“Cool.” I paused. “Homework seems really lame after all this.”
“Homework is always lame, Sophie.”
* * *
“So, you can come over today?” I asked Jules the next day.
She sighed.
“Or not.”
“More…” She looked around. “Secret stuff.”
“Oh. Yeah. It’s only been a few days, I guess. Lots to learn.”
Jules gave me a sympathetic look before heading off to second period. I stuffed down my feelings of resentment, wishing something very odd.
I wished they’d just been some weird cult.
I did get an e-mail from her later that night before bed, when I checked my in-box one more time.
However much fun you’re having doing homework or whatever, I bet it’s not nearly as fun as phasing with a bunch of boys and all the while making sure they don’t get a look at you naked.
I laughed, feeling less lonely.
* * *
Jules met me at my locker Friday morning, looking as tired as could be.
“Rough night?” I asked with a small smile on my face.
She shook her head, her eyes happier than her face. “What exactly are you implying, Sophie Todd?”
I shrugged innocently. “You did e-mail that you were with a bunch of guys.”
“Yes, and they would never be worth the lack of sleep.” She yawned and stretched. “How was your night?”
“I’m sure less exciting. But I have something for you.” I dug into my bag, searching for the familiar contours. I pulled it out. “Here.”
The wolf figurine had synthetic gray and white fur. Not like the ones that Ezra did.
Jules gave me a weird look. “Um…thank you?”
I laughed. “I found it on one of my shelves at home. When my folks and I travel, I tend to buy some random souvenir and that’s from Yellowstone National Park. About two years go.” I pointed to its face. “It seemed sweet.”
“You’re giving me a wolf?” she asked, trying not to laugh.
“Made me think of you. Although you’re prettier than this guy. You don’t have to take it if you don’t want it. I thought maybe he’d guard your locker or desk or something.”
She shook her head, grinning. “You really are strange sometimes.” She slipped the wolf into the front pocket of her backpack.
“It’s my brain. It goes places without my permission.” I closed my locker. “So, more pack stuff tonight?”
She shot me a warning look as we headed to English. “Yeah.”
“More practice?” I wrapped my arm around her shoulders. My hands were down to just a few Band-Aids over the deepest cuts.
“I can’t tell you.” She looked regretful.
I dropped my arm. “Oh.”
“Not that I know all that much. But I can’t tell you.”
“Sure. ’Course.” I followed her into English, waves of abandonment breaking over me again. They seemed worse this time.
Later in the day, Jules had her sweater tied around her waist, which surprised me. Not that I paid all that much attention to clothing or the wearing of it, but it seemed out of character.
“Jules?”
She emitted a low growl.
I stopped. “Um, what’s wrong?”
Her shoulders slumped, and she lifted the sweater to show me her backside. Pinkish red marks streaked haphazardly the seat and upper legs of her jeans.
“Period?”
She dropped the sweater. “No. Lipstick.” The growl was still there in her voice.
“But you don’t wear lipstick.” She didn’t wear any makeup actually.
“No kidding. State the obvious.” She took a deep breath. “Sorry.”
I nodded, accepting it.
“It was on my seat in last class.” She slammed her locker door.
“Maybe someone got bored and played with it?”
“Like it was an accident? We always sit in the same seats in that class. Someone knew.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. She growled again.
“Humans don’t sound like that.”
“I know!” She closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose like she had a headache. “I know. Sorry.”
I looped arms with her. “Walk me to my car?”
A reluctant smile played on her lips. “OK.”
* * *
I called Jules after dinner only to get her voice mail. That I knew why she disappeared without her phone and that she wasn’t just ditching me or ignoring me was good, but it still hurt.
I finished my homework and went downstairs to see Mom and Dad in our backyard playing badminton. They’d turned on some camping lanterns and were drinking wine while attempting to hit a birdie. I smiled and joined them. To play badminton, not drink wine. Slightly ran around trying to catch the birdie, but she really wasn’t the best at it.
“You’re home,” Dad said.
“You saw me at dinner,” I replied, sitting in a wicker chair and watching as Mom missed the perfect serve Dad hit. “Good job, Mom.”
