Very Superstitious

by Delany, Shannon

  She’s not real. You’ve slept, like, three hours in as many days. You’re hallucinating. Just go back to the truck and try to start it. If you can’t, you’re probably close enough to walk to Uncle Jimmy’s by now.

  “Do you think you’ll actually find your uncle at that address? The number was out of service when you tried it yesterday.”

  Gwen gaped at the ghost flapper. Was she psychic or was Gwen so tired she’d started babbling aloud? To herself—because Lulu couldn’t be real. But, if this is really happening, might as well respond to the question, she decided. “I’m sure that was just … He didn’t pay the bill or something. He’ll be there. He’ll help me fix the truck. Maybe get us some gigs at the music club down the block from his apartment—he wrote about it in my birthday card last fall.”

  “Maybe he’ll offer to let you stay as long as you want. Maybe Wake will be so excited about the gigs that he’ll forget about Seattle and agree to it,” Lulu recited the reasons that Gwen had thought about, but never told Wake. He hadn’t even wanted to stop in Chicago. He hated the city because his mother had left him to follow a man there. A year ago, when Gwen had written him a tearful letter about Jimmy’s plan to move there, Wake had expected her to loathe the city and her uncle, too. Jimmy needed a fresh start, though, and Gwen got that. She also trusted that Jimmy would understand that she and Wake needed one now. Especially Wake.

  The crackle of a match snapped Gwen out of her thoughts. Lulu had produced a matchbook, a slim black cigarette holder, and an unfiltered cigarette from somewhere. She inhaled deeply and then released the smoke slowly from the corner of her mouth—sultry, like an old movie star. “Maybe,” she said after she finished exhaling, “Uncle Jimmy fell off the wagon again and he isn’t going to be around to help you. Maybe he was lying every time he said he’d be there for you when he called or wrote. After all, wasn’t he supposed to be there to help you fix up that truck?” She motioned toward the road with her cigarette.

  “He taught me enough before he left.”

  Weekends in Jimmy’s backyard restoring the old wrecks he spent too much money on, had been Gwen’s only comfort besides letters from Wake. When her daddy’s Blazer broke down for the millionth time and her mom was going to junk it, Jimmy convinced her to give it to him. He promised Gwen that they’d fix it up for her sixteenth birthday. Since they didn’t finish before he left, Jimmy had the truck towed back to Gwen’s house and her mother spent a solid year bitching about it while Gwen tried to repair it with the advice her uncle gave her over the phone. After she finally got it up and running last fall, Mama kept threatening to sell it since she was always short on bill money. The day Gwen found a “For Sale” sign on her truck was the day she convinced Wake to leave.

  “I can fix it. Even if …” Gwen couldn’t bring herself to admit that her uncle might not be here. She hadn’t heard from him since Christmas, which wasn’t a good sign, but she didn’t want to say it, not even to a ghost. “Wake didn’t want to stick around here anyway. I can figure out what part we need and we’ll spare-change for it if we have to. Wake’s good at that.”

  He had a cardboard sign in his guitar case. “Traveling, Broke & Ugly,” it read. He’d used it on his way from South Carolina to New Orleans and he’d kept using it in the French Quarter to raise the money that Gwen’s mom insisted he give her if he was going to sleep on their couch. She hit up Gwen for rent money, too, even though she never made her own boyfriends pay. After Wake had been in New Orleans six months, he told Gwen that he thought it was time to make a new sign since he wasn’t traveling anymore.

  “No, we are going to leave,” Gwen insisted. That had been the plan all along. They’d been talking about running away together since fourth grade, but when Wake had been shunted into another foster home last summer, he’d written her saying he had to get out. For real. So she’d invited him to New Orleans, but it was only supposed to be temporary, until the truck was up and running. Of course that took longer than expected and then she needed to save money from her job since Wake spent what he didn’t give to her mother on pills and powders that the Quarter had introduced him to.

  But now they were out and they weren’t going back.

  “So you’ll spare-change your way to Seattle. Then what?” Lulu punctuated her question with a delicate puff of smoke.

