excerpt from Sugar Moon

I didn’t used to hide my wolfliness. Up until high school, I reveled in it. It made me tough, and scary in a good way. I could always protect my family. But my parents were serious when they told me I couldn’t tell anyone, not a soul, no exceptions. “People shoot wolves,” they said to me, over and over, and I knew they were right, so I was careful. But I wasn’t ashamed. It didn’t feel sexy, exactly, but exciting. A secret that no one else had. 

When girls in my class or in the neighborhood talked about boys they liked, I thought, “boys couldn’t handle me,” and I was right. I remember wondering if boys knew, somehow, because they were always shy. I asked someone I kind of liked I could borrow a piece of paper in English and he gave it to me like he was afraid I would burn it. Girls were less shy. They seemed eager to talk to me even if we didn’t actually like talking about the same things.

They liked talking about clothes. I never did. But when they wanted to try on bathing suits, they thought I wanted to for normal reasons. I think everyone I knew wore bikinis to go swimming, and it was a safe way to take in their shoulders, stomachs, backs, without making anyone uncomfortable. I was even helpful. The question of what colors best flatter her skin tone and her curls; I could answer these questions. I was a thoughtful friend, for selfish reasons. It was another secret, and one I was more afraid of than being a wolf. Not because I thought they would all freak out if they knew I liked girls, but because I would be expected to be a girl and I wasn’t. Not the way they assumed. I didn’t know what I was (besides a wolf), but I knew it meant something different for them than it meant for me.

Alejandra had a reputation for being crazy; in middle school she drew a giant penis with balls on the board and made it into a cat, just to make the boys laugh. (We had a substitute teacher that day, who did not laugh.) I liked how she had nothing to hide, that she always did what she wanted to do, but I didn’t think she noticed me; I kept myself hidden with baggy clothes and didn’t talk in class unless I had to.

One time, after school and right before Thanksgiving, she put her arm around me and started walking me off campus. I assumed her friends were waiting for us and that she was going to prank me or something, but I was intoxicated by the sudden contact; not just her arm around my shoulder but her side warm against mine. I couldn’t pull away.

“My cousin’s home for Thanksgiving,” she said, speaking softly right into my ear. “He carries this flask and I stole it today, to celebrate for break.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know why she was telling me this, but I waited.

“We’re gonna drink it together,” she told me.

“You and your cousin?”

“Ohmigod you’re dumb. No, you and me.”

“Oh.”

 She led me to a little park, about a block away, and the whole time we were walking, I was thinking, why me, and not any of your real friends? But I didn’t ask. I thought I might jinx it, even if I didn’t know what I’d be jinxing.

“It’ll be dark in like an hour,” Alexjandra said. “So we have to do this now. I thought about the short days of November, nervously, to keep myself from conscious hope that anything would happen. We sat behind a tree, where there were hedges on either side. I could tell how much she enjoyed taking the flask out of her jacket pocket.

“Ladies first?” she said. She took the first sip, and I wondered if she knew more than I knew. I didn’t ask that either.

When she handed me the flask, I was mostly eager to put my lips where her lips had been. But I didn’t mind the burn in the back of my throat. I handed it back to her.

“Actually I hate my cousin,” she said. “That’s why I took this. Fuck him.”

“How come?”

“He acts like he knows all these things about people,” she said. “He doesn’t know anything. And he’s always telling me what to do and saying I won’t grow up to be anything.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “You can be anything you want.”

We started passing and swigging in a rhythm, like playing one of those giant xylophones for a lot of people at once.

“Right? He’s jealous. He hates life.”

“How old is he?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Old.”

She took two sips this time, and held the flask in her hand. I didn’t ask for it.

“Is it true you like girls?” she asked.

When I didn’t say anything, she said, “I don’t care, I’m just curious.”

“Why?” I managed to ask.

“All the gay kids I know like boys,” she said. “So I wanted to see.”

“Nothing to see,” I said, and stood up.

“I told you I don’t care,” she said. “I know I’m mean, but I wouldn’t ask you that to be mean. Have you had sex with a girl?”

“I haven’t had sex,” I said. “I haven’t even kissed anyone.”

“Want to?” she said. “Just to see? I probably don’t like girls but I might. I don’t know yet.” I could feel myself turning into something I absolutely could not be, not in daylight, not in public, and never in front of a pretty girl.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Genesis—”

But I ran like I was under attack. When I got home, I grabbed the turkey my mother had been defrosting on the counter and I ate it. All of it. My hands weren’t paws, but they felt like it, with one on either side. I forgot myself in this meal. I ate like I’d been starving, which, in a way, I realize now, thinking of my untouched mouth and Alejandra’s eyes, I had.

