Hungry Ghost

by Allison Moon

  “Do you miss her?” Hazel asked, finally.

  “Yes,” Lexie said. “Every day.”

  “Me too.”

  Lexie must have misunderstood. She almost spoke, but Hazel continued.

  “Blythe, I mean,” Hazel whispered. “You only really got the worst of her. And that was bad, for real. But, for a long time, she was pretty rad. I mean, she helped me own things that I didn’t even know were there. She was really good to all of us.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lexie said.

  “It’s not your fault. It’s neither of our faults,” Hazel said. “Ego, right? Sheesh.” Then, after a long pause, “I’m worried about Renee.”

  “Do you think she’s taking it hard?” Lexie asked.

  “Duh. How would you feel if you killed someone?”

  “Someone? Or Blythe?”

  Hazel let her restless leg shake. “Fair. But I don’t think Renee is managing.”

  “She sounded like she was managing just fine tonight.”

  “She’s in denial,” Hazel said.

  “Whatever you say,” Lexie said. She wanted to care, to help, but she was tired. Her heart was in the woods at the treehouse, and her mind was still with the body she’d found in the clearing. She didn’t have anything left for Hazel; she didn’t even know how to divine what Hazel might need. Everyone in the Pack seemed to need something from one another, but no one would say so directly. Instead, it was constant shots across the bow: indications, double-speak, and lingering silences. Perhaps the girls, having known each other so long, were able to parse this type of communication. Meanwhile, it only left Lexie feeling stupid and disconnected.

  Hazel grasped Lexie’s wrist and drew her even tighter. She curled like a squirrel into the space formed by the crescent of Lexie’s body.

  “I don’t think what she did was wrong,” Hazel whispered, a confession.

  Lexie didn’t know whether she was talking about Archer, Blythe, or Renee.

  “Neither do I,” she replied, absolving them all for past sins.

  She stroked and nuzzled Hazel as if it were the next logical step, but as Hazel’s sigh became a snore, Lexie too let herself drift off.

  4

  “Is there anything to eat?” Lexie asked, blinking bleary eyes and stifling a yawn. Bree’s death-slackened face had jolted her out of her dreams throughout the night. She wished she could keep sleeping, but she had to try and score a seat in some classes today.

  Jenna stood in the kitchen wearing a cotton sundress despite the chill. She punched a wad of dough that would soon become a loaf of sourdough bread. The morning sun was stuck behind impenetrable layers of cloud, and Jenna used the opportunity to warm the kitchen with the preheating oven.

  “I just made some hummus. And there are some flax crackers in the cabinet.”

  “Meck,” Lexie said.

  “Well fuck you very much, too.”

  “Sorry. I just need more heft. Meat.”

  “There’s still some of the jerky I made in the fridge,” Jenna said. “Go for it.”

  Lexie smiled and retrieved her snack.

  “You should really eat something other than jerky. That’s a lot of sodium. Bad for your heart.” Lexie shut the fridge door on another flash of Bree’s face: her waxy skin and blind, staring eyes. When to tell the Pack? Lexie didn’t know. She didn’t know how to deliver such news without callousness or chaos.

  “Nothing else you make tastes as good,” Lexie said, her salivary glands bursting into overdrive with the salty-sweet meat.

  Renee staggered into the kitchen in shorts and a bra. Her hair was smooshed and poofed in weird shapes, and she searched for the coffee pot through half-closed eyes.

  “Morning, sleepyhead,” Jenna teased. Renee woofed a greeting.

  “Where’s Nina?” Lexie asked.

  “I drove her home last night,” Renee replied.

  “Already?” Lexie said. “She allergic to dog hair or something?”

  “I’m allergic to sleepovers.”

  Renee filled her mug and found her way to the living room sofa, where she pulled out her phone to check email.

  Jenna smiled sweetly and continued to throw her fists into the dough with tiny grunts. “You going to come running with us on the moon?” she asked Lexie, not looking up from her hands. “It’s next Friday.”

  Lexie shook her head. “Nah. I don’t think it’ll happen.”

  “You just have to let the moon do her thing. She’ll take you.”

