This Is Not a Werewolf Story (33 page)

I found myself. I am right where I was.

Socks. My feet are warm. My jeans won't button and my shirt and shoes are snug, but I feel light, like I'm walking on two inches of air. My skin is smooth and my head is full of thoughts and words and things I have to say.

I run out of the lighthouse, and before I know it my dad picks me up and holds me tight.

“White Wolf,” I say. The words come out like a creak and a growl.

We both look over to where we last saw her.

She's gone.

“It's Mom,” I tell my dad. “I'm sure of it.”

Dean Swift's eyes bulge. “That never occurred to me.”

Dean Swift is flabbergasted, but my dad acts like I just told him mom got stuck in a traffic jam somewhere. Like it's no big deal. “Don't worry,” he says. “We'll bring her back. We just have to figure out the right steps.”

Do you see how quick a man of science can become a man of magic?

Seeing is believing.

“We'll fix it,” he says.

He's my dad. So I believe him.

Let me break it down for you. Even happy endings feel sad, so let's make it quick, right?

First we go back to the school.

Mary Anne skips down the steps, throws her arms around me, and squeezes me so tight I burp. How's that for a hero's homecoming? My belch cracks everyone up, but Mary Anne doesn't seem to mind. She keeps saying I'm the most heroic boy in school. I'm not sure what kind of lie Dean Swift has come up with to explain it all, so I just smile. Now, if I can figure out how to make the things I want to say to her sound like words instead of gastric distress, maybe she'll do a slow dance with me at the Christmas party this year. My armpits get sweaty just thinking about it. Ha!
There's
something I didn't miss when I was a wolf. Nervous perspiration.

Jack is my new best friend. He's rough on the outside but smooth on the inside. Like the birch branch we found last week in the woods. I'm showing him how to carve. For a mobster he has excellent fine-motor
skills. Right now we're making Sparrow that rod.

Sparrow is still Sparrow. When he heard that I had come home, he ran and hid under his bed. He wouldn't come out until I had crawled under there with him. No easy feat, since I gained a lot of weight in the woods. Berries and raw meat apparently meet all of a wolf-boy's nutritional needs, and then some.

The police are looking for Tuffman. If they ever find him, he'll be charged with fraud for pretending to be me and writing letters to my dad and asking for money. I'd tell the police to go check out the new cougar at the Woodland Park Zoo, but then they'd send me off to the loony bin, and that has to be worse than being stuck in a cage or a wolf skin.

Vincent never says he's sorry again.

“Look,” he says instead one day. “I sawed this from the tree and cleaned it up for you.”

It's the red bike from the old oak. “A little grease, a lot of paint, and she's as good as new,” he says. He spins the back wheel. He opens his hands, and I see the blisters and calluses he got from using the saw. On the inside of one arm he has a long thin scar, like what you'd get if you fell down against a sharp wolf claw.

“Thank you,” I say. I know he really feels sorry for what he did. I just wish he had felt more sorry, sooner. A lot sooner. Like so soon that he had never done it.

I wish I could say I forgive him, but it's hard. I still
wake up some nights in a cold sweat, my head filled with the cougar's screech and the sight of him pouncing on White Wolf.

Vincent tries to explain it. One night he tells me how White Deer calls him Raven whenever he goes into the woods.

“I don't want to be a bird, Raul,” he says. “I don't ever want to change. I want to stay the same.”

I just look at him when he says that. Everyone changes. We can't help it. And maybe if he tries to be a raven, he won't be such a chicken anymore.

One day when I'm not so mad at him, I'll try to help him figure out that when you change, part of you stays the same. There's more than one of you inside you. Don't be afraid of that. We were made for this world and we belong everywhere in it, wearing all the skins that fit us.

And what about White Wolf? She came back, the very next Friday at sunset. She's not going anywhere. Love goes on and on.
That's
the magic.

The big problem is how to help her find whatever she lost. When the dean talked to me that night when I was a wolf with the shadow of a boy's head and he was a man with the shadow of an eagle's head, he asked me if I had lost my threshold, my light, or my clothes. My mom must have lost one of those things, or all three.

The day after I get back, I open the dean's office door.

“I have a question,” I say. “And I'm afraid of the answer.”

Dean Swift nods.

“I never see the shadow of my mom's face the way I saw the shadow of your eagle wings,” I say. “Does that mean she's been trapped in her wolf skin so long that her first self is gone?” My mouth turns down. I've said most of it, but some of it I keep inside. I don't want to say it out loud because the words might make it true.

Is my mom dead? Is White Wolf all that's left of her?

Dean Swift's eyes are very soft when he finally speaks. “Think about your question,” he says.

I think. He watches.

“Remember,” he says, “shifters can only see each other's first-self shadow when they're
both
wearing their second skin.”

My skin tingles when I realize what he means. “I understand,” I say.

“Do you?” he asks.

I nod. I see him with different eyes. Dean Swift and my mom have something in common. It's their
second
skins that are human. My mom's first self is White Wolf. Dean Swift's is the eagle.

It's wonderful. And a little weird, too.