“Hush,” she answered good-naturedly. “Would you like to help me out then?”
I chuckled and grabbed an extra racket and walked over to Mom’s side, scooping up the birdie from the ground as I did.
“I thought you’d be off to see your friend, Julia.” Dad was notoriously bad with names.
“Jules, Dad. Nah. She had something with the family tonight.” That sounded not too lie-like.
“How’s it going for her? Being there?”
Dad and Mom both stopped playing to look at me.
“Um, OK. You know, there’s stuff, but she seems to like them better than her other foster families.” At least before everything had come out.
“And you’re keeping up your grades?” Dad again.
I sighed, tossing up the birdie and actually hitting it. Right into the net. “Of course.”
“Good.” He jogged over and picked it up, moving backward to set up another serve. “We miss you.”
I looked at him, surprised. Then over at Mom who seemed just as surprised at Dad’s comment.
“Well, um—”
“Honey, it’s fine,” Mom said. “We’re used to you being with us. It’s good that you have a friend in Juliet.”
Dad nodded. “It’s just my little girl is growing up. Soon, you’ll be too cool for your old dad.”
“Daaad…” I felt a twinge in my heart. Things were changing. My life was drastically different than last year. Than a week ago. And I couldn’t tell my parents why. They just thought I was growing independent and pulling away like a typical teenager.
If only they knew.
“Soon there will be boys lining up at the door. I’ll have to get a shotgun to clean when they show up.” Dad smiled at me, his eyes crinkling up at the sides.
“I don’t think that’s an immediate problem,” I told him, mock serious. “But I’ll give you full warning if the herd of boys appear.”
“You do that.” And he tossed up the birdie, sending over another perfect serve. Mom reached over and squeezed my hand before running to hit the birdie.
I told myself that I wasn’t lying to them. I just wasn’t out and out telling them. If they asked, “Do you know any shifters?” I would answer truthfully.
Pretty sure no parent would ever ask that. But I sent up a preventative prayer just in case.
* * *
Jules texted me to come out on Saturday to work on
Hamlet
essay topics. So after breakfast and cleaning up my room, I headed out. The weather was just beginning to get chilly during the day, which seemed early as it wasn’t even October yet. But I still drove with my windows down, not caring that my hair would be beyond tangled when I got there.
Jules wasn’t downstairs when I arrived, but Naomi was. She sat in front of the television, remote in hand.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“So, how are you?” I should have just gone upstairs to find Jules, but it was ingrained in me. To be polite. Even to Naomi.
I moved over to look at the DVDs underneath the television. I had this habit of investigating people’s DVD collections when I went to their houses. Probably an odd way of judging someone, but if they had one musical I deemed them OK in my book.
“Fine.”
I flipped through the DVDs, a lot of action films. On one side were some ones just in clear plastic cases. “So, do you turn into a white wolf, like is that only females or—”
“I don’t turn white,” she snapped. “That’s just her. Most of us turn whatever color our hair is. She’s the weird one.”
“She’s not weird.” Technically they all were. I should have said something like, ‘what’s wrong with weird?’ “So you turn golden like Ezra?”
She gave me a smug look. “We look nearly alike, except I’m prettier.”
I forced a smile. “That makes sense.” Did it really? I never had trouble talking to other girls. Naomi made me feel edgy.
She snorted. “Must be nice to have someone to share the secret with.” She noticed my DVD investigation. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, um.” I picked up one of the plastic cases. “M. Reade,” I read aloud. “Home movies?”
She chuckled cynically. “Yeah, right. It’s him phasing. We have one for each of us. Something about keeping it for records or training. It was Nick’s idea. They’ll probably do one of her now.” The way she said “her” was so angry I couldn’t think of anything to say. “She’s upstairs.”
I’d been dismissed. “OK. Good to see you.” Kind of a lie, but I felt bad for Naomi right then. It had to be tough being the only girl of the pack. Pre-Jules anyway. I stuck the DVD back.
I didn’t get any response so I started up the stairs. I could hear music coming from Jules’s room. She seemed to prefer mellow music, like folk. I was about fifteen feet away from her door when I heard from behind it, “Come in, Soph.”
