Rules for Werewolves (6 page)

—Banging what pretty hard?

—The hood of that car.

—I don’t see any car.

—Me, neither.

—All I see is a like a portal to hell. A portal that drags people into a big fight and puts some of us in jail and some of us back with our families and just destroys everything.

—We’re gonna wanna stay away from that.

—Yeah. Let’s go back around to the other side of the school and take a left this time and keep looking.

—Look, it’s a party. Look at all the people. All the fucking clothes and hair.

—I wish we had cool friends.

—We do. We are cool. You wanna go in and get a drink?

—We shouldn’t.

—If we lived by “we shouldn’t,” we’d still be single-cell slime balls. Let’s climb up out of “we shouldn’t” and start walking around on the two legs of “why not?”

—This is a bad idea.

—No. Fuck. Just follow me in. We’re not even gonna ring the doorbell. Just act like you belong. Look, there’s people all over this house. There’s more out in the backyard. There’s no guest list. I always figure at any party like this there’s three or four people like me who don’t belong.

—What if somebody talks to you?

—We’ll talk to them first. Like this. Watch— Hey, excuse me. Excuse me! I’m looking for a guy named John? John told me to meet him here.

—I think he’s in back.

—You want me to make you a drink from some of this?

—Sure.

—I’m making you something of my own design. You, me, and my friend Rachelle. Rachelle, meet …

—Craig.

—Hi, Craig. We can only stay for a little while.

—We can only stay for one drink. But what a drink it’s going to be! Do you have a bottle opener?

—Here. There’s one on my key chain. But you’re not putting beer in that, are you?

—Oh, nice key chain, Craig.

—What’s
your
name?

—Tanya.

—What do you call this drink, Tanya?

—It’s a drink I like to call the werewolf.

—You gonna make me howl at the moon?

—Is that a come-on?

—No.

—It’s a shitty come-on, if it is.

—You take it how you want to.

—And you take this and drink it all up and you’ll be a changed man.

—One who doesn’t make shitty come-ons?

—You too, Rachel.

—Rachelle.

—We’ll pound ours with you and then we’ll be changed into women who don’t care.

—You want us to drink the whole thing at once?

—What do you think? Now: go!

Drink. Drink. Drink. Drink. Drink.

—Oh, god, that’s awful.

—The second one tastes better. Give me your cup.

—I’m like a time bomb now. I still feel sober, but I’ve got a pint of alcohol in my gut waiting to get into my bloodstream!

—I’ll make us one more round.

—No. You said we could go after one.

—Come on.

—I can’t drink like you can, Angel.

—I thought you were Tanya?

—The drink changed me into an Angel, and I came down to earth to give you a kiss.

—Now who’s making shitty come-ons?

—Tanya, let’s go find John, like we said we would.

—What time is it, Craig?

—It’s ten thirty.

—That’s a nice watch.

—Thanks.

—All right. Let me make these drinks and then we’ll go find John and then we’ll go before it gets too late. We’ve got plenty of time until midnight.

—What happens at midnight?

—Sorry, Craig, but Tanya and I have another party to go to.

—Maybe we’ll take Craig along?

—No. You said this would be simple. You said we could have one drink and go.

—The one drink made me change my mind.

I like to be alone. When we get a new house I like to find a walk-in closet or pantry I can claim for my room. I’ve been with them for three houses but they still call me the new kid. No one else we’ve picked up has really stuck. In the first house I just slept in the living room with everybody else. Almost everybody sleeps in the living room together. If there’s beds, we drag all the mattresses out and push them side by side. If there’s not we just put our sleeping bags on the floor. We leave the TV on all the time. Malcolm and Tanya take a room together. Sometimes another couple will form and drift off into the house somewhere. Every once in a while you wake up and a couple is forming right there on the living room floor. It’s a kind of weather that passes through the group. Susan took me upstairs in the last house. The next day the storm passed and she treated me like any other guy. She went back to the living room and I went back to the pantry.

I like to have a door. I believe in doors. Doors are the greatest invention known to man. Before doors there were no families. A caveman could walk into your cave in the middle of the night and take your wife. Or he could come in and take your whole family. He could carry your son out to the forest and hold him down by the neck and if the boy made a sound it would only attract the dinosaurs who would eat the both of them. No one loved anyone before the invention of the door, because what was the
point in loving something that could be taken away at any moment? You might as well fall in love with a single moment from a single day.

When I lived at home no one was allowed to lock any doors. That’s a rule that Donald made. And he walks around the house and checks. It doesn’t matter whether you are going to the bathroom or trying to have a private phone call or if you want to try to talk to Mom again about what Donald has done. You can’t lock the door. And if you do, if Donald tries the bathroom door and it’s locked, he will start banging and he won’t stop until you open it. If he finds your bedroom door locked in the middle of the night he will start banging on it even if it wakes up everyone in the house. He wants to know what you’ve got to hide. And Mom believes him. She said, “If you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of then you don’t need to lock your door.”

One of my best tricks was to start locking doors and shutting them without me in the room. Then I would leave the house and go check out new comics at Dragon’s Lair. Donald would start banging and kicking and screaming and there was no answer. I wasn’t ever brave enough to do that when I was in a room. But for a while he must’ve thought I was getting really brave. It was fun to come home and walk past him like nothing. I would get my ass beat, but it was fun. Then once I came home and he had kicked in the bathroom door and no one was in there. Mom let Donald ground me for that trick, and I had to give up money from my savings to help pay for the new door. And Donald definitely paid me back.

