So the trouble starts with this: Mike likes Carly and Carly doesn’t like him back. Mike’s trying to figure the situation out as best he can, then he turns fifteen and this werewolf thing happens—boom—and he spends three nights a month camping out in the middle of nowhere because a pining teenage werewolf and the full moon aren’t a great combination. It’s enough to make you feel bad for the guy.
None of this is news, yeah? I mean, the werewolf thing, sure, but the rest is obvious. You catch the two of them together all the time, Carly with her wire-frame glasses and her hot-pink bob, Mike with his eyeliner and his older brother’s black Nirvana shirt, and it’s clear to everyone Mike never considered wearing mascara prior to Carly deciding she was into punk—punk, not emo—and Mike became punk-not-emo too, for real, trailing along after Carly, a private entourage of one.
No one missed Mike’s crush, not even Carly. She’s not stupid about these things, but she pretends she is so she doesn’t have to hurt Mike’s feelings. I mean, she likes Mike well enough; he’s a nice guy, and he learned how to use eyeliner for her, and that’s worth something in Carly’s book. Problem is, she doesn’t like Mike the way Mike likes her. She likes his older brother, Jake, that way. Possibly even someone like that loser Oscar Delluna. But Mike? No. A world of no. Never going to happen, and anyone who says otherwise has binged on too many romantic comedies.
Mike doesn’t get that. Never really did. He figures Carly would like him if she could, but liking a werewolf is a tricky thing and invites nothing but hassle. Werewolves don’t draw a line between love and hate and irritation, so it gets messy right about the point where they grow fur. The fact that Carly might not like him, Mike-Mike rather than Werewolf-Mike, hasn’t even crossed Mike’s mind. He’s good with computers, Mike, and he’s stubborn like you wouldn’t believe. He really is a werewolf, too. Limited group of folks in the loop about that. I figure you deserve to know, since I’m trying to tell you the whole story, the Carly-and-Mike story. Some of it’s meant to be a secret, but it’s just between us—and Mike’s a lot cooler with the werewolf thing these days. If you keep quiet about Carly kinda-sorta liking Oscar Delluna and everything’ll be fine. ‘Course Oscar Delluna’s a creep, so you probably shouldn’t talk to him anyway, not unless you’re working to figure out exactly what Carly saw in him. Me, I’ve never truly understood.
Anyway, Mike’s a werewolf and it involves a lot of camping. Mike isn’t big on the camping, even though his parents insist it’s the only way. His parents are werewolves too, so they know what they’re talking about. Mike-Mike hates the great outdoors, although by all accounts Werewolf-Mike’s ecstatic as heck once the moon is in the sky. He gets to run and howl and roll in the dust. He hunts down kangaroos and gets into fights with the wild pigs. Sometimes Mike wakes up the morning after and he’s in the middle of nowhere—even more in the middle of nowhere than he was at the start of the camping trip—and it takes him hours to hike barefoot through the bush and find his parents again.
He spends most of those walks speculating about Carly, wondering what she’s been doing for the last couple of days. Mike predicts worst-case scenarios. Carly kissed Jake at a party, or she talked to Oscar Delluna when he came into the video store where Carly works, or Carly knows that Werewolf-Mike isn’t one for the eyeliner and that’s what’s costing Mike-Mike his shot. Those kinds of thoughts drive Mike nuts, month after month, right up until the morning he comes back from camping and finds out that Carly really has kissed Oscar Delluna at a party.
It wasn’t a good kiss, by all accounts. It turns out Oscar Delluna made out with Carly on a dare, proving to his buddies he could, and no one was particularly satisfied by the experience, least of all Carly. Mike doesn’t know this right away, but they’re coming back from the camping trip the day after it all went down and there Carly is, waiting on the front steps, wanting to tell Mike what happened because she figures Werewolf-Mike can get mean and wolf-like to defend her honor. Mike gets out of his parents’ Range Rover and shoulders his pack. He walks up to Carly and says, “Hi.”
Carly looks up and smiles, but it’s a weak little smile rather than the wicked grin Mike loves, and he realizes instantly that big things happened while he was away.
“Hi,” Carly says. “How was the trip?”
Mike shrugged. He’s covered in dirt and he ripped his second-favorite T-shirt when he turned into a wolf. Right now Mike’s wishing he’d thought to take his eyeliner pen out camping with him. Carly looks down at her shoes and taps her toes together, wishing there was some way she could ask Mike to hurt Oscar Delluna without telling him what happened. Mike’s parents, who know an awkward pause when they see one, choose this exact moment to bustle past and carry the gear into the house. Not that Mike’s family takes a lot of gear with them when they go camping. Going wolf cuts down on their need for a tent.
“Listen,” Carly says, “I’ve need a favor. A big one. The kind where I ask you to do something and you don’t ask why.”
She’s still looking at her shoes, wondering when her right toenail punched a hole in her favorite pair of pink Converse, and Mike sits down next to her and nudges her with his elbow. Carly’s got nail polish on her feet, candy-apple red, and you can see the polish on her big toe through the crack in her sneakers.
