Whatever the case, she was the most interesting adult I’d ever met by far. Like all adult wolves, she was notoriously cagey, but out of all the adults in the pack, my money was on her to be the one to slip up at some point and tell me something really, really interesting.
2
TurnsoutIwaswrong to look forward to the summer vacation. Dead wrong. Before Jules and I managed to settle into a nice routine of sleeping in late and finding ways to annoy everyone around us, Jules was packed up by his parents and was loaded into their minivan along with most of their possessions. There was no warning at all. All I got was a breathless Jules knocking on our door early one morning at the end of the first week of the vacation.
“We’re heading southwest for the summer. We’re doing it. We’re finally going to see August.”
August was Jules’s older brother. He was one of his older brothers. Mason was the other. Mason and August were born just over a year apart and were fifteen and sixteen years older than Jules respectively. They left the pack soon after they graduated from high school. I’m not sure if they meant to leave the pack exactly, but they both headed south for the summer to find work, and neither of them ever came back. We were young when they left. Maybe four or five. I remember the feeling of them: a sweaty male presence in Jules’s house when we were little. When I thought about them, I had vague recollections of them spending a lot of time eating bologna sandwiches and drinking soda and belching loudly, but that’s about it.
Jules didn’t know the specifics about what happened or why they didn’t come back. When I asked his mom, Tess, she just shrugged and said, “That’s just how things go sometimes.”
Jules had been dreaming of visiting his brothers for most of his life. I was at the point where I honestly didn’t think it would ever happen. Who could afford it? Fuel costs alone were astronomical and like the rest of the pack, Jules’s parents didn’t have much to spare. To say I was taken aback hearing that he was leaving would be an understatement.
“What do you mean you’re going? When? How long?”
“We’re leaving right now. We’re all packed up already. Ma and Pa have been planning it for ages, but they didn’t tell me ’cause they wanted it to be a surprise.” Jules’s mom was standing behind him on our porch, and when he said that, I saw a flicker of something cross her face. It was hard to read, and it was gone so fast that later I thought I’d imagined it.
“How long will you be gone?”
“All summer.”
“What?” I was trying my best to hide how I was feeling, but I don’t think I did very well.
All summer?
All fucking summer?
Three months on my own without Jules. It was worse than a nightmare.
“I’ll be back before you know it,” he said, pulling me into a giant hug. I was too stunned to talk, but I hugged him back tighter and longer than I normally did. After gentle encouragement from his mom, he headed off to the van. He stopped and looked back at me before getting in.
“I’ll miss you, too, Sully,” he said, though I hadn’t said a thing.
I guess he did miss me. He sent postcards now and again, so he must have. They arrived battered and crumpled, looking like they’d had a time finding their way to me. None of them contained much news. Nothing important, anyhow. They were all things like:
You’d love it here. Just ate the best burger of my whole life. Had coke and fries with it and everything.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in what he’d been eating. I was. It was that none of his postcards touched on the only thing that mattered to me: the exact time and day he’d be back. So, yeah, he might have missed me a little, but I missed him a lot. Alot. It was the worst summer in living history. My history, that was. No one had ever been as bored as I was. I’d have put money on that. And if anyone ever had been, they probably hadn’t survived to tell the tale. I slept as much as I could. I tried to pass the days that way. Around midday, my mother shook me awake.
“Go play outside,” she said. Every day it made me want to scream. I was a sophomore in high school. As if it wasn’t enough that I was way too old to be told to go out to play, I didn’t fucking well have anyone to play with. If I grumbled too much, she’d give me a little shove to get me moving. “Out, out, out. Out you go. Wolves grow big in the mountains.”
Given my mood, my mother was lucky she was what she was: a formidable woman. She was only a little over five feet tall, but there was a steeliness about her that no one could miss. I always thought of steel when I thought of my mother. She had long silver-gray hair, down to her waist. It had been that way for as long as I could remember. She told me once that she went gray before she turned thirty. Maybe that was why I thought of steel when I thought of her. Her skin was dark without tanning and her eyes were almost black. There was something else about her, something small, but you’d probably notice it if you were to meet her, which is the only reason I mention it. Her left arm was shorter than her right, and that hand was wizened and curled in on itself slightly. It was a birth defect.
Birth defects were rare in wolves, but once in a blue moon, they happened. She paid it no attention whatsoever. She never let it stop her from anything. And if you were thinking you should show her pity for it, boy, would you be making a big mistake. Given the right circumstance, my mother could be quite frightening. Despite that, I loved her as much as it was possible for a teenage wolf to love their mother. Because of that, I didn’t answer back. I hardly ever answered her back. I wasn’t the only one. Most of the pack picked up on her steeliness, too. My father definitely did. He sensed it in a very big way. My parents were both betas so their designation was equal, but let’s just say the way things were on paper and the way they were in reality were two very different things.
I stumbled out of bed, grumbling as I pulled on a pair of jeans. I struggled in vain to close the fly.
“God,” my mother said, “you’ve grown out of that pair too.”
It was true. It seemed that the only ever-loving thing that had happened that awful summer was my endless growth spurt. Truth be told, I was losing my patience with that, too. I’d grown so much I no longer fit into the hand-me-downs from Jules that had been my wardrobe staple all my life. My mother had already been down to Walmart once that summer to buy new clothes and I felt bad about how much she’d had to spend on me. It wasn’t just that it was a nuisance growing out of clothes. I’d had it up to my eyeballs hearing how much I’d grown from the adults.
“Aw, Christ, Sully boy. I reckon you grew a quarter of an inch overnight,” my father said every morning. And I do meaneverymorning. He laughed when he said it, which is why it irritated me so much. It wasn’t funny when he said it in June, and it sure as hell wasn’t funny when he said it in the middle of August.
“Ye gods, what are they feeding you, boy?” the omegas caterwauled as I walked past the pack house.
“That’s the way, Sully. Good man. Off with you. Wolves grow big in the woods,” said The Brothers, Kevin, Keith, or Llewellyn. Every day they seem to alternate who got a turn to say it, which only heightened my annoyance.
“That’s the future of our pack right there, boys,” said Marty.
