Shiver

“Come listen to the howls I found online,” she said.

“I’m reading.”

“Mine’s more important,” Shelby said, towering above me, her toes curling and crinkling the pages further. “Why do you bother reading that stuff?” She gestured to the stack of schoolbooks on the desk beside my bed. “That’s not what you’re going to be when you grow up. You’re not going to be a man. You’re going to be a wolf, so you should be learning wolf things.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Well, it’s true. You’re not going to be Sam. All those books are a waste. You’re going to be alpha male. I read about that. And I’ll be your mate. The alpha female.” Her face was excited, flushed. Shelby wanted nothing more than to leave her past behind.

I ripped Yeats out from beneath her foot and smoothed the page. “I will be Sam. I’m never going to stop being Sam.”

“You won’t be!” Shelby’s voice was getting louder. She jumped off my bed and shoved my stack of books over; thousands of words crashed onto the floor. “This is just pretending! We won’t have names, we’ll just be wolves!”

I shouted, “Shut up! I can still be Sam when I’m a wolf!”

Beck burst into the room, then, looking at the scene in his silent way: my books, my life, my dreams, spread under Shelby’s feet, and me on my bed, clutching my wrinkled Yeats in white-knuckled hands.

“What’s going on here?” Beck said.

Shelby jerked a finger at me. “Tell him! Tell him he’s not going to be Sam anymore, when we’re wolves. He can’t be. He won’t even know his name. And I won’t be Shelby.” She was shaking, furious.

Beck’s voice was so quiet I could barely hear him. “Sam will always be Sam.” He took Shelby’s upper arm and marched her out of the room, her feet skidding on my books. Her face was shocked; Beck had been careful to never lay a hand on her since she’d come. I’d never seen him so angry. “Don’t you ever tell him differently, Shelby. Or I will take you back where you came from. I will take you back.”

In the hallway, Shelby began to scream, and she didn’t stop until Beck slammed her bedroom door.

He walked back past my room and paused in the doorway. I was gently stacking my books back on the desk. The words shook in my hands as I did.

I thought Beck would say something, but he just picked up a book by his feet and added it to my pile before he left.

Later, I heard Ulrik and Beck; they didn’t realize there weren’t many places in the house a werewolf couldn’t hear. “You were too hard on Shelby,” Ulrik said. “She has a point. What is it you think he’s going to do with all this wonderful book learning, Beck? It’s not as if he’ll ever be able to do what you do.”

There was a long pause and Ulrik said, “What, you can’t be surprised. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what you were thinking. But tell me, how did you think Sam would go to college?”

Another pause. Beck said, “Summer school. And some online credits.”

“Right. Let’s say Sam gets his degree. What’s he going to do with it? Go to law school online, too? And then what kind of lawyer would he be? People put up with your eccentric gone-for- the-winter routine because you were established when you were bitten. Sam will have to try to get jobs that ignore his unscheduled disappearance every year. For all the learning you’re stuffing in his head, he’s going to have to get jobs at gas stations like the rest of us. If he even makes it past twenty.”

“You want to tell him to give up? You tell him. I’ll never tell him that.”

“I’m not telling him to give up. I’m telling you to give up.”

“Sam doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to. He wants to learn. He’s smart.”

“Beck. You’re going to make him miserable. You can’t give him all the tools to succeed and then let him discover—poof—that he can’t use any of them. Shelby’s right. In the end, we’re wolves. I can read him German poetry and Paul can teach him about past participles and you can play Mozart for him, but in the end, it’s a long, cold night and those woods for all of us.”

Another pause before Beck answered, sounding tired and unlike himself.

“Just leave me alone, Ulrik, okay? Just leave me alone.”

The next day Beck told me I didn’t have to do my schoolwork if I didn’t want to, and he went driving by himself. I waited until he was gone, and then I did the work, anyway.

Now, I wished more than anything that Beck was here with me. I turned the key in the lock, knowing what I’d find—a box stuffed with months’ worth of envelopes and probably a slip to collect more from behind the desk.

But when I opened the box, there were two lonely letters and some junk fliers.

Someone had been here. Recently.

CHAPTER THIRTY • SAM

41°F

“Do you mind if I go by Olivia’s?” Grace asked, climbing into the car, bringing in a rush of cold air with her. In the passenger seat, I recoiled, and she hurriedly shut the door behind her. She said, “Sorry about that. It got really cold, didn’t it? Anyway, I don’t want to, you know, actually go inside. Just drive by. Rachel said that a wolf had been scratching around Olivia’s house. So maybe we could pick up a trail near there?”

“Go for it,” I said. Taking her hand from where it rested, I kissed her fingertips before replacing it on the wheel. I slouched down in my seat and got my translation of Rilke I’d brought to read while I waited for her.

Grace’s lips lifted slightly at my touch, but she didn’t say anything as she pulled out of the lot. I watched her face, etched into concentration, mouth set in a firm line, and waited to see if she was ready to say what was on her mind. When she didn’t, I picked up the volume of Rilke and slouched down in my seat.

“What are you reading?” Grace asked, after a long space of silence.

I was fairly certain that pragmatic Grace would not have heard of Rilke. “Poetry.”

Grace sighed and gazed out at the dead white sky that seemed to press down on the road before us. “I don’t get poetry.” She seemed to realize her statement might offend, because she hurriedly added, “Maybe I’m reading the wrong stuff.”

“You’re probably just reading it wrong,” I said. I’d seen Grace’s to-be-read pile: nonfiction, books about things, not about how things were described. “You have to listen to the pattern of the words, not just what they’re saying. Like a song.” When she frowned, I paged through my book and scooted closer to her on the bench seat, so that our hip bones were pressed together.