Yesterday was shock.
Where is the girl we bully? Oh, there she- oh my God! I could feel it from the way they analyzed me, desperately searching for a chink in my armor when all I want to do is throw up my hands and yell THIS ISN'T ARMOR.
Today there is a gray t-shirt with black swirls, destroyed skinny jeans, my combat bots and a black leather belt. I wonder what the word will be. Probably
tactical retreat. backing off, disguising their stares, speaking in whispers when I'm near.
The only thing about me that's out of place at the Port is my hair- dark chocolate falling in glossy waves- me throwing Mum a bone, hoping to ease her panic over the sudden change. I can't say I min d having nice hair, either.
"Need. More. Coffee," I groan- but I n a way that lets Warner know I'm joking- and push my mug across the counter.
Warner fills it up and hands it back to me. "I take it you're not planning to sleep tonight?"
"This is what's keeping me from sleep ing
today," I say, gulping some down. "I mean, what do you put in this stuff?"
"My wolf piss," Warner drawls. "Like I'd tell you! I don't need competition."
The Port- one of the pockets of air that the World breathed for us, a place where we can stretch from the confinement of our human bodies, freedom from the people that would despise us for what- not who, what- we are. It shifts at night, and other than Warner's cafe it's completely uncertain what we'll find- five of the shops we love or five empty rooms, beckoning others to seize the chance to claim them and start their own stores.
"Speaking of competition," says Warner, breaking me from my thoughts, "I saw your man in here yesterday."
I spit my coffee back into my cup. "Ryan?
What!?" I told Warner about him because it seemed safe- even though he doesn't always act like it, he's totally gay, and Ryan's had a few girlfriends over the years.
"Yeah. I've seen him before, but I really didn't think about it. He looked good, for sure, but he didn't look
good."
It made sense, if I really stretched. Why he knew to follow me, how he even saw the path to begin with, and why he didn't totally freak out.
Why he talked to me right when I started dressing like someone from the Port.
"Well, Warner, you just killed my coffee buzz. Thanks. Now I have to go." To school, to the tactical retreat, to everything I've built up and everything I've struck down.
To Ryan.
Ryan isn't on the bus. Barely anybody's on the buss, like it's the last day of school or something. I wonder if this is what it looked like to the survivors of the fire in New York. Barely anybody left, a sense of shock lingering over them. Thirteen days ago the blaze was defeated and only now do we even have an idea of who lived and who...died. How many here had relatives caught in the inferno? Is that the reason for the shock hovering over us? Or is it just spreading, regardless of whether we were in the fire or not?
Thirteen days since the fire in New York. Thirteen people missing from my life. Two from art, four from PE, three from lunch, two from Algebra. people who actually talked to me, even before I changed.
And Ryan. All day I desperately search for his smoldering wolf-eyes, for a flash of his wavy brown hair, his perfectly pale skin, to no avail.
What I do find is anxiety. Stress. Worry. Written on people's faces, their eyes speaking of something their mouths are too scared to. It bounces through the school- maybe the World helps me see it, maybe I'm perceptive.
Either way, something is
wrong.
That afternoon I head straight for the Port, calling Mum and letting her know I'll be gone- omitting the location, of course- and yet she still goes straight to panic mode.
"It. Will. Be. FINE," I say into my cell phone, teeth gritted. "I'll be right down the street." You'd think she'd know I was lying, see right through my ruse of popularity, yet I'd kept up the lie for so long. Maybe she wants to believe me, or maybe she just does.
"Alright, then," sighs Mum, her breath heavy through the speaker. "Just don't stay out forever."
"Okay." I turn my phone off and stare at the scree. "Mum, you and I obviousky have different definitions of forever." As if she can hear me, perceive my voice through some sort of telepathic link that mothers and daughters supposedly share.
I step into the Port and am immediately overwhelmed by swarms and swarms of
people, seemingly hundreds all crammed into Warner's cafe, more Weres than I have ever seen, and there is that feeling again- a rush of adrenaline, a sense of dread and hopelessness, the two combining in the sea of faces. I snatch pieces of the conversaation from the buzzing air, yet nne of them make sense, so disjointed they might as well be in a foreign language, and it seems that a chant is running through the crowd- one phrase repeated over and over that I can never make out.
The feeling is coming over me, charging through my veins. I realize what it is now- fear.