My mother was furious. I had ruined Thanksgiving, she said, because I didn’t know how to control myself. I wanted to protest that I had controlled myself and that’s why I needed the twenty-pound carcass, an average meal for a wolf. Late that night, though, vomiting it up like the end of the world, I regretted everything: Alejandra’s arm around me, the whisky, the meat feast, my wolfness, being alive. When I learned then that I had to be careful, I felt sure I’d never need that lesson again. Meeting Krystal changed everything.

I could imagine what happened after she discovered that damn YouTube video, the one that most people didn’t believe, that she wouldn’t have believed if she hadn’t met me. But because she had, and because I’d told her no, the world doesn’t need more of us, she’d gone to him. I could imagine what happened. It played like memories in my head as though I had been there, seen Krystal noticing the werewolf, his wild hair and beard half-sheathed in a hoodie, on a street corner in Mendocino County, late at night. As I watch the scene, it’s raining, and the headlights in her car are making luminous streaks on the street. Maybe he’s watching them, with his wolf vision, and wondering why the car isn’t moving. He expects a guy to get out and pick a fight, which is something that had been happening a lot since his video went viral. He’d just been trying to reach out, to see if there were others, and maybe, when he got caught up in questions about why he was like this, to help young people who feel the way he could remember feeling. He didn’t expect a bunch of quasi-skinhead types to feel emasculated by the whole thing and try to prove their manliness. They’d drive down in giant pickup trucks that towered above the highway, sometimes with guns, from crazy towns in the foothills. They’d say his time has come, having always hoped they could use that gun to save the world. Still, he won every fight, even though he didn’t want to fight with anyone. Tonight, for the first time, he wonders if he’ll let the guy win. Make things easier. Ease his conscience a little.

He doesn’t expect a woman to get out, and he adjusts the drawstring on his hood, like it’s a tie. She’s got a lot of tattoos and hair that’s been dyed so many shades it’s its own new color now, a deviation from the spectrum. As a teenager he’d had a crush on a girl that reminded him of this one; she’d been a student at Mendocino College and had shared his first-ever joint with him.

The woman in the car catches his eye, and he almost turns around so she won’t feel like he was staring. But she’s walking toward him, there is no mistaking it. Is she the girlfriend of one of the guys he’d had to fight? He’s terrified, suddenly, a new feeling.

“Hey,” she says, calling to him over the rain. “You’re that guy.”

Close up, her face is mesmerizing – a few freckles on her dark skin, her hair that’s every color and none of them cut into a kind of mullet that somehow works. On her it works.

“I’m a guy,” he says.

“You know what I mean.”

“I really don’t,” he says, already hers. She doesn’t seduce him, she wouldn’t do that, but she smiles at him, and that’s all it takes for him to trust her.

“I just want to know more about you,” she begins. “Should we get out of this rain?”

“I live a bit of a ways from here,” he says, his voice unsteady.

He’s looking at her car, but she says, “Good. I’ve come a long way and need the exercise.”

“Where do you want me to start?” he asks, as they begin walking. The raindrops are gleaming on her hair, making it look celestial.

“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “Start wherever you want.”

“I assume you want to know about the—”

“Wherever you want,” she cuts in. She’s learned, from me, that the best way to get what you want from a werewolf is to not force them to talk about being a werewolf.

By the time they reach his door, which lies crooked on its hinges, there’s nothing Krystal doesn’t know about this guy. She knows about his mother’s addiction, and how she spent years in jail when he was little because she’d prostituted herself for drug money. She knows about his aunt that took him in during those years, and how even though they never really got along per se, he owed her everything, or at least, as much as he had. He talks about how he never knew the father that, well, you know, and no one liked to talk about him. “I figured he was worse than me,” he says to Krystal, but for a while there his aunt had dated a guy who was really bad, and he wondered, was his father that bad? But he’d never know. These details pour out because – Krystal can tell this – no one had ever asked.

“You’re beautiful,” he’d offered at the end, and she’d laughed, because nothing he’d told her so far had led up to that.

“Will you give me something?” she asks.

“Anything, I mean it.” By now he’s tripping out on Krystal’s receptiveness, the lack of judgement he feels in her presence.

