The Frenzy (12 page)

I dropped to the ground, wriggled forward on my belly and rested my chin on Corey’s leg.

“Who the hell were they?” he said.

I could smell his flesh through his clothes and I wanted to taste him. I
could
almost taste him—the sweet, salty sensation a memory on my lips. But I had not forgotten my prayer.

May the winds of calm …

Pace was dead, I had changed, but this was Corey, the one I loved. And somewhere inside, beneath the teeth sharp enough to pulverize bone, the muscles that could take down an elk, the fur rough enough to protect from cold and wet, somewhere beneath it all I was still me.

I’m sorry, Corey. I love you.

He nodded as if he’d heard me, then stroked my head until that full moon fell and only redemptive dawn lit the sky.

Death

B
y morning I had changed back again. We didn’t speak about any of what had happened—even Pace; it was too much. Corey found my clothes near the entrance to the woods. He walked me to the stream, sat me down in the shallow water, bathed me, dried me off with his sweatshirt and dressed me. Everything hurt and my stomach was growling with hunger. It was all I could think about, or all I wanted to think about, wiping out any thoughts or feelings of grief. I limped home on Corey’s arm and he kissed me good-bye at my door. The day was already growing
hot and the sun shot harsh rays into my eyes as we emerged from the trees.

Part of me wished my dad had hit me again to take my mind off everything. But my parents seemed to have forgiven me for running because of what had happened to Pace. They were in the kitchen drinking coffee and for once the TV wasn’t on. Gramp slept sitting up on the couch. My dad didn’t say anything. My mom asked me what I needed and I pointed to the refrigerator. Then I walked over to the freezer and took out a slab of red meat marbled with streaks of white.

They both stared at me. “You want a steak?” my mom said.

I nodded. I didn’t want to hear a lecture about anemia right then but I’d have done anything for some rare meat.

“You must be anemic. You look pale. I told you. Let me cook you up something. Go upstairs and get in bed. I’ll bring it. I told you young people shouldn’t be vegetarians!”

She went on like that as I climbed up the stairs, threw my clothes on the floor and got in bed. The sheets felt cool and soft against my skin. My mom was obsessed with thread count and for once I was grateful. I smelled the meat cooking in a pan on the stove. My nostrils tingled with sensation and my mouth watered; my stomach growled so loudly it sounded as if there were an animal in the room. When my mom finally came with the steak I sat up and devoured it in a few bites. My teeth still felt sharper than usual and my tongue longer, my mouth bigger. I wiped my greasy lips with the back of my hand and gave my mother the tray. Then I lay back down, closed my eyes and slept.

When I woke it was the next evening. I felt nauseous and confused. For a moment I lay there in a fog, trying to think of what it was I didn’t want to remember.

Yes, Pace. That was it. No. Yes. What?

Pace was dead.

My best friend. The only one I trusted besides Corey. And dead because he hated himself. Because he didn’t accept himself. That was partly why we had been friends. Because we both felt this same way. And it had won, the self-hatred. It had killed him.

I curled up in a ball and shut my eyes but I couldn’t sleep again.

I would have slept straight through if I could have; slept through forever. Corey kept calling until I answered.

“Come outside with me,” he said. “Baby, come outside and breathe.”

But I couldn’t get out of bed. Not even for Corey. And he couldn’t come to me because of my parents. I was too weary even to care about that. So I stayed in bed for two days—not able to read, completely unable to write in my diary—until Pace’s funeral and then I put on black jeans and a black Sex Pistols T-shirt turned inside out under Pace’s cotton button-down and went to the cemetery with my mom, my dad and Gramp.

We stood on the sloping hillside full of the graves of men who had died in the steel mill—crushed by steel, burned by molten steel—men and women who had died of old age, cancer, heart attacks and grief, children who had died of illness and accidents, babies who had died at birth. They all lay beneath our feet, under their carved gray granite headstones and giant crosses that shadowed the lawn, and Pace would be there, too. But it was impossible that Pace could be there with the dead. I could still see his face and hear the sound of his voice. His scent of goat’s milk soap and citrusy aftershave was still on the shirt he had let me wear home. I could still feel his lips.

