Shiver

“Shut up,” Isabel said, which only supported my theory. I was about to tell her so, but her next words stopped me cold. “When I saw Jack, he said he hadn’t really died. Then he started—twitching—and said he had to go right then. When I tried to ask him what was wrong with him, he said that you knew.”

My voice came out a little strangled sounding. “Me?” But I remembered his eyes imploring me as he lay pinned beneath the she-wolf. Help me. He had recognized me.

“Well, it’s not exactly a shock, is it? Everyone knows that you and Olivia Marx are freaks for those wolves, and clearly this has something to do with them. So what’s going on, Grace?”

I didn’t like the way she asked the question—like maybe she already knew the answer. Blood was rushing in my ears; I was in way over my head. “Look. You’re upset, I get that. But seriously, get help. Leave me and Olivia out of this. I don’t know what you saw, but it wasn’t Jack.”

The lie left a bad taste in my mouth. I could see the reasoning behind the pack’s secrecy, but Jack was Isabel’s brother. Didn’t she have a right to know?

“I wasn’t seeing things,” Isabel snapped as I opened the door. “I’m going to find him again. And I’m going to find out what your part is in all this.”

“I don’t have a part,” I said. “I just like the wolves. Now I need to get to class.”

Isabel stood in the doorway, watching me go, and I wondered what, at the beginning of all this, she had thought I was going to say.

She looked almost forlorn, or maybe it was just an act.

In any case, I said, “Isabel, just get help.”

She crossed her arms. “I thought that’s what I was doing.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE • SAM

54°F

While Grace was at school, I spent a long time in the parking lot, thinking about meeting wild Rachel and wondering what she’d meant by the wolf comment. I debated hunting for Jack, but I wanted to hear what Grace found out at school before I went on any wild-goose chase.

I didn’t quite know how to occupy my time without Grace and without my pack. I felt like someone who has an hour until his bus arrives—not really enough time to do anything important, but too much time to just sit and wait.

The subtle cold bite behind the breeze told me that I couldn’t put off getting on my bus forever.

I finally drove the Bronco to the post office. I had the key to Beck’s post office box, but mostly, what I wanted to do was conjure memories and pretend that I’d run into him there.

I remembered the day Beck had brought me there to pick up my books for school—even now, I remembered it had been a Tuesday, because back then, Tuesdays were my favorite day. I don’t remember why—it was just something about the way that u looked like when it was next to e that seemed very friendly. I always loved going to the post office with Beck; it was a treasure cave with rows and rows of little locked boxes holding secrets and surprises only for those with the proper key.

With peculiar clarity, I remembered that conversation clearly, down to the expression on Beck’s face: “Sam. Come on, bucko.”

“What’s that?”

Beck shoved his back ineffectually against the glass door, suffering under the weight of a huge box. “Your brain.”

“I already have a brain.”

“If you did, you’d have opened the door for me.”

I shot him a dark look and let him shove against the door a moment longer before I ducked under his arms to push it open. “What is it really?”

“Schoolbooks. We’re going to educate you properly, so you don’t grow up to be an idiot.”

I remembered being intrigued by the idea of school-in-a-box, just-add-water-and-Sam.

The rest of the pack was equally intrigued. I was the first in the pack to be bitten before finishing school, so the novelty of educating me was fascinating to the others. For several summers, they all took turns with the massive lesson manual and the lovely, ink-smelling new textbooks. They would stuff my brain full all day long: Ulrik for math; Beck for history; Paul for vocabulary, and later, science. They shouted test questions at me across the dinner table, invented songs for the timelines of dead presidents, and converted one of the dining room walls into a giant whiteboard that was always written with words of the day and dirty jokes that no one would cop to.

When I was done with the first box of books, Beck packed them up and another box came to take its place. When I wasn’t studying my school-in-a-box, I was surfing the Internet for a different sort of education. I surfed for photos of circus freaks and synonyms for the word intercourse and for answers to why staring at the stars in the evening tore my heart with longing.

With the third box of books came a new pack member: Shelby, a tanned, slender girl covered in bruises and stumbling under the weight of a heavy Southern accent. I remembered Beck telling Paul, “I couldn’t just leave her there. God! Paul, you didn’t see where she came from. You didn’t see what they were doing to her.”

I’d felt sorry for Shelby, who’d made herself inaccessible to the others. I’d been the only one who had managed to float a life raft to the island that was Shelby, coaxing words out of her and, sometimes, a smile. She was strange, a breakable animal that would do anything to reassert control over her life. She’d steal things from Beck so that he would have to ask where they’d gone, play with the thermostat to watch Paul get up from the couch to fix it, hide my books so that I would talk with her instead of reading. But we were all broken in that house, weren’t we? After all, I was the kid who couldn’t bear to look into a bathroom.

Beck had picked up another box of books from the post office for Shelby, but they didn’t mean the same thing to her that they did to me. She left them to collect dust and looked up wolf behavior online instead.

Now, here in the post office, I stopped in front of Beck’s P.O. box, 730. I touched the chipped paint of the numbers; the three was nearly gone and had been for as long as I’d been coming here. I put the key into the box, but I didn’t turn it. Was it so wrong to want this so bad? An ordinary life of ordinary years with Grace, a couple of decades of turning keys in P.O. boxes and lying in bed and putting up Christmas trees in winter?

And now I was thinking of Shelby, again, and the memories bit, sharp as cold next to memories of Grace. Shelby had always thought my attachment to my human life was ludicrous. I still remembered the worst fight we had about it. Not the first, or the last, but the most cruel. I was lying on my bed, reading a copy of Yeats that Ulrik had bought for me, and Shelby jumped onto the mattress and stepped on the pages of the book, wrinkling them beneath her bare foot.