Tell the Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

  “Okay, well, what I suggest is that you have a look through some of our costumes. Feel free to try a few on and then let me know what you want. Okay? There’s lots of his ’n’ her stuff back there.”

  We both nodded. The woman unlatched a swinging door that opened up into the rear of the booth.

  “Did you see that?” Toby whispered.

  “See what?”

  “I think that woman thought we were a couple.”

  “Gross,” I said.

  I don’t know how long we spent browsing through the costumes. I tried on a Victorian dress and a medieval one. They looked okay, but in the end I settled on a ruby-red and gold Elizabethan dress. It was low cut, but since I didn’t have any boobs it wasn’t too embarrassing. Toby decided on a Revolutionary War soldier’s uniform. It was blue, and when I told Toby blue was the American color, he said he didn’t care. Plus, he said, the photo would be black and white, so nobody would ever know. I thought he really looked like a soldier in that uniform. Like someone who’d seen all kinds of terrible things. He stood against the wall, with his fake rifle on his shoulder.

  We waited for the woman to get her equipment ready. She set up a tripod, then took a closer look at us.

  “I don’t think you understand,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Well, you have to stick with one era. You can’t go combining different times. See?”

  “It’s okay,” Toby said. His voice was calm, convincing. “We know what we’re doing.”

  “Sir, you don’t seem to understand,” the woman repeated, folding her arms across her chest. “We just don’t allow it. You can’t mix time periods, and that’s that. Like I said, there’s plenty of his ’n’ hers.”

  I looked down at my feet. The Elizabethan shoes they had were too small, so I’d left my heels hanging out. I felt Toby’s hand land on my shoulder and it made me feel like we were in something together. I wasn’t sure I wanted to feel that with him, but right then, with that lady acting so stupid, I did.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I mean, excuse me, but if we’re paying for the photo, why should it make a difference what costumes we choose?”

  “I don’t want to get too technical on you, but there’s the backdrops for one thing. . . .”

  “We don’t care if the backdrop doesn’t match. Choose something halfway between the two of us. We’re really not bothered about the background.” Toby’s voice had lost its soft tone. I could see that the woman wasn’t going to budge.

  “Look, sir, take a look at every single picture we’ve got out front, okay? Tell me if there’s a single one that mixes eras. Okay? Now, I can hear you’re foreign, and I don’t know how they do things where you’re from . . .”

  Toby didn’t know what to say to that. There was a silence. All of us waiting for someone to shift.

  “I’ll change,” I said in a voice that was almost a whisper.

  “What’s that, hon’?” the woman said.

  “I said I’ll do it. I’ll get something colonial.”

  “No, June. This is for you. We’ll find someplace else. There’s got to be a place where we can do whatever we want.”

  But there was no place else. I looked at Toby and had the panicky thought that maybe I would never meet anyone again who would do this stupid thing with me. Never. And then what? And then where would I be?

  “No,” I said. “I want to.” We looked at each other for a second, and then Toby bowed his head.

  “Why do things always have to be like this?” he said. “I’ll do it, then. Give me a minute to change.”

  I nodded and Toby disappeared. The Elizabethan costume didn’t fit him right. It was too short, and the tights made it so I could see how thin his legs were. Too thin. That’s what I thought at first, but then I looked again. It wasn’t as if I’d seen a lot of guys in tights. Especially not skinny guys like Toby. Maybe that’s what their legs looked like. Maybe the stories weren’t true. Maybe he was just an ordinary friend of Finn’s. Not special. Just ordinary, like me.

  The woman apologized for all the fuss, then told us to experiment with different poses while she snapped the pictures. I didn’t know how most of them would turn out. In one, Toby put his bony arm around my shoulder and whispered, “Don’t be afraid, June,” in my ear. Occasionally, Toby would give me a look out of the corner of his eye and it was like he’d known me forever, which was creepy but at the same time kind of hard not to like, and suddenly the whole thing seemed so ridiculous it took everything I had not to burst out laughing.