Also I snore really bad. So I want to have a door between me and everybody else here. Nobody has said anything about it, but I wake myself up with it when I’m around others. In the first house there was a guy who minded—Dan. Dan isn’t around anymore. I guess he went back home. People come and go. I think the big majority of us just met other ones of us hanging out on the street or at a canned food giveaway. Susan found me in the alley. When a new one comes in, he or she usually still has a good phone. Then we might pick up another new recruit from a text message or the newcomer might call one or two close friends and say if things are cool here. I always try to borrow a phone and call my brother and leave a message, which is also a way to let my mom know I’m all right and to let my stepdad know I’m still alive and still building my strength in order to kill him. But pretty soon the battery dies or the unpaid bill ends it.

We don’t charge our phones. We don’t take showers. We don’t comb our hair. We don’t wash our clothes. We don’t brush our teeth.

We wipe our asses when we shit and that’s about where hygiene ends for us. There is a look we’re going for, and a smell, and a taste. We want to become rotten. We want to look wild. You get a kind of respect from it. People don’t fuck with you. People don’t even look at you. Even if you’re a little guy. People can tell that you’re not normal, that you don’t play by the normal rules. So they can’t assume that you won’t growl at them if they make eye contact, that you won’t rip their arm off if they tap you on the shoulder.

I wish we were vampires instead of werewolves. I think I would like a room the size and shape of a coffin. I read that hotels in Japan are like that, only a little bigger. I wish I could go to Japan. I would like to have just exactly what I needed and no more and no less. This is my only set of clothes. When we do finally do our laundry, when it finally gets to be too much and one of us has dog shit on our clothes or something we just can’t stand, I walk around the house in a blanket. I feel like a sheikh. I don’t know what I’m gonna eat tomorrow. Sometimes I steal a book from a house and that is my whole library for a while. I read it and reread it. I like being able to touch all the walls of a room at the same time. I like being able to reach the ceiling. If I were the god of our society, our houses would be much smaller or we would be a lot bigger.

I had a science teacher in late high school who said, “If the universe and everything in it doubled in size every night, we would never know it.” He was trying to explain relativity or something. But I suddenly felt two hundred feet tall. I felt huge. My pencil was twenty feet long. Everyone in the room was a giant. I decided to adopt doubling as a belief.

I like to lie in a little room, alone, and try to sense myself growing bigger. Tomorrow I’ll be over ten feet tall and weigh 280 pounds, and when I try to open the door to the pantry I’ll crush the doorknob in my fist. I’ll be able to open the canned tomatoes by squeezing them and I’ll be able to step over fences and walk back home in a straight line and pick up my little brother and put him on my shoulders, and we’ll walk across America like Johnny Appleseed telling people about how to become werewolves or vampires.

My biggest regret, besides leaving my little brother behind when I ran
away, is not taking Susan to my room in the pantry. We just went upstairs to some empty room we’d trashed. I don’t know why. I didn’t even know what was happening, really. I was embarrassed. Our hands and our faces and our necks are gray with dirt, but the middles of our bodies are pale. We were fucking glowing and then I turned pink with shyness. I pulled her to me and started right in so she wouldn’t see me blushing. I ended up rushing through the best moment to happen to me in a thousand years. But why be embarrassed if someone wants to have sex with you? If we come together again I’m gonna take her to the pantry. I have exactly what I need. A bed, a book, a candle, a box of matches. The candle makes just the amount of light you need to read and no more. It’s like everything else I like. Just the right size.

I like matches because they come in matchboxes. Whenever I run out of matches I look around for more. If I can’t find a new box of matches I ask around. I don’t want a lighter. A matchbox is like a little room. When the matches run out I draw a picture of a bed in the bottom of the box and I draw a picture of me and Susan in the bed and I draw us a TV and a dresser and a dog on a rug and then I close the box and leave it behind. That’s magic to make her become obsessed with me. I think she would like the way I lay out a room. If Susan came back to my pantry with me it would be twice as small because of the space she takes up. That’s a doubling, too.

I love Susan. I love imagining the two of us lying naked in our bed with the candlelight making everything flicker and each of us with our clothes bundled up under our heads like a pillow and with books at our side, but we’re not reading, we’re just talking about what sort of room we want next, in what sort of house, in what sort of neighborhood, in what sort of city, in what sort of state, in what sort of country, in what sort of world, in what sort of planet, in what sort of solar system, in what sort of galaxy, in what sort of universe.

—Welcome home.

—Who is that?

—I’m over by the garage.

—I can’t see you.

—It’s Malcolm. I was the first one back.

—It’s Bobert.

—And Tom and Anquille.

—We didn’t see anything.

—It’s dark.

—What are you doing?

—I’m spray-painting our mark on the driveway of this house.

—That’s our mark?

—What is it?

—It’s a wolf.

—Are you sure.

—Stand over here. Look at it from this angle.

—I see it.

—Where?

—That’s the nose and that’s the ears—

—What’s that?

—That’s the teeth.

—All right.

—What time is it, Malcolm?

—I think it’s a little after eleven. It could be earlier.

—You want us to keep looking?

—No.

—I’m cold.

—I like a night like this.

—It’s so dark.

—Not much wind.

—Just the sound of the highway.

—The highway sounds like wind.

—We didn’t see anything.

—You said.

—What about you, Malcolm? Did you find anything?

—Just this guy.

—What the fuck is that thing?

—That’s my dog.

—I didn’t see him there.

—It’s dark and he’s black. Almost black. He’s chocolate-colored.

—Does he bite?

—I guess if you kicked him or something you could get him to bite, but I’ve only been nice to him and he seems to want to be nice to me. He seems to want to be nice to all of us.

—Where’d you find him?

—I think he found me.

—Where?

—Well, just like you guys, I was out looking for the Peugeot and I went a little north, I sorta scooted by the edge of the elementary school.

—We were around that way, too.

—Rich people always want to live by nice schools. You see that in the movies. When rich people talk about buying a house they ask what school district it’s in, and where the nearest school is, and what the test scores are.

—Well, that school is a nice school.