Deadtown

Gwen’s favorite shift was a seagull; she adored soaring over open water. But she also tried out life as a cat, a squirrel, a deer in the woods. She even shifted into a baby elephant to do an undercover exposé for the school newspaper on animal cruelty at the circus—her English teacher couldn’t stop praising her for how vividly she’d imagined the life of a circus animal. Everything was great until Gwen landed the lead in her senior class play.

They were doing Our Town; her role was Emily. For weeks, all she could talk about was acting, the theater, how she was going to major in drama and become a Broadway star. She lost interest in shifting—which I thought was grossly unfair, because I’d just started. For stagestruck Gwen, though, nothing compared to the thrill of the theater, and she spent all her time at rehearsals and hanging out with her acting-crazed friends. I missed her. I volunteered to help backstage, but for the first time ever Gwen treated me like the pesky little sister, tagging along.

On the play’s opening night, disaster struck. My sister got stage fright. She walked confidently onto the stage, then froze up, her eyes wide and glassy. Her mouth opened, closed, opened, but all that came out was a piteous squeak. Then she shuddered and bent double, her limbs twisting, as though she were having a seizure.

I realized what was happening and ran to close the curtain, yelling at the other actors to get off the stage, to give my sister some room. Mom and Dad were with us in a flash, emerging from the audience to hold the teachers at bay.

Gwen writhed on the floor. Fur covered her face; her ears slid around to the top of her head. Her nose lengthened, and she sprouted whiskers. The shift’s energy field blasted out, billowing the curtain and shredding her costume to ribbons. All the while, she shrunk smaller and smaller. Soon, all that could be seen of her was a rustling inside the remnants of Emily’s dress. Gwen had changed into a mouse.

I scooped up my sister and carefully slipped her into my pocket as Mom gathered the scraps of costume. Dad spoke to the teacher who had directed the play and convinced her we’d already carried Gwen out to the car. The director made an announcement that Gwen had become ill and the scene started over, with the understudy thrilled to step in. No big deal. The audience thought Gwen had fainted. Back in those days, most norms had an enormous capacity to ignore what they’d seen in favor of what they’d prefer to believe.

But Gwen was inconsolable. Her life, she insisted, was over. She refused to go to school for a week. And when she finally returned, it was to be shunned by her former friends. They blamed her for ruining the play, and someone—we never found out who—had seen something of Gwen’s shift. Rumors flew around the school, most of them even crazier than the truth. Gwen was called a freak, an alien, a mutant. Maybe if the monsters had been public then, kids would have thought she was cool. Maybe if Aunt Mab had taken on Gwen as her apprentice demon-fighter instead of me, my sister would have felt like there was some point to shifting. As it was, she felt like everything she’d ever wanted—her friends, popularity, a career as an actress—had been ripped away from her. Because she was Cerddorion. And she’d die, she insisted, if anyone ever found out.

Gwen never shifted again. She gave up her college plans and dropped out of high school. My parents objected. They pleaded. They even tried a threat or two. Gwen wouldn’t budge—stubbornness is a family trait. She found her own tiny studio in Medford and took a job at a pizza place near Tufts. And her mission in life became finding the right guy to get her pregnant. When a Cerddorion female gives birth, she becomes inactive, losing the ability to shift. Once being “normal” became Gwen’s driving force, she set out to catch a norm, with the intensity of a hunter stalking big game. Within three years, she’d married Nick Santini and gotten pregnant—not in that order. Nick was exactly the catch she was looking for. A Tufts grad who worked in finance, on campus for his five-year class reunion, he fell in love at first sight with the pretty waitress at the his old student hangout. Gwen was twenty-two years old the spring Maria was born. And with the birth of her child, she dedicated herself to out humaning all the human moms in her picket-fence suburban neighborhood.

Dad and I saw Gwen’s embracing of normhood as a rejection of everything that we were. Mom had a different view—after all, she’d made the same decision once. “Don’t judge your sister too harshly, Vicky,” she’d told me. “Maybe she’s not pushing her heritage away so much as she’s reaching toward something else.” I had no clue what Mom was talking about. All I could see was that Gwen wanted to be a norm.

Now, as if to prove that she was indeed the epitome of norm homemaking, she appeared in the doorway carrying a tray loaded with coffee and various pastries. All home-baked, I was sure. Gwen would rather die than have a store-bought cookie in her house. She smiled as brightly as any TV mom, kind of like Carol Brady, Clair Huxtable, and June Cleaver all rolled into one.