  Wishing she had her own cigarettes, Gwen patted the pockets of the jacket out of habit. Miraculously, she felt the familiar rectangular shape on the lower left side—Wake’s Reds! Buoyed by this discovery, she answered, “We’ll play until we make it.” Staring into Lulu’s artfully smudged eyes, her own gaze strong and determined, Gwen added, “As long as we’re playing music we’ll be okay.”

  “That’s how I always felt about dancing,” Lulu said wistfully. “I just wanted to dance. That’s what I remember saying when the pain got unbearable. ‘Please stop. Please just let me keep dancing forever.’”

  Gwen barely heard her, distracted by what she’d found in Wake’s cigarette pack. There’d been one smoke left in it. His lucky. He always flipped a cigarette upside down when he opened a fresh pack and smoked that one last, saying, “Time to make a wish,” before he lit it. Gwen had started doing it, too. Might have been a silly superstition, but she needed all the please-let-us-get-out-of-here wishes she could get, and once they had found a dirty twenty-dollar bill on the street after lighting a lucky.

  Something else came out with the cigarette when she tilted the pack toward her open palm, though. Powder wrapped in cellophane. Another secret stash. She shoved it back into the cigarette pack and crushed it in her hand.

  Before she could whip it against the damp grass with all her might, Lulu said, “You know he can get more. Here. In Seattle. The weather will be different and the music—but will anything else really change?”

  “Yes,” Gwen maintained, jabbing the cigarette between her lips and fumbling in the pockets again, this time for a lighter.

  “What if it doesn’t? What if your worst fears come true? What if one day you open the bathroom door and—”

  “SHUT UP!” The cigarette fell from Gwen’s lips and she dropped to her knees to retrieve it. She groped at the damp grass blindly, her eyes filling with tears.

  But they didn’t stop the memory from replaying. Grover sat in front of the door and he growled when Mama approached, but she nudged him out of the way with her foot. She had to piss because she and Mina had been drinking cheap vodka with a splash of sweet tea while Gwen played with Mina’s niece, Tonyel. She didn’t really like the girl, who constantly bossed her around and made Gwen play dolls when she would rather be digging in the dirt; but at least Tonyel’s parents didn’t scream at each other all night. Gwen was supposed to sleep over at Tonyel’s—they’d have a girl’s night and so would Mama and Mina. Except Gwen had gotten sick out of the blue. She barfed her macaroni-and-cheese lunch into Tonyel’s toy baby carriage and Tonyel screamed. Mama came running and cursing. She put her drink in a plastic to-go cup and drove Gwen home.

  “This is my night,” she kept saying as she swerved down the road. “Daddy’s gonna have to take care of you ’cuz I’m goin’ back out.”

  If she hadn’t had to run in to pee, Gwen would have been the one to find him. Maybe. If she’d been able to coax Grover out of the way.

  She still saw. Mama had dropped to her knees and there was Daddy. She hadn’t understood immediately why Mama was wailing like a banshee. Yeah, it was weird that Daddy had fallen asleep in the bathroom all slumped up against the old clawfoot bathtub, but at least he was smiling.

  Gwen didn’t notice the needle in his arm that had killed him. An accident, her mother swore up and down so she could collect the tiny sum of insurance money that she burned through within a year.

  “He quit that shit when your mama got pregnant with you,” Uncle Jimmy had drunkenly told Gwen when she was thirteen. “Cold turkey. Woulda quit the booze, too, but there’s only so much a man can handle in a lifetime. ’Specially a man who seen the
shit your daddy saw.” Gwen knew that he’d seen a lot because Jimmy had been telling his big brother’s war stories repeatedly for years. They’d given her a few nightmares, but it wasn’t nearly as upsetting as when he told Gwen, “If he picked up that needle again, he was using it to check himself out.”

  Uncle Jimmy took it back the next day. In fact, he felt so bad about saying it to her that he started going to AA meetings. When Gwen wrote Wake about it, she said that she knew it was true. “A drunk tongue speaks a sober mind,” she’d printed in tiny neat letters.

  What does a ghostly tongue speak? She wondered.

  Then she felt a cold hand on her wrist. Grover growled from behind Gwen, but didn’t move from his spot.

