Memoirs of a Girl Wolf (13 page)

Earlier that week in gym I was able to run two miles in under fifteen minutes. Coach Dean was amazed. He wanted me to try out for cross country. I told him I’d think about it, but Mom said no without saying why. She was nervous about late practices and away meets which to me was stupid because there wasn’t a lot of crime in Petoskey, but I didn’t really care about joining sports after my short time as a potential cheerleader. I was just as happy to distance myself from high school as much as possible.

So although I was getting sick of the tea, it did have some benefits, but I really didn’t feel like drinking it every night and I tried telling Mom this but she placed the hot mug in my hand and told me to taste it, so I did.

“Hmm,” I said, surprised. I did like it.

“It’s a Japanese tea.”

“Not bad,” I said. 

She nodded with a smile and together we walked to the table to have dinner. I ended up liking the new tea so much that I had another cup after dinner and then I woke up in my bed with the sun shining on my face. I kicked the heavy blankets off of me, and groggily placed my bare feet on the floor. Stretching and yawning, I walked across the room and pulled the curtains shut over the window which blocked out the annoying sunlight. I was still so tired. I sat back on my bed and laid down. Turning on my side, I slowly closed my eyes and then I jolted awake and sat up in bed. 

My alarm clock beside me in a red blinking light read: 11:45 a. m.

14.

I don’t know how I did it, but I was ready in five minutes. After realizing how late it was, I jumped out of bed and pulled my nightgown over my head. I pulled open the top and bottom drawer of my dresser and grabbed a pair of jeans and the dark green v neck sweater I had got for my birthday. After changing, I ran to my bathroom and applied a little foundation. After rubbing the creamy substance quickly into my face, then highlighting my cheekbones with a bronze blush, I then found my mascara, cursed under my breath when it went on to thick and clumped my eyelashes together, but I didn’t have time to care, so I applied a little black eyeliner and then pouted my lips and moisturized them with lip balm.

I checked the time on my phone: two minutes to 11:50. I didn’t have time to spend on my hair. I allowed thirty seconds of staring at my reflection feeling sorry for myself that my hair looked like I had stuck my finger in an electric socket and then I bent forward, gathered my thick red hair in my hands, and tied it into a messy bun that sat almost on top of my head. Shrugging, I decided I looked decent enough and pushing up my breasts a little I was ready to run down the stairs and into the woods to hopefully be on time to meet Reign, but just as I left my bathroom I remembered I needed to brush my teeth.

So by the time I left my house, closing the front door behind me, at 11:53, I really did have to run for it. I jumped over the fallen, rotting branches of a Pine tree as I entered the woods and started running down the familiar trail to the clearing. As I got close, I tripped over a rock and fell to the ground with a hard thud.

Groaning, I rolled on to my back and noticed I had scratched the palm of left hand which I had used to break my fall. I slowly stood and brushed myself off. The front of my jeans were now a little dirty, but I did my best to look presentable before walking the rest of the way.

When I broke into the clearing I saw him laying out a blue and white checkered blanket. He didn’t notice me as I approached until a twig snapped under my foot. He turned with that smile that was so contagious. I beamed back at him.

“What’s this?” I asked, pointing to the blanket that had a piece of duct tape horizontally down the center.

He picked up a brown wicker basket at his feet and placed it on the blanket before sitting. “We’re gonna have a picnic.”

“Here?” I asked.

He nodded and motioned for me to sit across from him. I stepped forward and kneeled slowly onto the blanket.

“Nope,” he said, pointing at my knees.

I looked down, confused. “What?”

“You have to stay on your perimeters,” he said, nudging me a little until I fell back behind the line of duct tape.

Laughing, I scooted back and crossed my legs as he opened the basket and began pulling out food.

“I made everything myself,” he said as he handed me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an unwrapped hostess cupcake then a juice box.

“I’m very impressed,” I replied.

We sat across from one another, eating our sandwiches in silence, listening to the flapping wings of the birds above us and the rusting leaves as the wind blew through the high branches of the trees.

“I like your hair,” he said, in-between bites of his sandwich.

“My hair?”

“Yeah, it reminds me of home.”

“Home?” I nodded in the direction of his white house behind him.

He shook his head. “No, of Arkansas. Of the Ozarks during fall when the leaves change color and they look like fire. Every time I look at you, it’s like a different color of red.”

I felt like I should say something nice about him too so I said, “You have a nice smile,” and then I blushed because I sounded so stupid and then I blushed some more because I was embarrassed of blushing. My entire face and neck was red like a bad sunburn, I was sure. I pretended I heard something behind me so that I had an excuse to hide my face for a couple minutes, but as I turned my head I had a sudden flash back to the night of my party and I was seized with that dreaded terror again. He must have noticed the change in my expression because he set down his sandwich and looked at me with concern.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I haven’t really been back out here since that night I told you about. The night I thought I was attacked by some animal at your house,” I said slowly. I didn’t want to appear vulnerable.

“Maybe it was a wolf,” he said, with a shrug. “But don’t tell my dad.”

He said it as a kind of joke, but I didn’t take it as one. An image of the black wolf I had seen weeks before came to mind. Could I really have been attacked by one and if I was then it was possibly still out there in the woods. I suddenly wanted to move our picnic to another location, but if it had been a wolf it would have done more damage to my leg or me in general and I vaguely remembered there being two animals at one point. It was a very confusing memory and now mostly just a dream.

“Why don’t you want your dad to know?” I asked, unsure if he was joking about that too.  

“Because he’s retired from hunting and if he found out there was a wolf out here then he would get all crazy again with tracking it and if it left before he caught it, we would move again.”