She put the tray on the coffee table and poured me a mug. We both like our coffee the same way, strong and black, but Gwen had set out a creamer and a little bowl of sugar cubes, complete with tongs. In the Santini household, appearances counted big-time. I warmed my hands around the steaming mug, breathing in that wonderful fresh-coffee scent.

“Gwen, about Maria’s costume—”

“Don’t worry about it. I overreacted. It’s just that I put a lot of time into the bride’s costume.” That wasn’t it at all, and we both knew it. She sighed. “I’m glad that Maria looks up to you. It’s just . . .”

“It’s just that you don’t want her to be me.” I tried to keep the bitterness out of my voice, but it crept in anyway.

“I’m so scared that she’ll turn out to be Cerddorion.”

“What’s so awful about that, Gwen? I’m not the only Cerddorion around, you know. You’re Cerddorion, Mom’s Cerddorion. If Maria’s one of us, so what?”

“Each year, she grows up a little more. She’s ten already. In a couple more years—”

“In a couple more years you’ll know whether or not she needs some specialized guidance. If she’s Cerddorion, I can help her.”

“You know, I married Nick partly because he’s pure Italian. I was hoping that that would . . . I don’t know . . . dilute my DNA or something.”

“Maria will be fine, Gwen. She’s a great kid. That’s what counts.”

Gwen looked at me dubiously. She was about to say something else when the doorbell rang, and the expression on her face changed to a strange combination of guilt and hope. Uh-oh. I’d seen that look before.

“Are you expecting someone?” I asked.

“I wasn’t sure. A friend of Nick’s said he might drop by.” She checked her watch. “He must have gotten off work early.”

“Gwen, you didn’t.” Even as I said it, I knew she had. No matter how many times I asked her not to, my sister was always—always—trying to set me up with a human boyfriend. She didn’t approve of my dating a werewolf. Can’t imagine why.

She got up and started toward the front hall, smiling sheepishly—but not quite sheepishly enough to hide her delight. “This guy’s great. His name’s Andy. He just joined Nick’s investment firm. He’s really cute—and he went to Harvard. As soon as you said you were coming, I called Nick and told him to invite Andy for dinner.”

“I’m not—” But she was gone. Damn. I did notwant to sit there and play nice on some blind date I didn’t even know I was having. So I did what any self-respecting, happily single woman would do. I ran and hid in the bathroom.

I closed the door, locked it, and leaned my forehead against the cool tile wall. How was I going to convince Gwen to stop doing this? The last time she’d fixed me up with one of Nick’s friends, I’d agreed, reluctantly, to meet the guy for dinner. When I got to the restaurant, he was waiting for me in the bar, sipping a Scotch on the rocks. I don’t think it was his first one, either—he weaved a little as we followed the maître d’ to our table. The way he stared made me feel like some kind of zoo animal. Before our appetizers arrived, he got down to business: “So you’re a shapeshifter, huh?” I nodded, and with shining eyes he took a rolled-up magazine from his jacket pocket. “Can you change into this?” The centerfold dropped open, and there was Miss July in all her silicone glory.

My last image of that date was Scotch dripping off his nose and chin.

Through the bathroom window, I could see Gwen’s kids running around in the backyard. They were playing tag, from the look of things. Maria ran very, very slowly, arms and legs pumping exaggeratedly, so little Justin could catch up and tag her. Gwen didn’t have a thing to worry about with that girl.

Muffled voices penetrated the door. Even by pressing my ear against the wood, though, I couldn’t make out what they were saying or who was speaking. I gazed longingly toward the window. Maybe I could climb out and join the kids in their game of tag. I’d even volunteer to be It.

I actually had my hand on the window latch before I could admit how silly I was being. I regularly confronted the nastiest demons in Boston, but I was afraid to be introduced to a norm in my sister’s living room? Okay, okay. I could do this. I unlocked the door, sighing. At least I got to be fully armed when I went to meet the demons. I didn’t have so much as a slingshot to keep Andy at bay.

As I opened the door, Gwen was talking, for some reason, about the heights and weights of her kids at their births. Andy must have been riveted. I almost felt a stab of pity for him. I walked down the short hallway and peered around the corner into the living room. Gwen sat on the sofa, her back to me. Facing her in one of the wing chairs was an elegant, for tyish woman in a taupe business suit. She wore her blonde hair up in a twist. Half-glasses perched on her nose as she wrote in a notebook, nodding.

No Andy. I was safe. I strode into the living room. When the woman saw me, her face lit up like a kid who’d just watched Santa Claus emerge from the fireplace. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Vicky, Gwen’s sister.”