“When you're ready,” he says, “I wonder if you'll
tell me what you know about the Fresnel lens?”

It's nice for once to know more about something than the dean.

“I love you,” my dad says when he picks me up. Sometimes he just says it when we are opening a can of soup for dinner.

I was wrong before. Words matter. Those words my dad says matter to me.

The three of us—me, my dad, and the dean—we all agree on what to do. We all agree that not every family can be the same. Not every family can have a mom and dad and a house and two cars and two kids and money for vacations. But every family can find their own kind of happy.

So we all agree. I stay at the boarding school during the week.

In the mornings I carve in the woodshop before breakfast. At lunch Mary Anne sits next to me and tells me stories about soul-stealing shape-shifting otters. In the evenings Jack and I work on what the counselor calls our “social skills”—that means I try to talk more, and Jack tries to talk less. Cook Patsy is the new PE teacher. First thing, she burned the vomit troughs. Soon we will all be ripped. Ms. Tern doesn't come back. Something tells me she's parachuting into the jungle, a knife in her teeth and a rifle strapped to her back,
looking for tiger poachers. On the first day of school, the new reading teacher rips up the curriculum and eats it in front of us.

Gollum's cage is still empty.

Jason made Bobo a little wheeled seat that attaches to her hind leg. She runs way faster than before.

There's a lot I don't understand. I think I'm becoming a wonderer, like Dean Swift. The less I know, the more there is to discover.

On Fridays I still take the Cubs fishing. On Friday afternoons my dad rides his bike over from the ranger station to pick me up. He hugs me. We bike out to the lighthouse together. My legs are finally long enough for that ten-speed. On Sunday mornings he meets me at the lighthouse again. We bike over to the ranger trailer. We draw maps. We make plans. We talk a lot, and we think even more.

We sit under the cedars by the lake, and we wait for White Deer. One day it will come back. Red flowers will pour from its mouth, and in each flower a word. And in each word, a clue to freeing my mom.

In the late twelfth century there lived a noblewoman named Marie de France. She felt that as an author, her job was to take old stories that she had heard and write them down so that others could enjoy and learn from them. She often changed the stories to make them more meaningful to her audience.

One of her stories was called “Bisclavret.” Bisclavret was a noble knight who became a wolf every weekend. When his wife discovered his secret, she was terrified. Nobody can really blame her, right? But instead of trying to understand and help her husband, she spoke with another knight who was in love with her. She got him to follow Bisclavret into the woods, steal his clothes, and trap him as a wolf forever.

There's more to the story. Believe me, Marie didn't let the wife and her partner in crime off as easily as I do Tuffman and Vincent. If you want to see how Marie went medieval on the bad guys, check out Project Gutenberg online for an English translation of her
“Bisclavret,” or better yet, buy an English translation of
The Lais of Marie de France.
You'll find many more great short stories by her.

I've often wished I could thank Marie for all the joy her words have given me. A few years ago, I decided that the best way to make sure that everyone remembers her would be to do what she had done: take an old story and make it new.

I wrote
This is Not a Werewolf Story
with my son, who was nine when we started it. Many of the ideas and words in the book are his. This story is dedicated to him. Without him, like most of the good things in my life, it wouldn't have happened.

The keys stop clicking when I try to express my gratitude to my husband, Mike. We've grown up together. Marie de France wrote it best: “Neither you without me nor me without you.” I thank him for always thinking I can do anything I try.

My parents, Bill and Diane, filled my childhood with books. They read to me and my sister and talked with us. Above all, they gave us, and continue to give us, the precious gift of their time. Thank you more than I can say.

Nobody has believed in my dreams longer than my older sister, Kaye. She has always gone through everything in life first, and has made it all easier for me. I thank my nephew Evan and brother-in-law Jim for
always cheering me on. I thank my mother- and father-in-law, Jane and James, who have shared countless books and conversations with me over the years. I thank my grandparents, Jim and Peggy, for always making a big deal about my reading and whistling skills.

I was ten when I started to write. Since then I have received hundreds of rejections for my poems and stories. I decided at some point that it didn't matter how many people said “No.” All it would take was one person who said “Yes.”

In my case that person was Minju Chang, my agent at BookStop Literary. To her I give my most sincere thanks for her faith, and for talking to me about my story as if it were a real book she had read. The next person to say yes to me was Reka Simonsen at Atheneum. I am so grateful for her willingness to work with a first-time author. Only with her guidance and insight was I able to find the shape of this tale. I thank Reka from the bottom of my heart. I am grateful to Debra Sfetsios-Conover for designing a cover that so perfectly captures the story, Maike Plenzke for an illustration that stuns me every time I look at it, and Adam Smith for catching so many of my errors.

I thank friends who bravely asked, “What's it about?” and then listened like they meant it: Sheri H., Kim K., Denise D., Tiffany, Derek and Ric M., Hans O., Jennifer C. I thank Michelle S., my son's compassionate
and inspiring teacher during the year I wrote this. I thank the late Laura Hruska, who wrote me a rejection many years ago for an early attempt at a novel. Her letter, full of encouragement, has been taped to the refrigerator of every kitchen I've cooked in since.