Linger

Usually when I woke up someplace other than my bed—at my grandmother’s, or the few times I’d been in a hotel when I was younger—there was a moment of confusion as my body figured out why the light was different and the pillow wasn’t mine. But opening my eyes in Sam’s room, it was just…opening my eyes. It was like my body had been unable to forget where I was even while I was sleeping.

So when I rolled back over to look into the rest of the room and saw birds dancing between me and the ceiling, there was no surprise. Just wonder. Dozens of origami birds of every shape, size, and color danced slowly in the air from the heating vents, life in slow motion. The now-brilliant light through the tall window cast moving bird-shaped shadows all around the room: on the ceiling, on the walls, over the top of the stacks and shelves of books, across the comforter, across my face. It was beautiful.

I wondered how long I’d slept. Also, I wondered where Sam was. Stretching my arms above my head, I realized I could hear the dull roar of the shower through the open door. Dimly, I heard Sam’s voice rise above the sound of the shower:

All these perfect days, made of glass

Put on the shelf where they can cast

perfect shadows that stretch and grow

on the imperfect days down below.

He sang the line over again, twice, changing stretch and grow to shift and glow and then shift and grow. His voice sounded wet and echoey.

I smiled, though there was no one to see it. The fight with my parents seemed like something that had happened to a longago Grace. Kicking back the blankets, I stood up, my head sending one of the birds into crazy orbit. I reached up to still it and then moved among the birds, looking at what they were made of. The one that had knocked against my head was folded out of newsprint. Here was one folded out of a glossy magazine cover. Another from a paper beautifully and intricately printed with flowers and leaves. One that looked like it had once been a tax worksheet. Another, misshapen and tiny, made out of two dollar bills taped together. A school report card from a correspondence school out of Maryland. So many stories and memories folded up for safekeeping; how like Sam to hang them all above him while he slept.

I fingered the one that hung directly over his pillow. A rumpled piece of notepaper covered with Sam’s handwriting, echoing the voice I now heard in the background. One of the scribbled lines was girl lying in the snow.

I sighed. I had a weird, empty feeling inside me. Not a bad sort of empty. It was a sort of lack of sensation, like being in pain for a long time and then suddenly realizing that you’re not anymore. It was the feeling of having risked everything to be here with a boy and then realizing that he was exactly what I wanted. Being a picture and then finding I was really a puzzle piece, once I found the piece that was supposed to fit beside me.

I smiled again, and the delicate birds danced around me.

“Hi,” Sam said from the doorway. His voice was cautious, unsure of where we stood this morning, after our days apart. His hair was all stuck out and crazy from his shower, and he was wearing a collared shirt that made him look weirdly formal, despite its rumpled, untucked appearance and his blue jeans. My mind was screaming: Sam, Sam, finally Sam.

“Hi,” I said, and I couldn’t keep from grinning. I bit my lip, but my smile was still there, and it only got bigger when Sam’s face reflected it back at me. I stood there among his birds, with the shape of my body still impressed on the bed sheets beside me, the sun splashing over me and him, and my worries of last night seeming impossibly small in comparison to the vast glow of this morning.

I was suddenly overwhelmed by what an incredible person this boy was, standing in front of me, and by the fact that he was mine and I was his.

“Right now,” Sam said—and I saw that he held the invoice for today’s studio time in his hand, folded into a bird with sun-washed wings—“it’s hard to imagine that it is raining anywhere in the world.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

• COLE •

I couldn’t get the smell of her blood out of my nostrils.

Sam was gone by the time I got to the house; the driveway was empty and the house felt echoey and hollow. I burst into the downstairs bathroom—the bath mat was still twisted from where Sam and I had struggled the night before—and turned the tap on as hot as I could get it. Then I stood in it and watched blood run down the drain. It looked black in the dull filtered light behind the shower curtain. Scrubbing my palms together and scratching my arms, I tried to get every last trace of the doe off me, but no matter how hard I worked my skin, I could still smell her. And every time I caught a whiff of her scent, I saw her. That dark, resigned eye looking up at me while I stared at her insides.

Then I remembered Victor looking up at me, lying on the floor of the shed, bitter, simultaneously Victor and wolf. My fault.

It occurred to me then that I was the opposite of my father. Because I was very, very good at destroying things.

I reached forward and turned the water temperature all the way to cold. There was a brief moment when there was enough hot water to make it the exact temperature of my body, turning me invisible. Then it became frigid. I swore and fought my instincts to jump out of the tub.

Goose bumps rose immediately on my skin, so fast that they hurt, and I let my head fall back. The water coursed over my neck.

Shift. Shift now.

But the water wasn’t cold enough to force me to change; it was just cold enough to make my gut twist and nausea bubble through me. I used my foot to shut off the water.

Why was I still human?

It didn’t make sense. If being a wolf was scientific, not magical, then it had to follow rules and logic. And the fact that the new wolves changed at different temperatures at different times…it didn’t make sense. My head was full of Victor shifting back and forth, the white wolf watching me silently, sure in her wolf body, and me, pacing the halls of the house, waiting to shift. I grabbed the hand towel from the sink and used it to dry myself as I riffled through the downstairs closets for clothing. I found a dark blue sweatshirt that said navy on it and some jeans that were a bit loose but didn’t fall off. The entire time that I was looking for clothing, my head hummed, turning over possibilities for new logic.

Maybe Beck had been wrong about hot and cold being the cause of the shifts. Maybe they weren’t really causes; maybe they were just catalysts. In which case there might be other ways to trigger the shift.

I needed paper. I couldn’t think without writing my thoughts down.

I got some paper from Beck’s office, and Beck’s day planner as well. I sat down at the dining room table, pen in hand, the heat rushing out softly through the vents making me feel warm and drowsy. My brain instantly traveled back to my parents’ dining room table. I’d sat there every morning with my brainstorming notebook—my father’s idea—and I would do my homework or write song lyrics or journal on something I’d seen on the news. That was back when I’d been sure I was going to change the world.