Weregirl Page 6

  “I told you. You can have Cassian,” Bree said. “Gabe is into me, and Cassian doesn’t know who I am.”

  “I can have Cassian? Thanks. But he doesn’t know who I am either,” said Nessa.

  Later, it occurred to Nessa that it was a little odd that she’d heard Gabe whispering in the kitchen when she was upstairs at Bree’s. She was lying in her bed with the lights out, waiting to fall asleep, listening to her mom speaking over the phone to Aunt Jane—Nessa could often hear the low murmur of Vivian’s voice, but now she could make out the words. Maybe her hearing had always been great and she’d just never noticed before?

  “She’s got so much energy,” Vivian was saying. “I don’t know where it comes from. I know it’s good, I know…Something is going on with her…”

  Absentmindedly, Nessa fingered the wolf tooth on its chain. She didn’t like that her mother was worried about her. And she didn’t like that maybe her mom should be worried. Why could she hear her? Her mom wasn’t in the next room. She was all the way on the other end of the house.

  A few mornings later, Nessa stumbled into the bathroom before an early run and washed her face, then looked clear-eyed in the mirror. Oh no, she thought. I slept in my contacts.

  Nessa’s vision was bad enough that she usually couldn’t see anything in the mirror but an unidentifiable blur. She groaned and grabbed for her lens case with her right hand, sticking her left hand to her left eye to dig out the forgotten lens. But the little blue discs were swimming in saline, just as they should be. What? Nessa blinked at her reflection. She’d been farsighted since she was seven years old!

  Now Nessa could see herself quite clearly. She could see everything. She burst outside into her run, noticing that colors seemed brighter, shadows more well-defined. Had the Kindells had their house painted turquoise? Their regular blue paint job seemed to vibrate with life. The maple at the corner of Nessa’s road was positively, shockingly fluorescent.

  And as if her improved vision sharpened everything else, sounds were crisper now, too. She could smell more. The acrid odor of pine from a freshly cut tree on the trail was almost overwhelming. She caught the whiff of rotting leaves and, without thinking about it too much, she knew under which downed branch that particular leaf collection was located.

  After her run, Nessa popped a single lens into her eye: blindness. Her vision was perfect without them. Not wanting to scare her mother, Nessa left her contact solution out on the counter so Vivian would assume she was still using it. Normally, she told her mother about most things in her life, especially happy things, but something made her stay quiet on this. An overnight vision correction was magnificent. But why?

  “Wow, you just can’t seem to get enough of those,” Vivian commented that evening as Nessa took a third helping of venison sausages a neighbor had given them—he hunted in the Upper Peninsula and brought back a couple of deer every year. Nessa couldn’t remember enjoying them this much last year.

  The next morning, surveying the breakfast options—cereal, toast, muffins, waffles—Nessa started to feel frustrated until it occurred to her she could eat plain turkey. A pound of it. Delphine—who liked turkey sandwiches for lunch—was pissed.

  “Uncool!” Delphine said, holding up the empty turkey wrapper, while Nessa tucked the last piece of sliced meat into her mouth.

  “Nessa needs meat,” Nate said that night at dinner, with gusto, as Nessa slid two burger patties between her bun, “so she can jump off the deck.”

  Vivian and Delphine looked at Nate strangely. While he could tell you the names of every bird on the planet, and would talk for hours about the acceleration capacities of various locomotive engines, he was not usually that observant of the people around him. “She jumped off the railing and didn’t get hurt,” he said.

  “But that’s over five feet from the ground!” Vivian said, looking at Nessa now. “What were you thinking?”

  “It’s not that far,” Nessa said, trying to keep it casual. At the time, the urge to vault the railing had felt natural. All she’d registered was that she was in a hurry to bring in the laundry from where it had been hung out to dry.

  “You know very well it is!” Vivian said.

  Nate stood up from his chair. “She landed like this.” He got into a stance like a surfer would assume on a board, feet apart, knees bent, arms straight and out to the sides.

