“You were on yearbook?” Ben asked, incredulous.
“Yup.”
“I had no idea. I’m learning all kinds of things about you. I suppose you were all over spirit week and went to all the football games?”
“I was practically normal, back in the day.”
“Before,” he said.
“Yeah, before.”
He squeezed my hand and kissed my cheek.
“Sadie?” A tough-looking guy with an expensive-looking haircut and dark jacket came up to our table, and Sadie’s eyes widened. “Trevor?”
Trevor Ames? He’d changed. He hadn’t just put on that filling-out weight that everyone else had, he’d put on muscle, and moved with a practiced efficiency. He was a fighter. Back in school he’d been one of our crowd, Sadie and Jesse and me and the rest of us who weren’t cool enough to be in the cool crowd but weren’t goth or jocks or nerds enough to be in any other clique so we just made our own. He’d joined the army right after graduation, and was another one I’d completely lost track of when I lost track of everybody.
“He’s got a gun under that jacket,” Ben whispered in my ear.
I looked sharply at him. “Silver bullets?”
“Can’t tell.”
He smiled wryly as Sadie insisted on hugging him. They separated, then he looked right at me, a challenging stare, and his smile thinned.
“Kitty. You really are a werewolf.”
“You saw the YouTube video, just like everyone else,” I said drily.
He looked me up and down. “I could just tell.” He looked Ben up and down the same way, meaning he’d spotted both of us. We usually didn’t tell people about Ben being a werewolf too.
You could spot a werewolf just by looking, if you knew what to look for. This meant Trevor knew what to look for. And how, exactly?
“That a problem?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “No, it isn’t.”
I wondered . . . what would make it a problem?
“This is making me so happy,” Sadie said, beaming. “All of us together again—”
“Do you know if Jesse’s coming?” Trevor asked me.
“I don’t,” I said. “I kind of lost touch with everybody.”
“I figured if anyone knew . . .” He trailed off and shrugged.
Ben said brightly, “I really want to meet Jesse. I hope he shows up.”
“He’s not going to show up,” I said.
The guy who’d been class president went to a podium at the front of the room and tapped on the microphone, which was indeed on and screeched in disapproval. I winced—what had that poor mic ever done to him? He gave a speech about how happy he was, how great it was to see everyone, and how happy he was again, and so on. Then he announced that there were prizes. Prizes? Shouldn’t we all get a prize just for being here?
Former class president went down the list. Who had traveled the farthest to be here? Someone had come from Amsterdam, and why would anyone leave Amsterdam to come back to freaking Aurora, Colorado? Who had the most kids—four. Well, someone had been busy. The prizes were gift certificates to local restaurants for the most part, which was kind of ironic for the guy who’d come from Amsterdam. A few more categories followed, and I started to tune them out.
“And who has the most interesting job?” the guy asked. “The winner is . . . Kitty Norville!”
What? Who had decided this? I had a suspicion that Trevor’s job was way more interesting than mine, which hardly seemed like a job most of the time. Maybe I should have brought my own mic and recorder and done an episode of the show from here. People were clapping. Everyone was looking at me. I had to get up. Probably a good thing I hadn’t had a second glass of wine yet.
I managed to get to the podium, collected my gift certificate, and murmured a polite thank you into the microphone before fleeing. They might have expected more, considering my job involved talking into a microphone. But no one was paying me for this, and nobody stared at me in radio. One of the other members of the reunion committee cornered me before I could get back to my territory. I didn’t remember ever knowing her.
“It really was no contest about the job thing,” she said. “You seem to meet so many interesting people on your show!”
“I suppose I do.” She wasn’t wrong, I did meet some interesting people. And that was only what I could be public about. Just last winter I’d consulted for the army, trying to help werewolf veterans returning from Afghanistan. Maybe I deserved that fifty dollars for Mario’s Italian Bistro.
I tried to escape. She kept talking at me. “So what’s it like, being a werewolf?”
I honestly didn’t know how to answer that. It was strange. It was personal. It was too big. “It’s hard to explain.”
Thoughtfully, she put a finger on her chin and her gaze went unfocused. “I suppose a condition like that, it must be a little like fibromyalgia,” she said.
I stared. “It’s nothing like—yeah, sure, it’s a little like that.” Because that was easier than trying to explain. “If you’re really curious you could tune into the show sometime.”
“Oh, of course, I’ll be sure to do that!”
She was never going to listen to my show.
Back at our table, Ben offered me a fresh glass of wine and I gratefully drank it down.
“What’d you get, what’d you get?” Ben asked.
“Food.”
“Hm, the night almost pays for itself.” He cheered my wine with his glass of water.
With the speeches over, the dancing began. The DJ started the first set with Smash Mouth’s “All Star.” So, it was going to be like that, was it?
“So,” Ben asked. “Why’d you break up with this Jesse guy?”
I narrowed my gaze. “Is this going to be a problem, you being jealous of a guy I dated ten years ago?”
“Just curious.”
“He was going away to Boston for college. He made noises about trying to stay together, but . . . it was just noise. We’d have been setting ourselves up to fail.”
“It might have worked out.”
“And if it had, we wouldn’t be here,” I said.
If Jesse and I had managed to stick together and make it work . . . my life would be so completely different I had trouble fathoming it. For one thing, I wouldn’t be a werewolf. Which sounded good until I also realized it meant I wouldn’t have my radio show, and I wouldn’t have Ben.
I tried to avoid regretting pretty much anything. Regret had no boundaries once it started.
Trevor was standing a little apart from the table, watching the crowd, noting every face, turning to the doorways every time someone entered or left.
“You look like a hunter on the prowl,” I said.
He chuckled. “Yeah, I suppose you’d know all about that.”
“What’s your story? You joined the army, and then . . .”
He shrugged. “Here and there, this and that. It’s not that interesting.”
“Not like me,” I said, waving the envelope I’d won for having the most interesting job. Trevor laughed.
Next up on the set list: “Tubthumping.” That got a couple of people out on the dance floor for some half-hearted bouncing.