I don’t think I would’ve given the girls a second thought, except that at the edge of my vision I saw one of them sweep up her dark blonde hair and twist it into a long ponytail. The action itself was insignificant, but the movement sent a gasp of scent into the air. I recognized that smell. I knew immediately.
It was her. It had to be.
I jerked my book up toward my face and risked a glimpse in the girls’ direction. The other two were still talking and gesturing at a paper bird I’d hung from the ceiling above the children’s book section. She wasn’t talking, though; she hung back, her eyes on the books all around her. I saw her face then, and I recognized something of myself in her expression. Her eyes flicked over the shelves, seeking possibilities for escape.
I had planned a thousand different versions of this scene in my head, but now that the moment had come, I didn’t know what to do.
She was so real here. It was different when she was in her backyard, just reading a book or scribbling homework in a notebook. There, the distance between us was an impossible void; I felt all the reasons to stay away. Here, in the bookstore, with me, she seemed breathtakingly close in a way she hadn’t before. There was nothing to stop me from talking to her.
Her gaze headed in my direction, and I looked away hurriedly, down at my book. She wouldn’t recognize my face but she would recognize my eyes. I had to believe she would recognize my eyes.
I prayed for her to leave so I could breathe again.
I prayed for her to buy a book so I would have to talk to her.
One of the girls called, “Grace, come over here and look at this. Making the Grade: Getting into the College of Your Dreams—that sounds good, right?”
I sucked in a slow breath and watched her long sunlit back as she crouched and looked at the SAT prep books with the other girls. There was a certain tilt to her shoulders that seemed to indicate only polite interest; she nodded as they pointed to other books, but she seemed distracted. I watched the way the sunlight streamed through the windows, catching the individual flyaway hairs in her ponytail and turning each one into a shimmering gold strand. Her head moved almost imperceptibly back and forth with the rhythm of the music playing overhead.
“Hey.”
I jerked back as a face appeared before me. Not Grace. One of the other girls, dark-haired and tanned. She had a huge camera slung over her shoulder and she was looking right into my eyes. She didn’t say anything, but I knew what she was thinking. Reactions to my eye color ranged from furtive glances to out-and-out staring; at least she was being honest about it.
“Do you mind if I take your photo?” she asked.
I cast around for an excuse. “Some native people think if you take their photo, you take their soul. It sounds like a very logical argument to me, so sorry, no pictures.” I shrugged apologetically. “You can take photos of the store if you like.”
The third girl pushed up against the camera girl: bushy light brown hair, tremendously freckled and radiating so much energy that she exhausted me. “Flirting, Olivia? We don’t have time for that. Here, dude, we’ll take this one.”
I took Making the Grade from her, sparing a quick glance around for Grace.
“Nineteen dollars and ninety-nine cents,” I said.
My heart was pounding.
“For a paperback?” remarked the freckle girl, but she handed me a twenty. “Keep the penny.” We didn’t have a penny jar, but I put it on the counter next to the register. I bagged the book and receipt slowly, thinking Grace might come over to see what was taking so long.
But she stayed in the biography section, head tipped to the side as she read the spines. The freckle girl took the bag and grinned at me and Olivia. Then they went to Grace and herded her toward the door.
Turn around, Grace. Look at me, I’m standing right here. If she turned right now, she’d see my eyes, and she’d have to know me.
Freckle girl opened the door—ding—and made an impatient sound to the rest of the herd: time to move along. Olivia turned briefly, and her eyes found me again behind the counter. I knew I was staring at them—at Grace—but I couldn’t stop.
Olivia frowned and ducked out of the store. Freckle girl said, “Grace, come on.”
My chest ached, my body speaking a language my head didn’t quite understand.
I waited.
But Grace, the only person in the world I wanted to know me, just ran a wanting finger over the cover of one of the new hardcovers and walked out of the store without ever realizing I was there, right within reach.
CHAPTER FIVE • GRACE
44°F
I didn’t realize that the wolves in the wood were all werewolves until Jack Culpeper was killed.
September of my junior year, when it happened, Jack was all anybody in our small town could talk about. It wasn’t as though Jack had been this amazing kid when he was alive—apart from owning the most expensive car in the parking lot, principal’s car included. Actually, he’d been kind of a jerk. But when he was killed—instant sainthood. With a gruesome and sensational undertow, because of the way it had happened. Within five days of his death, I’d heard a thousand versions of the story in the school halls.
The upshot was this: Everyone was terrified of the wolves now.
Because Mom didn’t usually watch the news and Dad was terminally not home, the communal anxiety trickled down to our household slowly, taking a few days to really gain momentum. My incident with the wolves had faded from my mother’s mind over the past six years, replaced by turpentine fumes and complementary colors, but Jack’s attack seemed to refresh it perfectly.
Far be it from Mom to funnel her growing anxiety into something logical like spending more quality time with her only daughter, the one who had been attacked by wolves in the first place. Instead, she just used it to become even more scatter-brained than usual.
“Mom, do you need some help with dinner?”
My mother looked guiltily at me, turning her attention from the television that she could just see from the kitchen back to the mushrooms she was obliterating on the cutting board.
“It was so close to here. Where they found him,” Mom said, pointing toward the television with the knife. The news anchor looked insincerely sincere as a map of our county appeared next to a blurry photo of a wolf in the upper right corner of the screen. The hunt for the truth, he said, continued. You’d think that after a week of reporting the same story over and over again, they’d at least get their simple facts straight. Their photo wasn’t even the same species as my wolf, with his stormy gray coat and tawny yellow eyes.