  “You said that last month, and the month before,” Lexie groaned. “I’m like a one-shift pony. I can’t change anymore.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Jenna said. “Mother Moon is stronger than any earthly magic keeping you from changing. She’ll take you when the time is right.”

  “Well, I hope the time is never right. I don’t think I’m cut out for the werewolf business.” Lexie tore a bite from the leathery meat and chewed noisily.

  “Why would you say that?” Jenna looked genuinely hurt.

  “It’s too … ” Lexie regretted telling the truth, and reminded herself not to speak of such things to the girls again. “Raw.”

  She didn’t know if the word referred to her heart or the nature of the creature. Either way, the word felt apt.

  “It’s not really as dramatic as you make it sound,” Jenna said with a faint giggle.

  Lexie gnawed on her jerky. “What do you guys do when you go out?”

  Jenna bopped her head from side to side, shaking her curls, as she considered. “Just run around mostly.”

  “Run around?”

  “Yeah, we chase things, wrestle, rough house. You know, like girls do.” She shrugged.

  “Girls do?”

  “Sure,” Jenna said with a cherubic grin.

  “Sex?” Lexie asked after a pause.

  “Sometimes,” she shrugged again. “We get excited sometimes, and once you erase certain cultural stigmas the rest follows quite easily. But sex doesn’t really overshadow the overall experience. Plus, lesbian werewolf sex is kinda weird,” she said with a laugh. “Too much fur. Long claws. It all just gets in the way.”

  Renee snickered from the living room and Lexie bit her tongue.

  “I mean,” Jenna continued, directing her attention to her hands, “kidding aside, what we do, it’s really intimate and nurturing. We get to share a very private side of ourselves with each other. It’s far more vulnerable than sex, and it brings us so close each time. Plus, it’s only once a month, so we need to take advantage when we can. You should come running with us. Just try. It’s healing.”

  Lexie tried for a sympathetic smile. “The change doesn’t feel healing to me. It feels….” From what Lexie could remember of that singular event, it was that she was betrayed by her body once again, another in the long series of betrayals womanhood offered. Her whole young life, Lexie had run and leapt and dangled from tree branches, played in dark rivers, and stomped through nighttime forests. Then, when she turned twelve, everything changed. Her body became gangly and weak, and the world was populated with new threats. The rivers were no longer wondrous, but filled with leeches, snakes, and parasites. Her body became a thing of blood and guts, never to be economical again. “…Messy,” Lexie finished. Like her menstruation, like her cramps and odd digestion, her pimples and tears and odd moistures and odors. Puberty ruined her. If anything, her lone transformation into a wolf during her first shared orgasm only served to remind her of the unwieldy grossness that was endemic to being so much flesh and blood.

  Jenna kneaded her dough in silence for a moment. “Almost all of us found our wolves through violence. You know that, right?”

  Lexie watched Jenna’s hands flex and pull at the dough. She had remarkable strength in her forearms for someone so soft. “Blythe told me. But she said a lot of crazy things that night. I didn’t really know what to believe.”

  “Well, that part is true. Running together helps us remember the gift of survival. What seeing t
he edge and living past it does to a woman. I’ve changed in many ways since my attack. But of all those ways, my wolf was the one thing that kept me together.

  “I’m not saying you to have to suffer to find your strength,” Jenna continued. “But if you don’t find it when you do suffer, you won’t get out alive.”

  Lexie thought back to her first experience of violence in September, when she was attacked by the full-blood Rare in the Barrens. She remembered her meager defense of flailing paws and sharp jaw snaps, her all-too-easy surrender. She chuckled at herself out of shame. Sometimes she summoned that memory, staring into it as one might a deep canyon, seductive in its fatality. She shook her head, as if that would rid her of the memory.

  “The change,” Lexie said. “It doesn’t feel good. It makes me feel weak.”

  “To be a woman is to change, constantly, frustratingly. Our moods, our weight, the water we carry, the sadness and joy we possess in turn. To be a woman is to be in flux. That’s not the problem. Weakness is always at the joints. I’d guess that your wolf form isn’t weak, just like your woman form isn’t. It’s the in-between space that scares you. The dreamtime, when your consciousness loses shape.”