It's just contagious, I tell myself, fingers pressing against my temple.
What can you be afraid of? If you don't know what it is, you can't fear it.It's not true.
I quietly slip into anther room, and to y relief it's Threads' shop. She sees me from behind the counter and raises her hand in a Spock-like greeting. "'Sup?"
"What is going on out there?" I gasp.
She shrugs. "Probably a couple of rooms and a bidding war. No biggie."
Threads' shop is probably the most popular of the many that pop up- Threads herself a living paradox, an elegant punk, ancient and wise and the child in us all, fabulous and gritty, a bundle of brains and charisma- and one of my favorite people, despite the age barrier- five years between us.
A group of noisy Weres crash into the shop, and I quickly fade bak into the shadows. Two of them, Cordy and Pike, twin mastiffs, I recognize, but the names of the others are a mystery, perhaps a mystery that will never intrigue me quite enough. I turn my back to leave.
Another door. It's unusual, even compared to the rest of the World, and anomaly, something that never happens. There are only five rooms, no matter how small they may be, there are only five.
Five. The doors are all attached to Warner's cafe.
Never six.
My fingers hover over the doorknob, somehow remaining invisible, unnoticed amidst the loud, crashing Weres capturing Threads' attention. My hand slips around the doorknob. Clasps. Turns.
The door swings open.
It's a bathroom. Small, dirty, the kind you'd avoid using unless you couldn't find anywhere else. Iguess it makes sense- with so many Weres here, maybe another room is in order, but it has to sart out small. Maybe one day the Port will have hundreds of rooms, and yet the fact does nothing to banish my astonishment. The World is changing with me.
And then my eyes catch sight of the bathtub.
And what's in it.
Maybe it was humanoid, at one point, but it has nothing to do with our species, Were or no- it cant have ever been intelligent, cant've ever had a family, ever been human. It's splayed out, blackened like a burnt crust, its eyes hollow black holes, teeth rotting, part of its body sunken in like rotting wood so that I can clearly see the inside is completely hollow.
And
I
run
and
I
don't
know
if
I
will
ever
come
back.
Out of Threads' shop, pushing through the crowd that has amassed, noticing the sixth room, screams from the girls and some of the boys, and now I recognize the phrase that is said over and over.
Eater Bug.
I'm out of the Port and down the street, wishing just for once I had listened to Mum's overprotective panic, so I wouldn't have to have seen that, witnessed the nightmare, and I run, past my own house, down the street, and I realize I know where I'm going- I'm following my bus route. I'm going to Ryan's house.
In front of the door- it's red, which could represent any number of things that Race through my head on an adrenaline train track, flowing through my body like nothing that wouldn't sound stupid in a simile. Fire. Joy. Love. Fear. Anger. Anything. And I knock on the door and suddenly everything in me starts to calm down like I just did something, and that something cannot be retracted, and whatever happens next is going to happen and I can't do anything about it because the next move is not mine.
The door swings open, and he is standing in front of the door. I know what Warner meant when he said Ryan didn't look
good, normally shiny hair lank, skin less ivory and more sickly, wolf-eyes tired and bloodshot, the left one rimmed with a blue bruise. "Courtney?" He says, borderline incredulous and then I realize- coming to his house was pretty weird of me.
I take a deep breath and lean against the porch railing, all the energy whooshing out of me. "Oh my God, you're all right." And that's when it hits me- that's why I'm here because I had to see if he was gone like the rest of them because people are dying. They're dying and maybe it's selfish of me but all I've been caring about is Ryan.
His face darkens. "Yeah, I guess. For now."
He knows, too. Either that or we have some ethereal connection and I like to think the former because if he could read my mind. My God.
"Can I come in?"
"I really don't think that's a good idea," he says, looking just as nervous.
"I think it is," I say back, trying to banish the nervousness to the back of my mind so I can pay attention to it later and Ryan now.
Ryan doesn't look like he's going to back off so I take deep breath because it seems the only way that we're going to get past this is not with cliche innuendos about danger but with the truth and I have a lot of truth to tell.
"Why
isn't it a good idea, then?" I ask, trying really hard not to sound like Mum.
His face stays the same, but his voice breaks and some curtain behind his eyes draws back and I see every sort of pain and fear you could imagine when he answers.
"Because my parents are in there and they're dead."