  “That’s a wrap,” the woman said.

  She told us she’d get the picture to us as soon as she could.

  “After all that, we can’t have it now?” Toby said.

  “Of course not. It has to be processed.”

  Toby looked like a kid who’d just been told he can’t wear his new shoes out of the shoe store.

  “All right, but we need two copies.”

  The woman wrote on a pad. “That won’t be a problem. By the way,” she said, “where are you from?”

  Toby didn’t say anything at first. He looked over at me. Then he squinted and looked the woman straight in the eye. “Someplace very foreign,” he said in a mysterious voice. “Both of us. We’re from far, far away.”

  On the way home, we agreed we’d tell each other one Finn story each. Toby told me about this time Finn talked him into driving to a beach on Cape Cod that he and my mother used to go to on vacation when they were kids. Toby was an awful storyteller. He rambled on, going back to fill in stuff and stumbling over his words and taking big breaks while he figured out exactly how things went. Still, it was okay, because it was stuff about Finn I’d never heard before. The story didn’t really have any point, but it ended with Finn and Toby both being freezing cold because Finn had convinced Toby to sleep out on the beach for the night. By the end I was kind of sorry I’d heard it, because it just made me wish that I had been there too.

  The story took up most of the car ride home, so there was no time for my story, which I was glad about. I’d gotten a brand-new Finn story and I didn’t have to give a thing away.

  I didn’t know what time it was, but I asked Toby to drop me off at the library. I could walk home from there. We sat for a few seconds, not saying anything. There were no clocks or watches in that car, and I thought I might have found my bubble. A small blue bubble where there was no time and Finn might be hiding in the glove compartment. It felt like opening the door would burst everything.

  “Do you want another piece?” Toby held out a chunk of his strawberry gum and I took it.

  “It’s probably way late. I’ll probably be in big trouble.”

  “Here, then.” Toby rolled down his window. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a penny. He pinched it between his thumb and forefinger. Then he popped it into his fist and hurled it out across the parking lot. “For luck,” he said. “Go see if it’s heads.”

  I didn’t want to tell him that it didn’t work that way. That lucky pennies could happen only by accident. I put the folder of sketches in my backpack, then opened the door.

  “Well, bye, and thanks—I guess it was kind of fun.”

  “Come see me, all right? At Finn’s. And if you need anything. Anything at all . . .”

  “You said that last time.”

  “Because I mean it. I do.”

  I closed the door and walked toward the place where the penny had landed. I knew you couldn’t make luck that way, but still I kind of hoped it was heads. I started to run to the spot, but even from a few feet away I could already see it was tails. I bent and picked up the penny anyway. Then I turned to Toby and gave him a smile and the thumbs-up. He didn’t need to know.

  Twenty-Seven

  Greta was the only one home when I got there. Tax season was starting to get into the heavy stage. “Crunch time,” my parents called it, which meant they barely made it home by eight o’clock most nights. Greta was lying on the couch, watchin
g an episode of Fame she had on a videotape. Leroy was standing with his hands on his hips, mouthing off at the ballet teacher as usual.

  Almost a week had gone by since the party, and what happened in the woods had still never come up between us. I still wondered how Greta could have found her way to my exact spot, but there was no way to ask her. Not without giving away everything I did in the woods. I watched her sometimes, when we were waiting for the bus or eating dinner, trying to see if she remembered any of what she’d said, but there was no sign that she did. When she heard me come in that night, she smiled.

  “Big. Trouble.”

  “What?”

  “Well, where have you been?”

  “Why do you care?”

  Something about being out with Toby, about traveling so far from home with nobody knowing, made me feel powerful. I stood there looming over Greta, and suddenly she seemed small and sad. Then she clicked off the TV and sat up straight, and like always she was the one in control again.

  “So?”

  “Library, okay? With Beans. Is that interesting enough for you?”