Once Pace and I had kissed. Just once. I think we were trying to prove something to ourselves—maybe that we weren’t the things we feared.

We were dancing to old David Bowie in my room.
“We can be heroes, just for one day.”
Pace was so much taller than me; I just came to the middle of his chest. One of his big hands held mine, and the other rested on
the small of my back. He turned me around gracefully but with force and I tossed my hair. It was right after the first frenzy and more than anything I just wanted to be a regular girl. Pace must have wanted, in that moment, to be a “normal” boy. He touched his lips to mine. It was awkward and sweet and he tasted of peppermint toothpaste. Then he pulled away and we both broke into giggles. We laughed so hard we fell to the ground.

We were what we were. And in that moment, because we had each other, it was okay.

But Pace hadn’t felt okay, even though there was nothing wrong with what he was. Pace wasn’t a monster like me. He was just a boy who loved boys.

I watched the men digging the grave and thought that I wanted to go down there with Pace, down where it was dark and quiet and safe. Where I couldn’t hurt anyone ever again. Tears poured down my face and slid saltily into my mouth. I saw Pace’s parents clinging to each other like stunned children. They were
rich, tall, blond and good-looking. They had once had a handsome, athletic son who they had never really known at all. Carolyn Carter, the waitress at the café where Pace worked, was with them. She glared at me and I hung my head.

I looked around for a boy about my age, a cute boy I didn’t recognize, just in case this mysterious Michael had heard what had happened and found his way there. But there were very few young men at all.

After the ceremony I went over to Pace’s parents and hugged them, trying not to look at Carolyn. They felt almost boneless with grief. Their eyes were blank. I didn’t have words to say but I tried anyway.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you.”

The words you are supposed to say when what you mean is so much more. You feel denial and empathy and anger and blame and fear and sorrow and all you can say are words. In some ways animals have it better, I thought.

I looked up. Corey stood across the plot from me, watching with his greenish brown eyes. The boy I loved. He knew what I was and he hadn’t run away. I saw my mother watching as Corey hugged me lightly and kissed my cheek. I wanted to turn and kiss him on the mouth but I was afraid. Not of what she would do but of what would happen if she made me angry. So I pulled away from him quickly.

“I want to show you something,” he said.

Next to Pace’s grave was an old gravestone with a huge sad-eyed angel bending over it like a willow tree. Carved into the stone were the words:
MICHAEL FAIRBORN, JULY IO, 1896—SEPTEMBER 2, 1913
.

“Michael?” I said.

“Wasn’t there something about a guy who hung himself in the house on Green Street?” Corey asked me.

Hung himself? Like what Pace had done. With a rope in his closet. I shuddered. “The Fairborn House.
Michael
Fairborn.”

Corey and I exchanged a look. Michael. Like Pace’s

Michael? I had never seen this Michael guy. He had never showed up at the funeral. He was like an apparition. The names could have been a coincidence but I wasn’t so sure. Maybe Pace imagined Michael or maybe there was more to it. Nothing made sense in the normal way anymore.

I shivered, remembering the icy house. Corey moved closer to me so I could feel the hairs on my arm brush against his smooth skin. I wasn’t embarrassed by them now. In the light of what had happened, small things like that meant nothing.

I wanted to tell Pace what I was thinking. I don’t understand what happened with Michael. But whatever it was I wish I could have helped you. I let you down. I turned away from you. Without your love and acceptance, without Corey, I could have been where you are now. Love is the only thing we have to save us.

“What do you think that means?” Corey asked. “That they had the same name. That Pace did it the way he did.”

I wished Pace was there so I could ask him. No matter what he said, I wouldn’t have judged it; I would have just listened.

“But you know about things I don’t understand, baby.” Corey took my chin in his hand and lifted my face gently so our eyes met. “Like what happened with those wolves the other night.”

“I’ll tell you everything I know,” I said and the tears came with it and he reached out and took my hand even though people might have seen us.
Fuck it
, I thought.
Pace is dead and I’m going to worry if my mom sees this? I didn’t pull away
.

I looked across the cemetery lawn and saw Joe Ranger standing by himself with his hands in his pockets, watching me. Even from that far away I could see his jaw working, chewing tobacco like he was devouring a piece of raw meat.