  “Wow,” Lexie said. “That was pretty profound.”

  Jenna giggled and punched the dough into the bread pans. “It was, wasn’t it? I wish I had a tape recorder. I’ve never said it that eloquently before. Not that I have many people to tell.”

  Jenna opened the oven, and warmth swelled in the kitchen. “But true, right?”

  “I guess. I can’t say,” Lexie said. “The only in-between space I felt was when I was … you know, cumming.” Lexie drew swirls in Jenna’s leftover flour. “Which I kind of figured was part of the experience.”

  Jenna nodded at her dough. “Would you do it again?”

  “Have an orgasm? I sure hope so.”

  Jenna giggled. “No, silly. Find the in-between space. Let your physical self dissolve?”

  Lexie took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I don’t think I know how.”

  Jenna shrugged and slid the loaves into the oven. “Maybe just try moving toward the darkness rather than running from it.”

  Lexie gnawed on the stringy strap of jerky, considering Jenna’s suggestion. Hazel walked in and dropped her backpack on the kitchen table. She propped a foot on the edge and adjusted her stockings.

  “You shouldn’t hold it back,” Hazel said. “It’s not healthy. It’ll give you cancer or something.”

  Sharmalee and Corwin clattered down the steps and into the kitchen, laughing. Corwin wore a sarong and a white tank. Sharmalee was in her panties and bra. Corwin wrapped her arms around Sharmalee from behind.

  Jenna put on water for tea. “Having fun up there?”

  “Oh my god, yes.” Sharm giggled, her brown eyes nearly hidden behind her plump cheeks.

  “We’re watching a movie,” Corwin said, squeezing Sharm.

  Lexie raised her eyebrows.

  “A porno,” Sharmalee said in a stage whisper.

  Lexie pulled a face, and Sharmalee said, “No, it’s like super progressive queer feminist porn.”

  “It’s like all gender queer and fierce femme,” Corwin said. “There’s hair in all the right places, and some of them are fat, and it’s fucking rad.”

  “And seriously girls, it’s werewolf-themed.” Sharmalee spoke like it was a dance, all waving hands and exaggerated expressions. “It’s called Horny Like the Wolf and the special effects are ridiculous. You have to watch it.”

  Corwin pulled her blond dreadlocks back into a high bun. “Yeah, the women are just basically wearing these Halloween costumes. They look like sexy Lon Chaneys.”

  “Ew,” Jenna tittered.

  “But it’s cool, because they get to keep their thumbs,” Corwin said with a silly grin, wiggling her fingers. “And we all know how important those are, don’t we Lex?” She punched Lexie in the shoulder.

  Lexie made a face and batted Corwin’s hand away. “I didn’t know you liked porn.”

  Sharmalee squealed. “Me neither! I had never seen one before.”

  “We should invite Mitch to watch it. The bellies would totally work for—” Corwin cut herself off and raised a brow. “—What is Mitch calling Mitchself these days?”

  Jenna greased another bread pan. “Mitch is a ‘he’ all the time now, remember?”

  Sharmalee groaned, and Corwin rolled her eyes.

  “Mitch is a part of our family, ladies,” Jenna scolded. “I don’t know why this is so hard for you to grok.”

  “It doesn’t make sense that Mitch is doing this,” Corwin said. “Why should I have to accommodate her baggage?”

  “Because he’s your sister. It’s not about making you comfortable. It’s about making Mitch feel safe.”

  “Men are safe everywhere,” Sharmalee said.

  “Not trans men,” Jenna said.

  Corwin pursed her lips. “As long as she—fuck—he doesn’t get up in my case when I fuck it up, which I will because this is like the third fucking time Mitch has changed pronouns in, like, two months.”

  “Yeah,” Sharmalee said. “It’s not like this was a long time coming. She just out of the blue is demanding we call her a boy.”

  “So what?” Jenna said, barely raising her voice above speaking tones, which for Jenna was akin to yelling. “Shapeshifting is a legitimate form of self-expression.”

  “Yeah, woman to wolf. That’s easier to understand than woman to man.” Corwin ran her fingers through Sharmalee’s long, chestnut hair.