  A huge smile spread across Greta’s face, and she kept staring at me like she was waiting for me to understand something.

  “What?” I said.

  “So they were having a child prostitute look-alike day down at the library?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She clicked the TV back on and turned away. Then she said, “Nice makeup,” and my heart felt like it was falling right through my stomach. I was still wearing tons of photography makeup. Neither of us had wanted to put it on, but the Playland woman had insisted. Toby wiped his off as soon as it was over, but I didn’t. It wasn’t exactly that I liked the way it looked. It was more that it felt good to look different than I usually did. And, okay, maybe prettier.

  It turned out my parents were having dinner with a client that night, so I ladled a bowl of chicken and rice soup from the crockpot and sat at the kitchen table. It was hard not to march back into the living room and tell Greta all about Toby; I knew it would make her jaw drop to the floor. I would have loved to tell her how he’d asked for me. How he came looking for me. I wanted to open up that folder of sketches and shove them right in Greta’s face and say, “Look. See? I know all kinds of things you don’t.” But of course I couldn’t do that.

  The soup was hot and salty, and I ate it as fast as I could. Then I went straight up to my room and turned on all my candles. I had this set of six flickering electric candles that Woolworth’s was selling out cheap after Christmas last year. The flame was way too orange, but they were the best I could do. My room has two windows, and I put one candle in each. I clustered the rest of them on my desk. When I have my own house I’ll have real candles everywhere. Candelabras on mantelpieces and big candle chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Even if I end up in some poky apartment somewhere, I’ll make it like a whole other time. People will ring my bell and, when I open the door, they won’t be able to believe their eyes.

  I told that to Finn once. We were at an exhibit of sixteenth-century Turkish ceramics at the Met. We were standing in front of these intricately painted blue and white candleholders, and I was telling him exactly how my house would be one day. Finn turned to me, smiling, his eyes bluer than ever, and he said, “You’re a romantic, June.”

  I was standing close to Finn, right up next to him so I wouldn’t miss a word of what he knew about the exhibit. At once I stepped away and blushed so hard I could barely breathe. It felt like all the blood in my body had swum up to my face, leaving the skin around my heart completely transparent.

  “Am not,” I said as fast as I could. I kept my face turned away, scared Finn would see how embarrassed I was. Terrified he’d be able to read every weird thought I’d ever had.

  When I finally glanced back, I saw him giving me a funny look. Just for a second. A little flash of worry shot across his face. Then he smiled, like he was trying to cover it up.

  “A romantic, you barnacle, not lovey-dovey romantic.” He leaned over like he was about to nudge my shoulder with his, but then he pulled away.

  “What’s the difference?” I asked cautiously.

  “Being a romantic means you always see what’s beautiful. What’s good. You don’t want to see the gritty truth of things. You believe everything will turn out right.”

  I breathed out. That wasn’t so bad. I felt the blood ease away from my face.

  “Well, what about you?” I dared to ask Finn. “Are you a romantic?”

  Finn thought about it. He looked right at me, squinting, like he was trying to see into my future. That’s what it felt like. Then he said, “Sometimes. Sometimes I am and sometimes I’m not.”

  I pulled out the folder of sketches and flipped straight to the one with the wolf. The dim light in my room seemed to bring it out even more. Or maybe it was just that I’d seen it before, and my eyes knew to go to the negative space. I traced around the outline with my finger, getting drowsier by the second.

  That night I fell asleep with the folder of sketches under my pillow and my electric candles on, flickering right through the night. I dreamed about the wolves in the woods. I dreamed about them climbing out of the space between me and Greta. I saw them gracefully stepping right out of the portrait and into the real world. One after the other, they shook off their painted selves and turned real, until there was a whole pack. A whole hungry pack running across the crust of snow in the woods. I dreamed I was there. That I could understand their language.

  “You take her heart,” one of them whispered. “I’ll take the eyes.”

