Had I become Alex in that moment? I didn’t feel angry, or hateful, or capable of treating those who loved me, with contempt. Guess I assumed that if I was in Alex’s realm now that I was supposed to feel that way. I just felt different. When I made it home, I went straight up to my room. I searched the internet for anything on werewolves I could find. I searched and read until I could no longer keep my eyes open and sleep took me sometime after four in the morning.
“You fell asleep there?” Beverlee was standing somewhere in my room. “Adria, why don’t you get in your bed for an hour; you’re going to get a crick in your neck.”
I was barely awake and it took a minute to understand who she was and what she was talking about. I lifted my head from the desk and felt a cool draft of air brush my face where drool had pooled under my cheek. I closed the laptop where there had to be twenty web pages open, which I didn’t want Beverlee to see. She probably would’ve thought nothing of it, but I was panicked by privacy as if her seeing a simple web page would give everything away.
“Do you want some breakfast? I made pancakes.”
I looked over at the clock and then the window. The sun much higher than it usually was. I was late for school. I jerked awake fully then and started to rush around getting ready.
“Adria,” Beverlee said, “dentist appointment at nine, remember? I’ll drop you off at school afterwards.”
I went through the entire day in a haze. I sat with my regular friends at lunch and they noticed I wasn’t myself though I tried not to make it so obvious. It was easy to dodge their questions simply by nodding Yes or No and faking a yawn every now and then to make it seem like I just needed some sleep. But as the days wore on, hiding my issues became more unavoidable. A little more than a month and already rumors were going around about me, which made it to Beverlee’s ears at the grocery store.
“I don’t want you to hold a grudge against me for asking you this, Adria,” Beverlee said standing in the doorway of my bedroom one Saturday afternoon, “but it’s important that I talk to you about it.”
“I’m not on drugs, Beverlee,” I said, a step ahead of her. “I’ll take a drug test if you want me to.”
I sat on my bed with my back pressed against the headboard, a pile of books beside me, the laptop on the other side and a spiral tablet in my lap.
She walked further inside and sat on the end of my bed.
“I believe you,” she said, “and a drug test isn’t necessary to prove it, but will you tell me what’s going on with you lately?” She reached out and touched my ankle. “I thought you were warming up to us. You seemed great and then just like that you were hiding yourself upstairs like your sister.” She paused as though waiting for me to look at her while speaking and I did finally look away from the tablet. “Did something happen at school? Did I do something? Do you miss your mom? I know you must miss her, but I’m here for you if you need someone to talk to. You know that, right?”
I hated her for being so likable. It made me feel guilty for giving her reason to ask such questions and worry about me as much as she was.
Placing the tablet beside me on the bed, I gave her my full attention. The delicate lines around her lips curved subtly as she looked at me, softening the worried expression on her face just a bit. She wore a white long-sleeved button-up shirt with tiny blue flowers sprinkled all over the fabric. Beverlee reminded me of my mom; the way my mom used to look at me before she succumbed to that strange masochist lifestyle.
I did miss my mom. But I had been missing her for at least six years.
“It’s nothing you did,” I said. “I’m grateful you and Uncle Carl gave us a place to live. I know Alex is too, but she’s just taking things harder and I’m sorry for the way she’s treated you.” I smiled softly at Beverlee. “I’ll be fine. I’m just missing home a little, but I’ll be fine. I promise.”
It did bother me that my mom hadn’t called once to talk to us, but that was something I tried my hardest not to think about.
Beverlee returned the smile and then looked at the stack of books beside me with an inevitable curiosity.
“My thing was vampires when I was your age,” she said, reaching over and taking The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shape-Shifting Beings into her hand. She began flipping through its pages. “Interview with the Vampire, The Lost Boys,” she added as if to question my knowledge of them.
She placed the book back down. “But I guess maybe werewolves are the thing now.”
“Uhhh, not really,” I said, completely uncomfortable with the conversation. “I’m just reading it because I...well I have to write a short story for my Literature class and decided to do mine on werewolves.”
“That sounds interesting. I’d like to read it when you’re done.”
I knew my lies would get me into trouble eventually.
“I’ve always found them interesting myself,” she added.
“Werewolves?”
“Uh huh,” she said. She tapped the book with the tip of her finger. “Never thought they were scary though. Nothing scary about turning into a wolf. Kind of cool, actually.”
Oh god. Beverlee was thinking of the wrong sort of ‘werewolf’ here.
I just played it off.
Beverlee patted me on the leg and stood. “I do feel better than before I came up here,” she said. “We’re really glad to have you and Alex here; don’t forget that.”
