Misty’s fairy wings lay on the floor, dripping bits of glitter to sparkle in the dust. She didn’t remember bringing them up here, but unsure what to say next, she grabbed them and busied herself pulling them on.
Daniel watched her, then said, “I never read A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But isn’t Puck a guy?”
“The boys were allowed to try out. I beat them.”
Daniel laughed again and pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt. Blowing into her hands, Misty saw how thin her human fingers were, like twigs. She wanted her heavy, ice-striding paws. Daniel took her hands in his. “You were never in another play?” he asked.
“Just the one. Just a dumb thing.” Misty shook her head.
He rubbed warmth into her fingertips and traced his thumb along the lines of her palms. They had to speak slowly, working the words out in their minds, before giving them voice. “You liked it, right? If you’re still wearing your fairy wings. You were good if you beat all the guys.”
Misty shrugged. “Kept getting into trouble. I got into trouble too much and couldn’t do any extracurricular things. Maybe I would have tried out for the next play, but…” She shrugged again. She didn’t want to talk about it.
Misty’s parents had divorced when she’d been five. They remarried a couple of years later, only to have that marriage break apart when she was thirteen. They yelled a lot, but what Misty remembered were the long stretches of empty, angry nothing, the trip-wire-tense silence that made her afraid to speak herself.
Misty remembered acting out at school, screaming at teachers for the smallest reasons or for no reason at all. She remembered hiding in her room one night, slashing the head off her old teddy bear, yanking her polyester stuffing out, and never uttering a sound because she was scared and helpless and mad and there wasn’t anything else she could do.
She wouldn’t have survived without Marc. He sang songs and made dumb jokes just to smash the horrible quiet. Marc was the best brother ever. Misty had thanked God for giving her Marc at least as many times as she’d punched him in the neck.
And then Misty’s English teacher asked her to be in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She’d been young, not much older than Misty herself, and eager to challenge her students. Misty hadn’t known anything about the play except that it would let her escape her house for a few hours every week.
She got a part and threw herself into it. She painted sets and memorized entrance cues. When the school closed, she rode the bus to the library or just rode around until dark. Script in her hands, Misty taught her tongue and lips the inflections of the Elizabethan English.
Opening night, Misty forgot all her lines. She stood backstage, just trying to not puke on herself. Her cue came. She stepped into the glare of the spotlight, squinting at the silhouetted audience. They sat shuffling-quiet and waiting. She choked out the first word. Then the second. The third. And then the whole rhythmic rise and fall flowed out on her breath.
The King doth keep his revels here to-night Take heed the Queen come not within his sight; For Oheron is passing fell and wrath. Because that she, as her attendant, hath a lovely hoy, stolen from an Indian king….
It hadn’t felt like reciting from a script. Misty vanished. Puck schemed and flirted and didn’t know she was just a character in a play.
The audience applauded when she came out to take her bow. Misty’s mom had beamed. She remembered her dad wiping his eyes.
They split up not long after that. Misty’s mom moved them to the Southside. She had to get a second job, and Misty and Marc had to grow up fast.
Misty would have stayed in Puck’s enchanted forest forever if she could. The play ended, though, and she returned to the real world, where she was a stray, where she was a mutt, where she could never act soft or silly because the spoiled little hand-lickers would turn vicious the moment they thought she couldn’t defend herself.
But Misty didn’t want to talk about any of that.
Daniel’s eyes had drifted closed again. “Wake up. C’mon.” She shook him until they snapped open. “Italy or Greece first?”
“Huh?”
Misty sighed and settled back into the crook of his shoulder. “After graduation. Should we go to Italy or Greece first?”
“Am I coming with you now?”
“You don’t have any other plans after graduation, right?”
Daniel was quiet for a moment, then nodded. “Right.”
“Well then? I’m headed to Europe. I’m offering to let you tag along. If you want to waste your life hanging around here, fine.”
Daniel nodded. “I think England would be the best place to start. Give us a chance to get used to a foreign country, but they speak English and have Coke, so it’s not like foreign, foreign.”