  The ghost girl held out the cigarette Gwen had dropped with one hand and attempted to help her up with the other, but Gwen jerked out of Lulu’s grip, seized the cigarette, and pushed herself upright.

  She continued riffling through the jacket pockets for a lighter. Then she remembered that she’d thrown Wake’s lighter at him on her way out of the truck. Not that it made a difference. He hadn’t snapped out of it to follow her and Grover. He’d left her here to face this ghost.

  And she’d said something just like that to him a week ago when he’d nodded off while they were watching a movie.

  “Every time you do this you make me face my dad’s ghost,” she’d told him after shaking him awake. She stared over his shoulder at the bathroom—a different bathroom, but still. To keep from crying, she’d bit her lip so hard she drew blood.

  “I’m not … I don’t mean to. I’ll never use a needle,” he’d assured her like he always did. Like that made a difference.

  She reminded him as she had done for months, that it was still lethal and that she was so scared to lose him like she had her dad and uncle. He was as angelic as those girls in Jackson Square said. They’d done that stupid penpal project three months after her dad died and she’d mentioned it in her letter. Her teacher had frowned and said it wasn’t “very light and friendly” to say, “How was your summer? Mine was hard. My dad died and I miss him.”

  Gwen refused to rewrite it because it was the truth and she didn’t really care if her penpal wrote her back anyway. But he did and he said, “I’m sorry. I know how that feels. My dad is in jail.” His teacher had also chided him about this. Honesty won out over banal politeness, though. Wake and Gwen were the only kids from their classes to keep in touch through the end of the school year.

  And they’d kept writing. They fell in love with horror stories and punk music together.

  They fell in love with each other.

  But he didn’t love her enough to stop smoking and sniffing junk. “It just blocks out the noise in my head,” he told her. “I spent so much of my life angry and hurting. It feels good to be numb.”

  “Does it feel better than playing guitar?” she asked. “Or than kissing me?”

  He’d said no, but hadn’t met her eyes.

  The cigarette pack with his stash was still in her hand. Gwen crumpled it even tighter and shoved it in her pocket.

  “I’m sorry if I upset you,” Lulu said, offering Gwen her matchbook. “I was okay when I could go dancing, but now that Melody Mill’s gone, I just really want to go home.”

  “And since you can’t, you decided to torment me?” Gwen wanted to yell at Wake, but he wasn’t there, so she took out her anger on the ghost who’d stirred up her memories instead.

  “No, I just thought maybe I could convince you that it would be better to stay here than to keep running.”

  “Here?” Gwen scoffed, looking around at the old tombstones marked with creepy old photos of their occupants. “Is there some ghost clause that if I stay, you get to go home or to heaven or whatever?”

  Lulu bowed her head, an inscrutable mixture of hope and sorrow on her painted face. “You should go,” she told Gwen. “Keep running if that is what will make you happy.”

  “Music makes me happy. All I want is to play, to sing the songs that he writes. I don’t care where. I’ll play on that street corner forever,” she said, pointing in the direction of the intersection that the truck had broken down before they could reach. “As long as I’m with Wake and Grover and we have a guitar, I don’t care. That’s home.”

  “Home,” Lulu repeated with a sad sigh. Then she sparked a match and held it out to light Gwen’s cigarette.

  Make a wish, Gwen thought, placing the cigarette between her lips and leaning toward the flame. She closed her eyes and sucked deep.

  She heard Lulu whisper, “Thank you.” When she opened her eyes, the match lay in the grass at her feet, a wisp of smoke curling up from it. The girl in the lilac dress was gone.

  “Run away with me.”

  Luna turned to face me, her eyes widening under thick black lashes. Such beautiful eyes. Not pale and sickly yellow like the rest of the pack—but green and vivid as a storm-tossed sea. Looking into those eyes never failed to take me back to the wildflower-strewn fields of our childhood—the mad games of tag, the endless hide-and-go-seek. We’d run until breathless, until the sun retreated from the sky, then we’d sink down into the plush grass and stare up at a star-filled heaven, our hands clasped together as we wished on the future.

  But at sixteen years old, we were no longer children. And our days of mindless play were over forever. As were our plans for the future—unless I could convince her to change her mind.