  “All she’s doing is abandoning her gender for an easier one,” Sharmalee agreed.

  Their conversation was shocked to silence by a loud slam upstairs. Mitch shouted from his room, “I can hear you, you know!”

  The girls all flinched.

  “I’m still a wolf!”

  “We know, sweetie,” Jenna called back. “We’re just sisters having a concerned conversation. We’d say these things to your face, too!”

  “You don’t have to yell!” Mitch shouted. “I have the same hearing as all of you!”

  “We’ll stop yelling when you do, sweetie.”

  “I’m yelling ‘cause I’m angry, not because I can’t hear.”

  “Oh,” Jenna said. The girls exchanged sheepish glances.

  “Fucking Health Services,” Jenna sighed, seemingly apropos of nothing.

  The girls looked to one another, no answer coming.

  Jenna whispered, “They denied Mitch testosterone. They cited budget cuts, but it’s clearly transphobic.”

  “Clearly how?” Sharmalee asked.

  “Milton Health Services is still offering boner pills and condoms, but they cut birth control subsidies, HPV vaccination, and any sort of transition services. It’s horrible.”

  “We should protest,” Hazel said.

  “Over testosterone?” Corwin asked. “There’s too much of that in the world already. Why the hell should we protest for them to make more?”

  “It’s not about making, it’s about sharing.” Jenna pushed the remainder of the dough into a bread pan. “I’m doing some research into herbal substitutes. Apparently there are some options growing right around Milton.”

  Lexie found a patch of sunshine in the front room and stretched out in it, ready for a nap before she tried to win over Professor Rindt of Indigenous Linguistics of the Americas. The front door’s slam shook her awake. Renee entered the kitchen with more slamming sounds: keys, books, something that whumped like a purse. Jenna greeted her with mock singsong. “Welcome hooome, darling!”

  “Where’s Lexie?” Renee asked.

  “Napping. What’s up?”

  “We need to talk. This is getting out of hand.”

  “Weren’t you just the one that ordered us all some R & R?”

  “That was before I saw this. Look,” Renee said.

  Lexie listened as Jenna read silently. “Oh no. Another one?” Jenna’s voice cracked with the onset of tears.
Lexie curled into a tighter ball and buried her face in her arms. Renee’s Google Alerts had let her off the hook.

  She listened to Renee’s paces. “She was found less than two miles from here in the Western woods.”

  Jenna sighed. “There’s nothing out there. No trails, just trees.” She read under her breath, skimming the article. “She was dating Rory Blackwell? The Governor’s son?”

  “Exactly,” Renee said. “Why would Bree Curtis, a nineteen-year-old valedictorian from New Hampshire, wander around those woods alone in the middle of the night, especially when she’s got some stud of a boyfriend waiting at home?”

  “Who knows?” Jenna opened a cabinet and fished around the tea bags. “A girl’s got a million reasons to court danger. Postmortem psychoanalysis won’t get us far.”

  “I don’t buy it. The Blackwell kid could be a Rare.” Renee threw her phone on the counter and sighed. “I need to get at Lexie. Her peacespeaker sight has to help us in some way.”

  “We don’t know that,” Jenna said, rummaging through a drawer for a tea ball. “She obviously doesn’t know how it works, and we don’t even know if she could reproduce the effects. It’s not like there’s a guidebook for seeing werewolves while they hide in human form.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll have to beat it out of her.”

  “Seriously?”

  “What?” Renee said.

  “I don’t know what she needs, but it’s not that.” Lexie held her breath, wanting to escape, but knowing she’d be spotted. So she kept playing dead.

  Renee returned to pacing. “We have another dead girl on our hands and a werewolf that we should have killed by now.”

  “Even if Lexie did help us find a werewolf, Blythe was always the one who led the hunts,” Jenna said. “Without her, I don’t even know how we’d begin to capture and interrogate him.”

  Renee stopped pacing. She slumped into a chair, defeated. “We don’t need Blythe.” It sounded almost as much a threat as a promise.

  “It’s winter. We’re hibernating.”

  “Wolves don’t hibernate.”

  “We’re mourning, Renee. Some more than others. Just let it happen. Nothing you can do will force the issue.”