“That’s a good idea. Start there, then go south. What’s cool in England?”
While they talked, Misty pressed herself against Daniel’s warmth. She decided they could make the overgrown furnace complex their new enchanted forest. The fact that it was abandoned and mostly forgotten by the outside world only made it more magical.
Their hunger finally grew too sharp to ignore. Going back to the casting shed, they found Val and Eric had already left. Marc was asleep in the back of the Lincoln, an arm draped across his eyes. Without waking him up, Daniel and Misty left the furnace’s solitude, hushed except the for songs of birds, and ventured back into the rush of the city.
They headed to Milo’s. A Milo’s burger was a skimpy, greasy thing drowned in barbecue sauce. They made most people queasy, but a small segment of Birmingham’s population craved them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Misty was part of that dedicated minority, and since last night, Daniel realized he was too. Walking into the restaurant, he smelled the deep-fat fryers and his mouth watered. He ordered five, sucked them down one after another, then ordered three more.
Afterward, Daniel drove Misty home. He was learning Misty’s tics. When he noticed her tugging on her lip ring, Daniel knew she wanted to ask something but was nervous. His words stumbled over themselves to reassure her. “So when can we go prowling again?”
“Not sure.” She quit playing with her lip ring. Relief softened her features. “Don’t worry. We always find a few hours to get away.”
As Daniel pulled into her parking lot, Misty grabbed her fairy wings from the backseat. She kissed him and whispered “I love you” again.
Daniel managed to get it out a little smoother the second time and relished Misty’s guileless smile when he did.
Heading home, Daniel rubbed his eyes to keep himself awake and sorted through everything that had happened last night. It was hard giving up his voice. Humans had an urge to talk, even though most of what they said was meaningless.
But in exchange, the rot-eater god gave its wolves sharpened perception and the stamina to run for hours. Driving through the sleepy Saturday morning, Daniel felt sorry for the people around him. They would go from cradle to grave with the world dulled by their anemic senses, as if their heads were muffled in gauze.
There was a deeper change too. Not speaking, not able to process the meaning of speech, opened a chasm of silence between the pack and humans. Daniel remembered the cop. The wolves hadn’t cared about the man; they had no respect for his authority and no concern for his safety. The cop had been only a threat to drive back.
Daniel had shifted back into human skin once they’d returned to the furnace. The disguise had been thin, though. He’d smelled Misty, felt how warm she was, and didn’t care that he’d held back those same urges a week ago or why. Amanita muscara obliterated everything except the sensations of two bodies pressed together in the cold.
At first, Misty had been lost to those sensations too. As more of her humanity returned, though, the more she wanted besides animal rutting. She’d daydreamed about Italy and elsewhere. She’d told Daniel she loved him.
Daniel didn’t know if he loved Misty or not. He’d said he did because her scent had been thick on his clothes and there wasn
’t anything else he could say without crushing her. Remembering how to speak, he’d remembered how to lie, too.
But while Misty had talked about far-away countries, Daniel found himself wondering if he could ever really give up the shooting star’s clear trajectory for the right to roam. Not for a few dark hours, but day and night forever.
Pulling over a block from his house, Daniel unbuckled his tanker boots. Grime from the furnace covered his jeans and hoodie. He took clean clothes and his sneakers out of his book bag. A minute later, trying to ignore how tight the fresh clothes seemed, Daniel walked through his front door and back into his normal life.
CHAPTER 10
Lying on the living room floor, Daniel helped Mack with his Sunday school project, making a whale puppet from an envelope along with a little paper Jonah for it to swallow.
“I forget. What color are whales?” Daniel asked.
“Red!”
“A red whale.” He reached for the Magic Markers.
“With blue dots.”
Their mom came from the kitchen with the portable phone in her hand. “That was your aunt Leslie. Is Keith going out with Angie?”
“Yeah.”
“Your Angie?”
“Not anymore.”