  Vivian was staring at her. Nessa felt her face turning red. Jumping off the deck had been incredibly stupid. What if she’d sprained an ankle with Homecoming time trials only a week away? Her time at trials would place her at Sectionals. They were critical. Lots of scouts would be there. But the truth was, she hadn’t even thought about the decision when she was making it. It had seemed obvious. She’d known she could land the jump.

  “I was in a hurry?” she tried.

  “Wow,” Coach Hoffman said when Nessa came in from running a 5K. She knew she’d been going fast. She could feel it, but she hadn’t had the usual fear that came with picking up her pace, doubting that she’d be able to maintain it through the full course. “You just ran a 5K in 17:10.”

  “I shaved thirty-eight seconds off my best race time?”

  Coach was nodding. Nessa felt a smile spreading across her face.

  That night, just to see, she went out on her own and did it again.

  “I think something strange is happening to me,” she told Bree when they were driving to the vet’s office that weekend—Bree had decided to come along to get another dose of puppy love and Nessa was happy to get a ride to work.

  Parking the Monster in the rutted dirt parking lot behind Dr. Morgan’s, they looked into the enclosure off to the side of the building and saw that the puppies were out in the small yard, rolling and playing while their mother watched. They’d gotten bigger in only a week—and were now running and falling and then running some more, hiding behind plastic milk crates. Their mother, Betty, was lying down with her head up, keeping an eye on them.

  “Hello, puppies!” said Bree, jogging over to the fence and pushing her fingers in for a little nibble. She’d named her favorite Henry—he was fawn colored with brown markings and white paws. “Henry,” she called into the enclosure. “Did you miss me?” She turned back to Nessa. “He remembers me!”

  But as Nessa jogged over, Betty started barking, a warning, repetitive bark. Nessa looked at Betty with alarm. The mama dog was on her feet now.

  Betty’s hair raised along her spine and she barked right at Nessa. “It’s okay girl, it’s just me,” Nessa called out to her.

  Nessa held the back of her hands forward, so Betty could sniff.

  Betty growled. Nessa backed away. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she told Betty in the gentlest tone she could muster. Betty lifted her snout and barked a few more times into the air. Bree was looking from Betty to Nessa to Betty again.

  Nessa shrugged. “I’m going inside,” she said to Bree. Bree waved.

  As soon as Nessa entered the kennels, the caged animals began freaking out too. They all acted just like Betty. A cat pushed her rear end up into the air, her hair standing on end, her tail high, and hissed at Nessa. A dog whimpered, cowering in the back of his cage, trying to make himself small enough that Nessa couldn’t see him.

  Nessa pulled out the cleaning supplies, put on rubber gloves, and began to work through the crates as best as she could. Bree came in and helped out, which was important because some of the animals looked like they were going to bite Nessa.

  Nessa was shaking as she signed out at the desk, and Ashley, the receptionist, said, “Nessa, honey, did you get highlights?”

  “No,” Nessa said.

  “It looks really pretty,” she said. “But it could be the smell of the hair coloring that’s getting to the critters.”

  “But I didn’t do anything to my hair,” Nessa insisted.

  Bree had her head cocked, looking at Nessa. “It does look lighter.”

  That night, Nessa stood in front of the bathroom mirror w
ith all the lights on. Ashley was right. Her hair was lighter—or parts of it were, a few streaks were lighter blonde, almost white.

  Nessa slept fitfully and dreamed she was running, but low to the ground, on all fours. Panting.

  Snarling.

  Her skin felt uncomfortable—itchy. She looked at it and then watched in horror as hairs emerged on her forearm, growing quickly. In a panic, Nessa checked her other arm. There was hair there too. She looked at her legs, her head moving from one to another, thinking that this was impossible. She kept rubbing over the hairs with her hands as if she could rub them away.