I spent the entire Saturday in my room, reading and surfing the net, but when I realized I wasn’t any closer to finding out anything more about ‘real’ werewolves than when I started, I put the books away and turned the laptop off completely. I don’t know what I was trying to find, but I was beyond frustrated with it all. What did I expect? Werewolves weren’t supposed to be real and researching them would be like researching UFO’s. There would be a book here and there about the possibility of their existence, eyewitness accounts that no one ever took seriously. Old village myths from centuries ago and random names of some professor or ‘expert’ who only the crazy truly believed in their research. After all, sane people don’t believe in the supernatural. Normal people believe what the majority believe and everything else is fiction. Right?
It was late, after eleven o’clock when I heard Alex stirring in her room. There wasn’t anything unusual about that since she made it a habit to actually come out of her room after Uncle Carl and Beverlee had gone to bed. Her footsteps faded down the stairs and I waited, listening. When she never came back up, my interest grew. The routine was usually to rummage the kitchen for something to eat and sometimes she would turn the TV on for a few minutes before heading back upstairs.
Still nothing.
And then something instinctive compelled me to look out my bedroom window. I saw Alex, dressed in only her gown, walking briskly behind the house and disappearing through the trees.
I slipped on my shoes quickly, grabbed my coat and followed.
I let the back screen door shut softly behind me and I leapt down the back steps, taking two at a time. The moment my thin Converse shoes hit the frigid ground, I regretted not doubling-up on socks and grabbing my hat and gloves while I was at it. I sucked in cold air as I ran, quickly realizing that my lungs were better off immobile, at least until I could breathe into the warm confines of my coat sleeve. My eyes burned; the layer of moisture coating them, stripped away by the cold October air.
Dashing into the woods, I felt swallowed up by the immediate darkness. The wind whipped through the trees and bit the back of my neck and the bare skin around my ankles. I kept running, over brush and limbs and toward a thin stream of water, slowing down only enough to gauge my distance before leaping over it.
Splash! I never saw the second sliver of black water until it was too late. My feet were soaked to my shins and the bitter cold stung my legs like thousands of needles.
But I kept running.
I knew Alex was just ahead of me. I had heard the same splash of water a minute before I found it.
My run finally came to a slow crawl. I could see Alex through the trees; the length of her shiny, dark hair glistening faintly like a spider’s web.
I stayed low behind the trees and off the makeshift path that was easy to lose as it was already so covered with leaves. The darkness engulfed me and the moonlight could hardly penetrate the veil of nak*d trees that stood so thickly together. I jumped and nearly shrieked when an animal darted past—I wasn’t afraid until that happened. The memory of the night in Georgia came back to haunt me in the worst moment, while I was practically all alone in the darkness of a deep, never-ending forest. Because of that fear, I never went far enough into the woods to let the house disappear from my line of sight.
But I pressed on slowly.
I could still hear Alex’s movements out ahead, though they seemed fainter. Her feet shuffled through dead leaves. Low tree branches snapped as she pushed her way through them. One snapped under my feet as well and I froze, but Alex never looked back. She continued her graceful trek through the forest as if she knew every downed limb and ankle-spraining crevice without having to mind her footing.
Several long minutes in and I could see a small clearing out ahead, bathed by the moonlight. Alex slowed to a delicate walk as she got closer. I stopped and crouched next to a tree, trying to stay warm and failing miserably. The only part of me that felt heat was the skin around my mouth and the tops of my fingers as I continued to breathe deeply into my sleeve.
Alex stepped softly around a maze of young trees. Faintly, I noticed that she was barefoot as she tiptoed over a blanket of leaves and dirt. I could see the white of her feet stained by a tenuous layer of mud. She entered the clearing where there was just enough light to see the outline of her gown and her nak*d form underneath it. I wondered how it was that she didn’t seem cold, though she wore less than I did.
She reached out her hands in an unusual gesture then.
It appeared she was talking to someone. An erotic undertone in her movements was completely odd to me. I tried harder to penetrate the darkness with my eyes, needing proof that this girl was really my sister, Alexandra Dawson. I began to wonder....
I rose to my feet and crept further in until I noticed another figure and I stopped solid, sucking in more bitter air with one unexpected gasp.
He placed his hands on each side of Alex’s face, her cheeks gently swallowed up by them. And then his lips covered hers. A boyfriend? No, something about this was different, off. The way he seemed to guide her movements as if controlling her, how she moaned simply by his fingertips brushing against her shoulders. I watched, feeling my insides twist into something hard. Vehemently worried about my sister in this place, this uncharacteristic situation, I intended to step out from my hiding spot and let this guy know she was not alone.
But then a second and third figure emerged from the darkness, stopping me in a fearful jolt.
The first one grabbed Alex protectively and pulled her closer. The others circled them almost ceremoniously it seemed, their necks craning as they appeared to inhale deeply of the air. I heard a few words amidst broken sentences, but nothing made sense to me. I slung the hood off my head and turned a bare ear toward them, hoping to hear something, anything that I could at least attempt to decipher. I got nothing but a blast of cold air against the side of my face.