Mack talked about whales in his usual happy jabber. Neither Daniel or his mom listened.
“Since when? What happened?”
“Since a few weeks ago, and nothing happened. It wasn’t working out.” Daniel busied himself filling in blue circles across the whale. “Are these dots big enough?”
“No. They have to be big. Big like this.” Mack spread his arms wide.
“So who have you been spending all your time on the phone with lately?”
Daniel sighed. “A girl named Misty.”
“Misty what?”
“Sandlin. You don’t know her.”
“But you’re dating now?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And that’s it. I’m seeing a girl named Misty. Keith’s hooked up with Angie. You’re all caught up” Daniel kept coloring. His mom stared at the back of his head for a few seconds, then walked out of the room without another word.
The snap in Daniel’s voice had silenced Mack, too. Daniel handed him a red marker. “Here. Start coloring his head, I’ll start at the tail, and we’ll meet in the middle, okay?”
In the recommendation letter Mr. Fine had written to Cornell, the vice-principal had praised, among Daniel’s other virtues, his organizational skills. For years, his life had run on multiple timetables, hours set aside for studying and homework, for practices and games, for church, student rep meetings, and summer college application workshops. Some nights, Daniel lay awake, slicing the next day or week or month into neat blocks of time. After all that, leading a double life—keeping two schedules from colliding instead of half a dozen—was no sweat.
He needed to fill out a transcript form so the school could send his final grades to Cornell. To make sure none of the pack saw him, Daniel waited until they’d all sat down to lunch, said he needed to piss, then rushed to the main office. At home, Daniel planned his escapes days in advance, thinking up stories, covering his tracks, and once, handing his dad a permission slip for an invented debate tournament. And while his parents slept, the pack’s sign closed like teeth around Southside.
Their howls scraped rooftops and reached a pit-deep fear in human chests. It was a fear rooted in the time before cities, when people huddled around fires, the watching darkness on every side. Now, they gathered beneath electric lights, but either way, the wolves’ call made skin prickle with gooseflesh. Eyes darted around. Steps quickened.
Shifting into wolf skin, though, had nothing on the mysterious change that overtook a soul between Saturday night and Sunday morning.
In crumbling Birmingham, the churches stood as forts against the rot-eater god. The decay spreading around them only inspired congregations to sing louder, to offer up more, to scrub and polish the Lord’s houses until they shone. While sunlight peered through jewel-toned windows, staining his skin lavender and pink, Daniel lifted his voice alongside his brothers and sisters in Christ.
The first week of Lent, Pastor Crowell reached out to Daniel on the church steps after service. “Well, young man?” he asked, squeezing Daniel’s shoulder with his thin hand. “Your dad mentioned you got some good news recently.”
“Uh, yeah.” The milling congregation started glancing over.
“Yeah? Something about college, am I right?”
“Yeah, I got into Cornell.”
“Daniel, that’s just wonderful. We all knew you were somebody amazing. We can’t wait until you get out there and show the whole world.”
Mrs. Applebee, Daniel’s second-grade teacher, hugged him. Friends, the youth minister, and people Daniel barely knew jostled to clap him on the back and congratulate him.
“I’m not sure we can let him go or not,” Pastor Crowell told his parents. “You know how many girls sign up for our youth missions because Daniel’s going to be there?”
Everybody laughed at that, and the press of smiling faces made Daniel smile back. He shook everybody’s hand, thanked them for their prayers, and told them he wanted to study law. He tried not to look at the gas station across from the church, where the pack’s sign stared back from the painted cinder blocks.
On the car ride home, his mom turned to look at him in the backseat. “That was nice, wasn’t it? You know how much Brother Crowell thinks of you.”
Daniel nodded, then cracked the window. His mom’s perfume was supposed to smell like honeysuckle. To the wolf, though, the harsh chemicals weren’t anything like the real honeysuckle blooming across the furnace. They actually made Daniel dry-throated and a little sick. Or maybe that was from being reminded he wasn’t who people thought he was anymore, that he wasn’t sure himself.