  And in the dream I didn’t even run. I stayed exactly where I was, waiting for the wolves to tear me apart.

  Twenty-Eight

  There are two main stories in South Pacific. One has a happy ending and one doesn’t. The one that Bloody Mary is part of is the sad one. In that one, Bloody Mary sets up her daughter Liat with Lieutenant Cable, who’s in the South Pacific on a big secret mission. The daughter is young and beautiful and the two of them fall in love, but Lieutenant Cable won’t marry her, because she’s Polynesian and deep down he’s kind of a racist.

  In the other main story there’s Nellie, this annoyingly chirpy American nurse from Arkansas who falls in love with this older suave French plantation owner named Emile. Emile seems pretty okay, and every time I see that play I can’t even begin to imagine why he would want to marry Nellie, but I guess you’re supposed to believe that love is like that. It turns out Emile is a murderer, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for Nellie. What she has a problem with is that he was married to a Polynesian woman who died and now he has two kids who are half Polynesian. And, like Lieutenant Cable, she’s pretty much of a racist.

  The real question for me is why Lieutenant Cable and Nellie didn’t just get together. Because they would have been a perfect match. I guess the idea is that opposites attract, but I don’t think that’s what it’s like in real life. I think in real life you’d want someone who was as close to you as possible. Someone who could understand exactly the way you thought.

  According to Greta, Bloody Mary is the only one in the whole play who has any sense. She knows everything that happens on those islands.

  “But she’s mean,” I said.

  We were waiting for the bus in the morning, and it was nice because all the spring mud had dried up on that little patch of grass near the mailbox. The sun was bright, and I had to squint and shade my eyes to look at Greta.

  “No, she’s not,” Greta said.

  “Kind of. Well, she twists people into stuff anyway.”

  “No, she doesn’t. She’s just smart. That’s all.”

  “Whatever,” I said, but I was pretty sure most people did think Bloody Mary was mean.

  “Anyway,” Greta said, “that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to hear where you were yesterday.”

  “I told you already. Library and Beans’s, and mind your own beeswax anyway.”


  Greta smiled. “Okay, then. I’ll ask Beans.”

  I didn’t think she would do that, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “Why do you even care?” I said. And I really wanted to know. I really wanted to understand why someone who seemed to hate me so much cared about where I went after school.

  Greta’s smile slipped for a second, then she turned away. The bus rounded the corner and we both looked over to see it swing its great yellow body onto our street. Greta turned back to me and stuck her chin up.

  “I don’t,” she said.

  That day I carried the bank key in one of the little front pockets of my skirt. I wanted to see the portrait after school. I wanted to see how I looked before Finn died. Plus, a vault is like a crypt, and a crypt is like a dungeon, and I wanted to see what something like that looked like.

  The day my mother gave us the keys, she also made me and Greta sign a form so that the bank knew our signatures. To get in we had to show our key and sign something so they would know it was really us. I was worried that my signature wouldn’t look the same. I wasn’t sure when that thing would happen that made it so you always signed your name exactly the same, but it hadn’t happened to me yet. So far I’d only had to sign something three times. Once for a code of conduct for the eighth grade field trip to Philadelphia, once for a pact I made with Beans and Frances Wykoski in fifth grade that we’d never have boyfriends until high school. (Of the three of us, I’m the only one who kept that pact.) And then the bank form. I don’t know what my signature looked like the first two times, but I was pretty sure it didn’t look anything like the one I did for the bank.

  It turned out that I didn’t need to worry, because the man who deals with the bank vault was Dennis Zimmer’s dad, who’s known me since kindergarten.

  “Little Junie Elbus . . .” Mr. Zimmer smiled at me. He had one of those faces that look like a turtle. Something about his upper lip. I couldn’t tell whether he was making fun of me by calling me little, because in fact I was a good two inches taller than he was. Mr. Zimmer was older than most parents, and I thought he was probably just trying to be jokey to pretend like he was younger. He held the door to the stairs open for me.