I opened the door. “And you heard me? Over your music?”
“I smelled you actually.” She was sitting at the window. She’d gotten a blue beanbag chair and had set it so she could look out the window. Which, because Mr. Varden luckily was a carpenter-type guy, had been fixed. Only a week ago Jules had broken it. So much had happened since then.
She grinned at me. “You have a certain scent.”
“Great. What do I smell like?” I asked, sitting on the end of her bed. Please be something nice and not related to BO.
“It’s funny. I never noticed before, ’cause I never thought about it, but once you didn’t use perfumes anymore, ’cause you did stop, it was like you had this nice aroma. Like sunshine and fresh grass.” She shrugged.
“Nothing flowery?” And another weird smelly Sophie conversation. “Or feminine?”
She laughed. “No, but trust me, the perfumes were too much. Why did you stop?”
“Oh, um, Ezra…” I trailed off. That’s why he’d said that stuff. The really weird conversation after my shower. I’d tossed my perfumes that night when I’d gotten home. Then I remembered that Jules was still waiting for my answer. “He said something, and I felt weird, and I have no idea.”
“Yeah, our noses are really sensitive. So they say. I don’t really have another nose to compare it with.” She stood up. “So. I was thinking. It’s nice out. And I think we could understand
Hamlet
way better if we were at Fangorn.”
I chuckled. “I think you are very wise.”
We got to our hideout with no Ezra lurking, and I plopped down on the floor, pulling out my copy of
Hamlet
and my notebook. Jules still stood.
“What are you doing?”
“One sec. Wait here.” She dropped her bag and ran down the outside stairs.
I didn’t move, confused, but went back to my notebook and opened a blank page, titling it “Topic Ideas.” After about three ideas written down, I realized Jules hadn’t come back.
“Jules?” I walked to the stairs. I looked around, then saw a flash of white. I froze. “Jules?” I started down the stairs.
I stopped dead in my tracks when a gorgeous white wolf trotted up to the bottom of the staircase and looked up with pale blue eyes.
“You phased,” I stated the obvious, walking carefully. I wasn’t sure how much Jules was in the wolf’s brain.
I put out my hand timidly and without even sniffing it, she licked it. I laughed. “OK, that’s gross.” I wiped my hand on my jeans. “But here you are. Wolfy.” I petted her head. “Ooo, and you’re soft.” I scratched behind her ears like Slightly always liked. She gave me a doggy grin. I sat on the second to last stair and looked at her. “This is incredible. I mean, the eyes are totally you, but…you’re a wolf.”
She rolled her eyes at me.
“So you can understand me, you just can’t talk to me.”
She howled, making me jump up a stair. She wagged her tail when she was done.
“OK, so you talk like that. That’s just scary.”
She snorted and scampered away toward the trees. I followed, hearing the bone-cracking sound.
Jules’s head popped around a tree. “I really wish the nudity wasn’t a part of it.” She emerged in a T-shirt, buttoning and zipping her jeans. “But I guess, how could clothes work into it?” She stopped. “So?”
“It was a pretty one-sided conversation.”
She laughed. “Didn’t freak you out too bad, did I?”
“No… So you think with your human brain?”
She cocked her head to the side. “Now, yes. Before, when I didn’t know…I couldn’t remember anything. It’s really hard to explain. I feel both sides of me. Human and wolf. You probably don’t get this stuff. I wouldn’t.”
“You can tell me anything,” I said, smiling. “I might not completely understand, but I want to know.”
“I know that it’s you. But you look different. More dreamlike, the colors are different. I’m not good at explaining it.” She walked back toward the tower. “But you know, my wolf side likes you now. You don’t feel like a threat.”
“Was I ever?” I followed her up the stairs.
“The night you came to the house, I didn’t know anything. I wasn’t here.” She tapped her head, walking up the stairs backward. “I don’t have anyone to talk about it with. I mean, the rest of them have known for years.”
“What about Naomi?”
Jules gagged. “What about her?”
“You’re both female shifters. Maybe you could talk about stuff with her?” Not that she was at all friendly.
“And I’d rather dance on spikes, barefoot.” She looked at me for a long while. “Why are you still here?”