After getting home, Daniel decided to meet Bwana and Spence at the park. He’d barely seen them since he’d started prowling with the pack.
They got into a game with some middle-schoolers, with Bwana playing center on one team and Daniel and Spence anchoring the other. The ball was a perfect street ball. The color and slickness of mud, it made a slightly dull whap against the concrete. After the eighth graders went home, Daniel and his friends played horse, laughed over Keith dating Angie, and talked about Spence going to UAB.
Spence still had an application at Florida State, but the University of Alabama at Birmingham had offered him a full ride, some scholarship meant to keep the city’s best and brightest from leaving. Bwana thought it was absurd that Spence would struggle to keep up a 3.8 GPA, then matriculate to a college four blocks from his house.
“It’s not going to be like going to college at all. You already take chemistry there.” McCammon High had a good relationship with UAB, and their chemistry classes occasionally used the college’s lab facilities.
“I know, I know.” Spence shot left-handed from the free throw line and missed. Tossing the ball to Daniel, he said, “I’m going to wait until I hear from Florida, but UAB has a good engineering program, I’ll have money to do something on Saturday nights besides eat cold pizza and beat off like you two broke fucks, and—”
“And if you forget your lunch, your mom can just bring it up,” Daniel added. “She’ll be, like, ’Sorry to interrupt, Professor, but my baby gets grouchy without his pudding cup.’”
“And I’ll still be able to go out with Dad on jobs sometimes,” Spence went on. “Oh, yeah. He wants to know if you’re going to work with us this summer.”
Spence’s dad owned Greensweep Landscaping. Daniel had worked for him over the last two summers, planting trees and hauling rolls of sod.
“Um, I’m not sure if I can or not.” Daniel wiped his face with the front of his shirt. “I may be swamped getting ready for school.”
“Yeah.” Spence gave him a sly smile. “And we know who you’ll be getting busy—I mean getting ready—with.”
; Bwana laughed. “Actually, we’ve got a question about Misty.”
Spence stopped dribbling. “No, no. Don’t ask him that.”
“What is it?” Daniel asked.
“Well, we were wondering. Does Misty have brown nipples like a black girl or pink nipples like a white girl.”
The wolf bristled. “Fuck off.”
“C’mon. We’re friends, right?” Bwana wrapped an arm around Daniel’s shoulders. “I’m just curious. I’d hook up with her either way.”
“You’d hook up with her if she had one of each,” Spence said.
“Is that it? Damn, Danny Boy, it’d be like she was winking.”
Daniel sank a fist into Bwana’s stomach, doubling him over. Fingers digging into the nape of Bwana’s neck, Daniel pushed him down.
Spence jumped back. “Shit. Relax, Daniel. Shit.”
On his knees, Bwana sputtered, “Sorry. I’m sorry, okay?”
Daniel let him go.
“He was just joking around! Christ! Where the fuck’s your head at?” Furious, Spence whipped the ball at Daniel’s chest. Daniel batted it away and walked off the court. Daniel realized he’d been growling deep in his throat, and he’d been ready to hurt Bwana more if he hadn’t submitted. Crescents of blood dried under his fingernails.
Bwana had just been joking around. Daniel had told him and Spence juicy particulars about almost every girl he’d hooked up with. He knew plenty about Geneva and Claire. Bwana had just wanted to swap the same dumb, dirty chatter they’d swapped since ninth grade.
But Misty was different; she was part of the pack. Or maybe Daniel was different now. Or maybe, after weeks of seething at Daniel’s human self, the wolf had been ready to lash out at any hand-licker.
The wolf or the shooting star. It was getting harder to remember which one was his real shape and which was only a disguise.
Since becoming a wolf, Misty had stopped going to church with Marc, Grampa, and Nana. She felt guilty about that but liked being home when her mom got off work. Misty usually made breakfast while her mom showered and, if she was heading to her dispatching job, changed into her uniform.
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