Perhaps my friend Pace, in love with a ghost, had lost his mind. But who was to say that I had not?

August Kill

W
e only had a few more weeks before the end of the summer; that was when Corey would be going away from me. Now that Pace was gone I clung to my boyfriend more than ever. Without him, with everything that had happened, I was afraid it would be so easy for me to move in the direction Pace had gone.

I went back to work and Corey started picking me up in the evening instead of meeting me at the barn. We walked together through town, not caring if anyone saw us. Part of me wanted the news to get back to
my mom so I could finally tell her the truth.

Sometimes in the heady heat of late summer everything seemed like a dream—Sasha, the brothers, the haunted house, the thing that had happened to Pace. I wanted to believe that the wolf woman was a dream, too. I didn’t want that to be real. All I had to do, I told myself, was to keep away from the strange people who lived in the forest.

But I knew it really wasn’t as simple as that, not at all. Three things had to be present to activate the curse—a full moon, my menstrual blood and an outburst of my rage. At least that was how it had been every time and the moon, my cycle and my anger were not as easy to avoid as a forest.

I was still seeing Nieberding to appease my parents but he was starting to really make my nerves crawl. After Pace’s death he watched me more carefully and kept asking how Pace being gone made me feel. I didn’t want to go through the emotions again because I was afraid I’d frenzy, so I tried to change the subject. The
sessions were grueling and I left feeling weak from the discipline. Sometimes, afterward, I’d notice how long and jagged my fingernails suddenly looked. I had to be careful when I kissed Corey because my teeth felt sharper. And the hair kept growing on my body.

There was a brutal, desperate feeling in the air that summer, like when you smell a fire, a big fire, but you don’t know where it’s coming from. The town lay under a stupor. The heat made it hard to move or breathe and all around me I sensed danger. But most of all I sensed it from inside myself.

Now that Corey was picking me up after work I stopped walking past Joe Ranger’s. I thought of how he’d watched me in the cemetery and the way he’d talked about the full moon coming. I wasn’t sure who or what Joe was and I didn’t know if I trusted him anymore. He had taken me to Sasha and seemed to be her friend. Maybe he wanted me to kill my mother,
too. So I avoided Joe Ranger until I had no other choice except to seek him out and ask him for his help.

It was late at night, after I’d left Corey. I woke from a nightmare of being in the prosthetics shop. Real severed limbs hung from the walls. The flesh was mottled like blue cheese or dripping with blood like raw meat in a butcher’s shop. When I opened my eyes I was so disoriented that the figure standing at my bedside seemed part of the nightmare.

But he was real.

He was a tall, dark-haired young man with luminous, yellow eyes and red roses—so dark they almost looked black—in his arms.

Victor.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. His voice was deep and soft and his eyes were fixed on mine. I could feel him willing me not to scream and it worked. Besides, the last thing I wanted was for my father to come. I just
stared back at Victor. My thighs were sweating into the sheet.

“I won’t hurt you, Olivia.”

“Get the hell out!” I hissed when I could finally talk.

“I just need to talk to you for a little while. Is that all right? May I speak with you? May I sit?”

He gestured to a chair by my bed but I didn’t answer him.

“I brought you roses. May I leave them here?” He laid the roses at the foot of my bed. They had a strong scent that made my head spin the way it did when I frenzied. It was as if I had two hundred million smelling cells inside my nose.

“I don’t think my boyfriend will be okay with that,” I said. “You know him. The one you threatened.”

Victor ignored me. “We have been respectful.”

He bowed his head and dropped to his knees.

“Get up!” I growled. “My dad will come.”

Victor’s eyes flicked up at me. “I’m not afraid of
your father.” There was a sneer in his voice.

“I’m not going to go anywhere with you.”

He moved closer to me and in spite of how he and his brothers had circled me and Corey in the woods I felt a desire to reach out and touch the top of his head. His hair looked thick, coarse but lush. Saliva filled my mouth and my heart was pounding. There would be a full moon soon. There always was eventually. I wondered if the more times I desired to change, the more easily I would change when the circumstances were right.