  But her hands had become large paws, her fingers shrinking, her joints gnarled like a dog’s, fur growing out between them, her nails hard and long. In the dream, she ran to a mirror, checked her reflection and there was hair on her face as well, covering her forehead and cheeks, her eyebrows growing, her jawline disappearing under the thickening fur. Her teeth were longer, her nose smaller, and she felt the full horror of the transformation, reacting in the dream just as she would react if it were real. Her heart pounded, her mind was saying, No, this isn’t possible, her eyes filling with tears, her mouth and throat dry.

  She woke sitting straight up in bed, and had to turn on the light—Delphine rolled over but did not wake up—to make sure her skin was still skin, her face still a face, her hands her own. But still, she couldn’t forget the horror of seeing herself become something she was not. Her skin was tingling and crawling as if fur actually had been sprouting from its pores, her face itching, and she had to resist scratching all over her body.

  It was close to dawn, and she never was able to fully get back to sleep, eventually giving up and heading to the bathroom. Before stepping into the shower, Nessa looked again at her newly lightened hair. And then she noticed something on the top of her shoulder that made her gut tighten and her throat close up. It was a light dusting of fine, white hair.

  She looked all over her body. Her leg hair was longer too, thicker, and again, that same white color. She squeezed her eyes closed. She turned on the shower. She turned off the light.

  And when she got out of the shower, the hair was gone.

  “Um, Mom, why is there dog hair in the shower?” Delphine complained at dinner, glaring from Nate to Nessa to Vivian. Nessa looked down. Easy enough to blame her mom for tracking it in from the vet’s office. She didn’t admit that it might have been hers.

  Later that night, Nessa was watching TV on the couch with Nate. Delphine was using the computer. “Can you do some research for me?” Nessa said. Maybe Delphine could make sense of what felt so confusing to Nessa.

  Without looking up, Delphine said, “Do it yourself. It’s the internet—accessible to all.”

  “Yeah but I’m tired, and you know you’re really great at finding stuff.” This was true. Delphine could do something as simple as googling and take it to the next level. “And you’re also so nice. And very pretty. And I folded your laundry once last month. Remember that?”

  “No,” Delphine said. “But fine. What do you need?”

  “Wolf stuff,” Nessa said. To keep from scaring Delphine, she added, “I need to understand what happened to me. Are there a lot of wolves coming into our part of the state? Are they causing problems for people or whatever? Is anyone else getting bitten?”

  “Okay,” Delphine said.

  “And also.” Nessa cleared her throat. She took a deep breath. “What’s with werewolves?”

  “Werewolves?” Delphine said, spinning around in the desk chair. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s just—” Nessa said. “It’s just something I need to know. It’s not real or anything. Just, in those dreams…” She let her voice trail off.

  Delphine looked at her, clearly wondering if she needed to be worried. “Nessa,” she finally said. She didn’t sound like she’d been able to reach a decision exactly.

  “What?”

  Delphine sat very still, staring at her older sister. “Nothing,” she replied.

  Like the good sister that she was, she gave Nessa a pass. When Delphine turned back to Nessa to make her report, her sister had fallen asleep on the couch.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  During lunch the next day, Nessa went to the library, quickly eating her sandwich on the way. She sat down at a computer terminal and took a deep breath. Would typing the word into the Google search make this real? Would it make her crazy?

  She typed anyway. She typed one word, a general word, a word that didn’t capture everything that was happening to her, but captured enough.

  Wolf

  She read things she knew—that wolves mate for life, raise pups in families, hunt in packs, and rarely kill more than they can eat. She read that wolves avoid humans, even though, thanks to humans, there are very few wolves left, where there used to be thousands. She read things she didn’t know. Wolves can run for miles without tiring; wolves run on their toes, which gives them a longer stride. An adult wolf weighs in at about 175 pounds, but, working in packs, they hunt mostly moose, which weigh 1,000 pounds or more.

  Nessa read that wolves are highly adaptable to different climates and surroundings: forests, grasslands, mountains, swamps, and frozen tundra. She read about wolves using language, the different barks and howls and what they mean. She read about wolves living on the site of the Russian nuclear reactor meltdown at Chernobyl, blocked off to humans for decades. Animals had taken it over, and wolves were thriving again at the top of the food chain.