  “Please, Luna,” I begged, hoping she couldn’t hear the slight tremor in my voice as I spoke her name. But she could, of course. She was so perceptive—that was one of the things I loved most about her. “We could be happy together.”

  Her eyes dropped to the ground, a dark shadow flittered across her pale cheeks, and I knew her answer before she could voice it. Truth be told, I had known even before I dared ask the question. Luna always did what she was told. And she would do it now, even if it meant sacrificing her last chance at happiness.

  “Oh, Orpheus,” she whispered, reaching out to trace my cheek with a soft hand. She wore her nails clipped short, unlike the other girls in town who preferred gaudy-colored claws that cut and scarred. With Luna, I felt only a slight scraping sensation as her fingers slid carefully down my jaw, hovering for a precious moment, before dropping back to her side. “If only,” she breathed. Her voice held a longing that mirrored my own. But it lacked the shred of hope. “If only I could.”

  “But you can!” I protested, no longer caring about the desperation that rang through my voice. My mind raced to find the right words—the ones that held the power to change her mind. “We can leave tonight and never look back. The witch promised to help us. She promised to set us free.”

  “Free?” she repeated, looking up at me with horror in her eyes. “How can you call that freedom? Being trapped in one body for the rest of your life? Cast from the pack, never able to run wild—never able to protect ourselves, even against those who wish us harm.” She gave me a torturous look. “What kind of life would that be?”

  I hung my head. “I know it wouldn’t be easy. But we’d be together. And that’s all that matters to me. I’d make any sacrifice in the world to have you with me forever.” To keep you away from him, I added silently. Did she think I didn’t know what he did to her? Did she think I couldn’t see the ugly purple shadows on her cheek?

  For a moment she said nothing, and in that silence, I allowed myself the luxury of hope. But even as I dared enjoy the feeling, I knew it was false. Luna had been given an order, and Luna always obeyed.

  “Oh, Orpheus,” she said with a sigh, her smile fading with the light of day. “You know that I can’t. Father has chosen Torrid as my mate. We are to be wed tomorrow at first light. The pack needs me. I can’t abandon them.”

  My mouth twisted at the name Torrid. The future Alpha. The strongest, fastest wolf in the pack. Not to mention the cruelest. I hated the idea of her being alone with him even for a moment—never mind the rest of her life.

  “You can�
��t marry him,” I begged. “I know what he’s like. Don’t think I don’t know.” A growl escaped me, despite my best intentions, rippling up in my throat. I dimly realized I was losing control. And when I lost control, I would shift—something clearly forbidden within the town limits. But I couldn’t help it. The thought of him hurting her. The thought of her letting him …

  I didn’t want to upset her further, so I struggled to keep the monster at bay. For her. It was always for her.

  “Tell me, Luna,” I managed to say. “Tell me that you love him. That you want to be with him for the rest of your life. Tell me that now and I’ll let you go, and I’ll never look back.”

  She met my eyes with her own. The warm glow was gone. She set her lips together and squared her shoulders. “I don’t love you,” she said flatly. The effort the words took her betrayed her true meaning. “I want to be with Torrid.”

  I knew she was lying; but the knowledge didn’t help much as her icy voice knocked the wind from my lungs. I struggled to breathe, and she turned on her heel and walked away without even saying goodbye.

  I stood there, like a stone statue, watching her go, completely unable to move. I don’t know what I was waiting for—in the movies, I guess, there was always that one last look. She’d stop, turn around and the music would swell as she’d offer up that final picture-perfect, wistful smile. A smile to hold onto in the cold nights to come.

  But Luna didn’t turn back. She didn’t smile. Instead, she turned the corner and disappeared from sight.

  Fury swelled and my remaining self-control fled. Before I knew it, I was shifting—my body collapsing inwards and morphing into a monster. Fur sprouted. Muscles popped. Teeth grew. Jaws snapped.

  I don’t remember what happened after that. Sometimes the mind grows hazy when trapped in the body of the monster. All I know is that I woke on the outskirts of town, muzzled and bound with rope. I looked up, and my eyes widened as I saw Lupine standing above me, arms crossed over his chest.