can tell though. I would never say anything to Greta, but sometimes I can see that she's a lot closer to being a kid than her friends are.

“I don't know, Greta. I don't think Mom—”

“Don't worry about Mom. I'll deal with Mom. It's a month and a half into tax season. Mom won't care.” Greta put both hands on her hips and cocked her head to the side. “So you're coming?”

“I … Why do you want me to?”

There was a flicker of something in Greta's look. I couldn't tell whether it was a flicker of love or regret or meanness, and then she said, “Why
wouldn't
I want you to?”