“Sure,” I said.
“If you’re going to be cranky, I’m not going to sit next to you,” Grace warned. “I don’t feel good, anyway. I’d rather be home.”
“I just said ‘sure,’” I said. “That’s not cranky, Grace. Believe me, if you want me to bring out the inner—”
“Ladies?” Mr. Grant appeared at my shoulder and looked at my blank screen and Grace’s black one. “Last time I checked, this was a Computer Arts class, not a social hour.”
Grace looked up earnestly at him. “Do you think I could go to the nurse? My head—I think I have a sinus thing coming on or something.”
Mr. Grant looked down at her pink cheeks and pensive expression, and nodded his permission. “I want a note back from the office,” he told her, after Grace thanked him and stood up. She didn’t say anything to me as she left, just knocked on the back of my chair with her knuckles.
“And you—” Mr. Grant said. Then he dropped his gaze down to the encyclopedia and its still-open page, and he never finished his sentence. He just nodded, as if to himself, and walked away.
I turned back to my extracurricular study of death and disease. Because no matter what Grace thought, I knew that in Mercy Falls, it’s never over.
CHAPTER FOUR
• GRACE •
By the time Sam got home from the bookstore that evening, I was making New Year’s resolutions at the kitchen table.
I’d been making New Year’s resolutions ever since I was nine. Every year on Christmas, I’d sit down at the kitchen table under the dim yellow light, hunched over in a turtleneck sweater because of the draft from the glass door to the deck, and I’d write my goals for the year in a plain black journal I’d bought for myself. And every year on Christmas Eve, I’d sit down in the exact same place and open the exact same book to a new page and write down what I’d accomplished in the previous twelve months. Every year, the two lists looked identical.
Last Christmas, though, I hadn’t made any resolutions. I’d spent the month trying not to look through the glass door at the woods, trying not to think about the wolves and Sam. Sitting at the kitchen table and planning for the future had seemed like a cruel pretense more than anything else.
But now that I had Sam and a new year, that black journal, shelved neatly next to my career books and memoirs, haunted me. I had dreams about sitting at the kitchen table in a turtleneck sweater, dreams where I kept on writing and writing my resolutions without ever filling the page.
Today, waiting for Sam to get home, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I got the journal from my shelf and headed for the kitchen. Before I sat down, I took two more ibuprofen; the two the school nurse had given me had pretty much killed the headache I’d had earlier, but I wanted to make sure it didn’t make a reappearance. I had just clicked on the flower-shaped light over the table and sharpened my pencil when the phone rang. I stood and leaned over the counter to reach it.
“Hello?”
“Grace, hi.” It took me a moment to realize that it was my father’s voice. I was unused to hearing it, pressed and fuzzy, over the phone lines.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“What? No. Nothing’s wrong. I was just calling to let you know that your mother and I will be home around nine from Pat and Tina’s.”
“Okaay,” I said. I already knew this; Mom had told me this morning when we parted ways, me to school, her to the studio.
A pause. “Are you alone?”
So that’s what this call was about. For some reason, the question made my throat tighten. “No,” I said. “Elvis is here. Would you like to talk to him?”
Dad acted as if I hadn’t answered. “Is Sam there?”
I felt like answering yes, just to see what he would say, but instead, I told him the truth, my voice coming out strange and defensive. “No. I’m just doing homework.”
While Mom and Dad knew Sam was my boyfriend—Sam and I had made no secret of our relationship—they still didn’t know what was really going on. All the nights Sam stayed over, they thought I was sleeping alone. They had no idea about my hopes for our future. They thought it was a simple, innocent, bound-to-end teenage relationship. It wasn’t that I didn’t want them to know. Just that their obliviousness had its advantages, too, for now.
“Okay,” Dad said. There was an unspoken commendation in his answer, an approval of me being alone with my homework. This is what Graces did in the evening, and heaven forbid I should break the mold. “Planning a quiet night?”
I heard the front door open and Sam’s step in the hall. “Yes,” I replied as he walked into the living room, guitar case in hand.
“Good. Well, see you later on,” Dad said. “Happy studying.”
We hung up at the same time. I watched Sam silently shed his coat and go straight for the study.
“Hi, bucko,” I said when he returned holding his guitar minus the case. He smiled at me, but the skin around his eyes was tight. “You seem tense.”
He crashed down onto the sofa, only half sitting, and threw his fingers across the strings of the guitar. A discordant chord rang out. “Isabel came into the store today,” he said.
“Really? What did she want?”
“Just some books. And to tell me that she’d seen wolves by her house.”
My mind instantly slid to her father and to the wolf hunt he’d led in the woods behind my house. From Sam’s troubled expression, I knew his thoughts mirrored mine. “That’s not good.”
“No,” he said. His fingers moved restlessly over the guitar strings, effortlessly and instinctively picking out some beautiful minor chord. “Neither was the cop that came in.”
I set my pencil down and leaned across the table toward him. “What? What did a cop want?”
He hesitated. “Olivia. He wanted to know if I thought she might be living in the woods.”
“What?” I asked again, my skin prickling. There was no way that someone could guess that. No way. “How could he know?”
“He didn’t think she was a wolf, obviously, but I think he was hoping we were hiding her or that she was living nearby and we were helping her or something. I said she didn’t strike me as the outdoorsy type, and he thanked me and left.”
“Wow.” I leaned back in my chair and considered. It was really only surprising that they hadn’t questioned Sam sooner. They’d already talked to me soon after Olivia “ran away,” and had probably only just recently made the connection between Sam and me. I shrugged. “They’re just being thorough. I don’t think there’s anything for us to worry about. I mean, she reappears when she reappears, right? How long do you think it will be until the new wolves start to change back into humans?”
Sam didn’t reply right away. “They won’t stay human at first. They’ll be really unstable. It depends how warm the day is. It varies from person to person, too, sometimes a lot. It’s like how on certain days some people wear sweaters when other people can wear T-shirts and still feel comfortable—different reactions to the same temperature. But I guess it’s possible some might have already shifted into humans once this year.”