This Is Not a Werewolf Story (2 page)

Jack swears and points to the path. Tuffman is walking the rest of the way down to the beach, holding his hair in one hand and wiping the blood from his nose with the other. He picks the kid out of the sand and starts marching him up the path back to the school.

Even from here we can see that the kid is crying. Not just a few tears either. He's bawling his eyes out, bent over at the middle. He's sobbing, sniveling, blubbering, driveling. Halfway up, Tuffman stops, squats down, and shakes a finger in his face.

A shiver goes through the room, up and down every spine.

I don't want to go to PE today.

I look up, but the crows have gone back to the woods. The woods magic has left the real world.

It's over.

“Loser,” Mean Jack says. Then he remembers his mobster act.
“Mortadella,”
he sneers in his thug voice.

Pretty soon, all the boys who had been cheering the new kid on are calling him a jerk and a poser, a show-off, and, worst of all . . .

“What a crybaby,” says Little John.

Little John is one to talk. He cries when a crayon breaks. I've seen every boy in this room cry, and me
too, and not just in PE when Tuffman “accidentally” sends the baseball smack into your front teeth.

But I've never seen one of them outrun Tuffman the way that kid just did.

“Shut up,” I say.

The room goes totally silent. Not a boy moves. I guess you could say that I'm not a big talker. In fact, I don't think I've said a word to anybody in a month or more.

“Shut up,” I repeat. “If I hear even one of you make fun of the new kid for crying, you'll be crying yourself. I guarantee it.”

I pat Sparrow on the head and walk out of the bathroom, slamming the door behind me.

In the main hallway on the second floor I cross paths with the dean. He's breathing pretty hard.

“They got him,” I say.

The dean stops dead in his tracks and just stares at me. Then he smiles. He wipes a trickle of sweat from the side of his face and leans toward me.

“Thank you, Raul. Thank you for informing me.” He talks real quiet, the way you do when you're trying to get a rabbit to come out of the blackberry bush and eat the lettuce in your hand.

I keep walking toward my room. I'm glad me talking makes him so happy, but I'm not gonna do it again
just because I like him. Talking is useless. One minute everyone says they love you and the next minute they forget all about you. Nobody listens, and everybody lies.

The only truth is in the woods, and nobody will believe it anyway. Look how they can stand under a sky full of crows on a mission and not even notice.

After a second I hear the dean panting behind me, trying to catch up.
Huff, huff, huff.
The dean needs to take a few laps with Tuffman, if you know what I mean.

“Raul,” he says. He sounds like he's had an idea. “I'd like you to take the new boy under your wing. I think you may have a lot in common. Will you help him settle in?” The dean's eyes bug out even when he's not excited about something, but when he is, they look like two big marbles.

I know what he's thinking. He doesn't think I'm gonna help the new kid. He thinks the new kid is gonna help me.

But I nod, mainly so that he'll stop looking at me like that.

“Wonderful!” he says with a huge smile.

He doesn't stop. Now his eyes are the size of alien moons. It's freaking me out. What if they pop?

I'm about to open the fire door to the boys' wing when I hear Dean Swift say something that makes
my
eyes pop. I have pretty good hearing. Once, after she
took the headphones off me and stopped fiddling with the dials, the nurse told me she thought I could hear sounds from a mile away. She kind of whispered that like it scared her. But I heard her.

So I can hear the Dean even though he's halfway down the hall. Now, usually when Dean Swift is talking to himself, it's about the refraction of light or bioluminescent fungi or mapping the human genome. So I don't listen too closely because no matter how well I hear it, I don't understand it.

“I wonder. Birds of a feather flock together,” Dean Swift is saying to himself.

That gets my attention. Didn't he say I could take the new boy
under my wing
? Why's he talking about birds again?

Did he notice the crows? The thought paralyzes me.

“They will be the best of friends. There is strong evidence that the new one has secrets too.” Dean Swift's key turns in the lock.

I push through the fire doors and walk down the hall to my room, chewing on his words like a dog with a bone. I wonder about the new kid's secrets.

Did he say “too”? Does that mean Dean Swift knows what the woods magic does to me?

And if he does, why isn't he afraid of me?

And if he's not afraid of me, could he help me?

I remember how it felt when I was the new kid here. I felt like the only one of my kind, and all around me were the other kids in their groups like herds of wildebeests and prides of lions and crashes of rhinos and unkindnesses of ravens and leaps of leopards and wrecks of sea hawks. Remembering makes it hard to breathe, like huge hairy hands have grabbed my heart and lungs and squeezed. (Not
werewolf
hands, if that's what you're thinking, because I'm too old to believe in monsters.)

I sit on my bed and wait until the big hairy paws let me breathe again. On my nightstand is a headband my mom used to wear in her hair. I pick it up and hold it to my face for a second. It doesn't smell like her anymore, but that's okay because I know I'm the one who sniffed the scent away.

The new kid is somewhere in the building. He's probably stopped bawling by now, but I bet he's got a big hard lump in his throat. I bet he feels lost. I'm still the only one of my kind here. But I don't feel lost anymore.