“Your dad hunts like professionally?” I asked. I had no idea there was such a job.

“Yeah, but since my mom died he’s mainly obsessed with wolves,” Reign said, looking over my head.

So here we were in the woods having a picnic, picking crust off our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and tossing the pieces of crust to the birds, the sun peeked through the canopy of trees and the smell of pine overwhelmed us while our innocent conversation had derailed to the topic of his deceased mother.

“Why wolves?” I asked, slowly. I was prepared to accept a reaction similar to the one Mom always gave me: a change of subject or shutting down.

“Well, because she was killed by one in these woods,” he said, looking around us. “A white one and dad made it his goal to track it and kill it, but he was never able to catch it.”

My eyes widened. A white one? Hadn’t Mom asked if the wolf I saw was white?

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said.

He shook his head and although he acted like it didn’t bother him, his ember eyes told me something different. “I don’t even remember her,” he said.

“I don’t remember my dad. He kinda abandoned the family when I was a kid.” I shrugged to show him it didn’t bother me and I hoped my eyes didn’t betray me like his did.

He smiled. “So we both come from single parent homes,” he said as he laid on his back with his arms supporting his head.

I fell forward on to my stomach and played with the silver tape between us. He watched me and when I caught him looking at me he closed his eyes and smiled, blushing a little. He was so comfortable to be around and talk to. I wanted to stay on that checkered blanket forever.

He started telling me about all the places he had lived and how many times he had to move for his dad’s hunting. He said for years his dad tracked the white wolf but every time he would come close to catching it, it would disappear. They followed it to four different states and finally they moved to Arkansas and once there Reign refused to move again so his father, Orgon, would leave Reign with friends for months at a time in order to hunt. Orgon was such a skilled hunter that he would be paid by people or communities to track and kill problem animals, but often Orgon always returned to his priority: the white wolf.

The profession caused some tension in their relationship and Orgon finally decided to retire early and focus on his relationship with Reign. Reign wanted to move back to the white house in order to feel a little closer to the woman who was a stranger in his life. Though he didn’t remember his mother, he hoped moving back into the house would provide some comfort for what he felt like had always been missing from his life.

“I don’t even like hunting,” Reign said. “He keeps saying that one day I’ll fall into it and pick up where he left off, but I don’t think so. I want to be a Vet. I can’t kill animals and be a Veterinarian.”

By the time he had finished opening up to me, I felt like I needed to reciprocate and share my life story with him too, but I didn’t really have anything to say. I had a great relationship with Mom and brothers. Nothing bad had every really happened to me in fact the worse thing of my life was happening right now and that was losing Kristen, and I didn’t want to talk about it. I couldn’t tell him about the parent missing from my life because I didn’t know anything about him. He could be dead or kidnapped or whatever else Mom told me about him when I pushed her to tell me something, so instead I continued listening to him because it was nice to finally have someone to listen to who wanted to talk to me and share things with me. I found myself reaching across the perimeters and taking hold of his hand.

15

Our date was interrupted when Mom sent me a text message: one of my friends was at the house and asking for something from me. When I first heard the chime of my phone in my back pocket and felt the vibration, I ignored it as best I could. I didn’t want the real world to creep into our secluded place in the woods where we relaxed on the crumpled blanket, holding hands and talking, but then my phone chimed and buzzed again and again and by the fourth time I couldn’t ignore it any longer so I released my hand from Reign’s and reached into my jean pocket to retrieve the slender, black phone.

There were four messages from Mom urging me to come home and her concern at her inability to find me was increasing with each message, but my main reason for retreating back through the woods and toward my house was because I was curious who this friend was that needed something from me. My only friend at the moment was next to me, watching me read the phone in my hand and waiting for me to talk.

“My mom needs me,” I said with a frown.

I started packing the trash and left over food back into the basket but he placed his hand on mine to stop me.

“I’ll get it,” he said.

I stood, slowly. “Okay,” I said, but paused for a minute looking down at him then behind my shoulder. I didn’t want to go even though he lived so close to me. I didn’t like not knowing when I’d get to see him again.

“Thanks for lunch,” I said, awkwardly. I was never good with goodbyes and I was still new with dating. If this counted as a date, and I hoped it did, this was only my second date ever. My unfortunate first date had ended weirdly and ruined my social life.

“Anytime,” he said. He gathered everything on the blanket and dropped it into the basket then stood and picked up the checkered blanket and folded it without breaking eye contact with me, which made me nervous. I waved at him as I stumbled away.

Before disappearing among the trees, I turned back and saw him watching me. I smiled. My hand was still warm and tingly from holding his hand and when I examined it on my walk back I noticed that I no longer had a scratch from where I fell earlier, but my attention was soon distracted by a black wolf that was standing a few feet from me and blocking my exit of the woods.

I froze even my breathing stopped, and all I heard was my escalated heartbeat and blood running through my veins. I couldn’t turn and run. The wolf was three times my size it could easily take me down and I couldn’t call for Reign he was too far behind me. My house was only twenty or so feet away. It was visible through the trees that the wolf stood in front of, but charging forward and getting past the animal unscathed was impossible, I determined.

A low whimper escaped my throat. I thought about climbing the tree next to me, but I wasn’t that fast. Basically, I knew that at any second the wolf could do anything it wanted with me as if I were a toy doll. I closed my eyes and tried to be at peace with dying because I was certain my life was over, but then I felt something wet on my hand and when I opened my eyes I saw the wolf standing mere inches from me, rubbing its white nose against the palm of the hand that held on to Reign’s hand moments before. I stood in shock and watched the wolf sniff me, circle me, then walk on past me.