“I want to be a wolf,” she says. “Like you.”

Maybe he’d thought she’d wanted sex, or even marriage. Maybe not, but he hadn’t expected this.

“Are you sure?” he asks. “It’s not easy.”

“Augh, you all say that.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I mean, what if it is easy and you make it hard? What if the shame makes it hard?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

“I mean if you—it’s okay, you don’t have to. But…please.”

“You’ve given me a lot of your time tonight,” he tells her, full of reverence and gratitude.

“This is all I ask for.”

I can see her leaning down to kiss his cheek, her lips barely grazing his dry, terminally untouched skin. The warmth undoes him. He’s glad to have anything he can give her. For one night, he doesn’t feel alone. And he’s glad to have been born the way he was.

***

I drove to the redwoods on the coldest night of the year. It felt familiar up there, even though as a human I’d always avoided the woods. Would I have ever come up, alone, to a place I could only fully enjoy as a wolf, if it weren’t for Krystal? Probably not. It wasn’t that I loved my wolf self now. But for the first time, I knew I needed it. She’d be easy to find in the stillness: anything is, if you’re an animal. The dark sharpens your senses.

I changed, slowly. The transformation came over my body like a deep stretch after too many hours of sitting. All thoughts gave way to the details in the insect chirps, the crispness of the air rippling through my fur. Walking, on this ground, with these limbs, I couldn’t believe I’d settled for the dull senses that now felt like a dream, an unsatisfying dream that you wake up annoyed from. I couldn’t be annoyed this way. Alert, colossal, relaxed. Big enough for the majestic trees that surrounded me.

“Even a werewolf has to be provoked,” I said softly to myself, thoughtful growls. Did I have a hair-trigger temper? When I had eaten those boys and made that scar in Marisa’s shoulder, I’d been trying to protect Krystal. But she would never need my protecting again.

I sniffed the air, waited. I knew she was close by. I knew she was eager for me to see her as a wolf. I knew she wanted to make me wait but wouldn’t be able to.

When I heard her growl, I didn’t turn around. A deer corpse startled me: decapitated, too neatly, a raw, bleeding circle, with a clean outline.

“Did you do this?” I still wouldn’t look at her.

Her laugh. As a wolf, she still had it, and as a wolf, I still loved it. “What do you think I am? Why would I decapitate a fucking deer? No. That was the handiwork of a couple of guys who are…” she ran her tongue around the edge of her long, elegant muzzle. “No longer with us.”

“It’s disgusting,” I said, looking at the headless deer corpse. “It’s pointless. It’s stupid. But did they deserve to die?”

“You don’t stop violent people by being nice about it.”

That was when I looked at her; she was a red wolf, not a grey one like me. We started circling each other, effortlessly, our eyes illuminating the dark, illuminating one another’s massive, powerful bodies. “Do you think you’re a hero?” I asked her. I was surprised by my own question.

“That word is meaningless.”

“But you can’t—

A sharp pain coursed through the soft of my belly as it slammed against the dirt. She was on me, a colossal trap. I couldn’t move my legs.

I growled, even though I almost liked her weight there. She spoke close to my ear so that her delicate howls vibrated through my whole body, and I shivered. Her voice was a low, sonorous rumble.

“You missed me.”

“I hate you,” I said, but I could hardly mask my whimper. She was majestic.

“Hate is not what I’m smelling from you,” she said.

I couldn’t argue. It was impossible to lie.

“I can’t believe you ever hid this from people,” she said. “From yourself! Such a shy little thing, falling in love with the first pussy you get your face in – you could be conquering the world. Let me show you how to do this. You’ve got to know you’re doing it wrong.”

“I don’t kill. Not…”

“You don’t live. Why’d you even come here?”

“To tell you to stop.”

She smirked. Unmistakably, she smirked. “Or you’ll what?”

“I don’t know what I’ll do,” I said. “I was hoping I could trust you.”

“A world full of assholes, some of them gone, what’s that got to do with trust?”

“Killing is wrong, Krystal.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Fine. Killing is wrong.”

“Let’s agree to disagree,” she said.

“You’re a better person than that,” I told her.

“I’m not a person at all.”

I turned away, dizzy from her intoxicating pheromones. I changed back into my human self—an ache I didn’t want to acknowledge—and strode away from her, feeling my way as my eyes adjusted.

“You’re beautiful the way you really are,” she growled. I was afraid she was right.