If I
was
gonna show the new kid around, I'd tell him how easy it is to figure out where everything is.
See,
I could say to him,
from the outside the building looks like a castle with turrets and windows and fancy stone carvings. It
looks
like the kind of place where you'll get lost. But don't let the outside fool you. The outside of anything almost never tells you what's inside. The building's a rectangle with a wing at each end. Ignore the wings on the third floor because that's where the girls are. Ignore the turrets because they're full of stuff nobody uses anymore, and the doors to them are always locked. Classrooms are on the main hallways of each floor, and if you can't find one then you just end up missing twenty minutes of listening to the teacher blab, and is that really so bad?

Here's all you need to know. First floor, dining hall. Got it? Okay. Second floor, boys' rooms in the north wing and boys' bathroom in the south wing.

Eat, sleep, shower—what else is there to do?

And if you forget to shower a few days or weeks, you're a boy, so it's only expected.

And then, if I liked the look of him, I'd tell him the truth.
The woods are all that matter, kid.
That's what I'd say. I wouldn't mention woods magic. I wouldn't tell him that the woods are alive with secrets. I wouldn't tell him that you'll find everything you've ever lost and everything that has ever lost you in them.

I'd just point him in the right direction.

My stomach informs me that food would be welcome.
Now
. My dad says only a fool argues with his vital organs.

On my way to the dining hall I hear the sound of breaking glass coming from the animal care room.
Sparrow.
If you hear something breaking in this place, nine out of ten times, Sparrow is involved. Then I hear screams. If you hear someone screaming in this place, ten out of ten times, Mean Jack is involved.

I trot over and look through the window set into the top half of the door.

Mean Jack is chasing Sparrow around the room with the business end of a pencil. Barking, squeaking, flapping, hissing—the animals are going wild. As I put my hand on the doorknob to go in and rescue him, Sparrow jumps up on a high table where the aquarium sits, with its fifty tropical fish.

“Do ya feel lucky?” Mean Jack snarls, jabbing the pencil at Sparrow's feet. “Well, do ya, punk?”

Sparrow jumps. Mean Jack misses. Water sloshes out of the top of the tank. A red swordtail goes over the rim, flops on the table, and hits the floor. Gandalf the cat swallows and then stretches. Forty-nine fish.

Sparrow jumps again, and this time he grabs on to the pipe that runs along the ceiling.

Mr. Baggins the hamster is running in his wheel, tossing little looks over his shoulder at me.
Get in here,
man,
he's saying.
Get in here and shut this crazy kid down.

I like to let Sparrow fight his own fights sometimes. I'll go in when he needs me.

Then, as Sparrow's swinging along the ceiling, one of his feet catches the latch on Gollum's cage. Snake loose. His other foot rams Mean Jack in the nose, and the mobster takes the mouse tank to the floor with him. Ten little mice scamper toward freedom . . . and the fangs of Gollum.

I predict a bloodbath.

I'm turning the doorknob, when I smell cinnamon and honey.
Mary Anne.
She pushes me aside and opens the door.

“Put down the pencil, Jack. That's a one-way ticket to juvie,” she says.

Mean Jack drops the pencil and puts his hands up. Sparrow lands on the high table with the aquarium. A rainbow fish flops over the rim and into Gandalf's mouth. Forty-eight.

Mary Anne's the same age as me and Mean Jack, but she has amazing power. I've never heard her say, “I'm telling.” She doesn't need a teacher.

She pulls me into the room, shuts the door, and drops the blind over the window so that nobody can see in.

“Get to work,” she says.

I give her the
What, me?
look, and she says, “You too. Sometimes
you must choose to observe and sometimes you must choose to act.
You
made the wrong choice.”

My stomach is growling, but I start sweeping sawdust and grabbing mice. I give Mean Jack a little shove every time I come near him. Mean Jack doesn't mess with me. Nobody does.

Then Bobo the German Shepherd growls, low in her throat.

Tuffman opens the door. We all freeze.

He's combed his toupee out pretty good, but there's still one spot in the back that looks a little mangled.

I don't think I'll point that out to him, though.

Mary Anne looks at each of us and shakes her head slightly.
Do not be a rat.
We don't need the warning. At One of Our Kind Boarding School we don't tattle. We don't point fingers. We. Don't. Rat. It's the single most important rule. Dean Swift calls it solidarity. Mean Jack punches his palm with his fist and calls it Stitches for Snitches. I call it keeping my mouth shut, and for me it's pretty much SOP (standard operating procedure).

“Got a problem?” Tuffman asks.

“No problem,” Sparrow squeaks. “I'm cleaning the cages since it's my week for pet care, and my friends are helping.”

Good cover,
I think. It's actually Mean Jack's week for pet care, and he was obviously trying to force Sparrow, at pencil point, to do the work for him. If he'd just turn that graphite tip toward a piece of paper instead
of some kid's eyeball, Mean Jack could write a book on it:
A Practical Guide to Extortion for Kids.

“No problemo, you say? Well, you lost one, pipsqueak.” Tuffman pulls a mouse from his pocket and dangles it by the tail.

Sparrow grabs the mouse. He strokes its head and says softly, “You gonna be okay now, little guy.”

“You didn't say ‘thank you,' short stuff,” says Tuffman.