  Nessa opened twelve browser tabs, taking in all of the info. She furrowed her brow. There were wolf-lovers and wolf-haters, blogging opinions to their hearts’ content.

  But reputable scientific sources were also saying contradictory things. She found out that scientists had been studying wolves on an isolated island in Lake Michigan for five decades. Their reports indicated that wolves never killed for “sport,” eating everything they brought down. But then the Oregon Outdoor Council collected news reports going back years showing times when wolves would obliterate farmers’ sheep herds, and leave whole carcasses behind.

  Do wolves attack humans? The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said no, quoting a wildlife ecologist who’d been studying wolves in Yellowstone Park for sixteen years. But then, elsewhere on the same government website, Nessa found a catalog of human-wolf encounters that did not end well for the humans.

  Nessa read and read, and took notes, and printed pages. Every question seemed to produce not answers, but more questions. Wolves had poor eyesight. Her eyesight was enhanced, almost perfect. She felt like maybe her research needed to veer into comic books and not these scientific sources.

  If wolves had been around for millennia, how was it that science still didn’t seem to have a handle on basic facts about them?

  And if science was so foggy on wolves, how could she possibly expect to find anything about what was actually happening to her?

  Then Nessa felt her blood turn cold. On the fifth page of results following her search for wolves + returning + bite + Michigan, she saw the words “Tether” and “attack.”

  She clicked through and came to a blog post called “Why I Would Move Away from Tether (If I was stupid enough to live there in the first place)” written by a rancher in Wyoming.

  What was someone in Wyoming doing talking about Tether?

  Could there possibly be a town called Tether in Wyoming too?

  No, Nessa saw, this guy was talking about Tether, Michigan. It was right there in the first sentence of his blog entry.

  In the first sentence of his entry was the line: “The best wolf is a dead wolf.” He wrote: “The best wolf is a dead wolf, but if you live anywhere near Tether, MI, chances are getting much more likely the wolf is coming to get you.”

  Nessa read on, all about how wolves coming back into Wyoming had started attacking his sheep herd, and he had started tracking news reports. He had a link to a website cataloging wolf attacks on animals and humans in the United States and Canada.
In the last year, there were eleven attacks on livestock or humans within the Tether town limits, more than any other municipality in the country.

  “Not surprising,” the rancher went on, “given that the Algonquin word for wolf—‘mahigan’—is basically the state name. Don’t give me that BS they teach Michigan children in school that it’s from the Chippewa ‘meicigama,’ for great water, after that big lake they’ve got up there. Which word sounds closer to you?”

  Was she living in a state that was basically named after wolves? Was Tether the epicenter of a wolf-demic, as the rancher said?

  And if she was, why hadn’t she heard anything about it?

  Nessa quickly scouted the Tether Journal’s website. There wasn’t a single report of a wolf attack in the past twelve months. Much less eleven of them. The last mention of any wolf was a sighting at the north end of town four years ago.

  Maybe the rancher was just another conspiracy kook. The internet was full of them.

  But then she thought of Tucker, the dog her mom had treated the night before school started. And of Dr. Kalish’s questions about rabid wolves.

  Why Tether? Why wolves?

  And why her?

  The bell rang, signaling the start of afternoon classes. Nessa carefully erased her browsing history and left.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Friday night before October Homecoming weekend, the cross-country team didn’t have a regular practice. Instead, they had a stretching session in the gym and then watched Chariots of Fire, a movie Coach Hoffman had memorized line for line. Luc slept through it. Hannah looked as nervous as Nessa felt. Cynthia was secretly using her phone.

  The boys’ soccer team must have been having a light practice as well, because about halfway through the movie, Cassian sneaked in to watch it. He slid into the chair next to Cynthia and poked her in the arm. Then he spun around to face the rest of the cross-country team, as if he were at a party and wanted to see a) who was there, and b) who got how funny it was that he had crashed.