“No questions asked?” Mike says. “That’s some favor.” But here’s the tragedy of the moment—Mike doesn’t need to ask questions. Not around that time of the month. He’s still got a little bit of the wolf in him after a night in the bush and that means he can scent the harsh cigarette smoke on Carly’s lips, a brackish-sweet mix of tobacco and cloves. Mike knows that Carly doesn’t smoke. Hell, there’s only one guy at school who smokes that brand of cigarettes, and Mike’s smart enough to put two and two together.
That’s one of the problems with being a werewolf that nobody thinks to tell you about. Everyone focuses on the big problems—hurting the people you love, accidentally killing some farmer’s sheep, getting shot by overzealous monster hunters who assume you’re a menace because you change shape three nights a month—but nobody considers the little problems, the impracticalities of living with a wolf’s nose and a wolf’s ears. No one thinks about the way you now figure things out that you’d rather stay ignorant about, not unless they suddenly find themselves in a position like Mike’s and wishing they weren’t. You’d think there’s an upside to the whole werewolf thing to make up for the inconvenience, but mostly it’s an enormous hassle.
“No questions asked,” Mike says. He grits his teeth and forces down the lump in his throat. He balls his fists into tight knots and wishes he could hit something. He keeps his voice calm. “Sure, I can do that, I guess.”
Carly, she doesn’t notice any of this. She’s not a werewolf, so she smells things and hears things like the rest of us, and mostly she’s watching her shoes like they’re opening up a broadway show. Carly’s embarrassed by what happened and wishing she hadn’t kissed Oscar Delluna last night. She’s also wishing she could try kissing him again, just in case, because there’s a possibility he really liked her and used the dare to kiss her without giving his true feels away. And Werewolf-Mike could really hurt Oscar, maybe even kill him. Mike’s parents always said that Mike has no understanding of what he’s doing when he’s all wolfed up, running on instinct, and it could be her plan is majorly bad idea. So Carly sits next to Mike, bouncing her feet, doubting whether she should really ask him what she was going to ask him, and then she says, “Never mind. Sorry, no big deal, just wondering if you’d do it, you know? Just testing.”
Mike nods and gives Carly an encouraging smile. “I’d do it,” he says. “Anything you ask, you know that.” He yawns and stretches, spine popping as he arcs his back. Carly smiles at him, all sad and cute, and it’s one of those moments when Mike knows how much he likes her real deep in his gut.
“Come around later,” she says. “I got a bunch of old horror flicks from work.”
Carly likes horror movies. Mike doesn’t, but he pretends that he does, because it’s an excuse to hang out with Carly.
“Sure,” he says. “After dinner. Call me.”
Then Carly walks off and Mike’s left standing there, the scent of Oscar Delluna’s cigarette smoke tickling his nose, wondering what really went on while he was camping. Mike’s still got enough of the wolf riding shotgun that he’s tempted to do something bad right then. He really, really wants to track Oscar Delluna down and bite him, hard, right where it’d hurt. Werewolf-Mike would go do it without hesitation, because Werewolf-Mike is an angry ball of sharp teeth and fur-covered muscle. Unfortunately, Mike-Mike is scrawny and half Oscar Delluna’s size, so he bites down on the urge and goes inside instead. He lies on his bed, staring at the wall, the volume of his stereo turned up so loud that he can’t think straight. That’s good because thinking leads to knowing stuff and knowing stuff leads to trouble.
Mike’s been in his room for an hour or two before his brother knocks on the door, hammering it with a big fist, then barges in without bothering to wait for permission. Mike’s brother Jake is a big guy, good looking. He even got away with being an ordinary guy, despite his parents—there’s no full moon camping trips for him, not even when he was a kid. It happens sometimes, when both the parents are werewolves. Jake got lucky, Mike inherited the genetics.
“Hey, fuzzball,” Jake says. “What’s up?”
Mike mumbles an answer that might be nothing and might be varmint, but Jake can’t be sure given the pillow over Mike’s face. Jake sits on the bed and punches his brother in the leg.
“Let’s try that again, fuzzy. What’s up?”
This time Mike snaps the pillow away and sits up, glaring at Jake.
“Nothing,” Mike says. “Nothing, okay?”
Mike’s been crying. You can tell because no one taught Mike about not applying eyeliner before you leak tears. He has black streaks down his face, like someone has been oiling up his eyeballs. Jake backs off, hands in the air. He settles down on the far end of the bed, watching his little brother crumple back against the bed-head. Jake has his flaws–-he’s oblivious to the fact that Carly likes him, for starters–-but he’s basically okay and he cares about Mike more than Jake lets on. Wolves are pack animals, so they try to get along. Jake isn’t a werewolf, but werewolves raised him. The habit kind of sticks. “Seriously, Mike,” Jake says. “What’s up?”
“Carly,” Mike says. “She kissed someone else at a party and aftermath wasn’t good. I could smell it.”
“Ah,” Jake says. He’s got a fair idea of what happened. He was at that party, after all, and you pick up the gossip. Everyone did, even you, which is why I’m here, setting the record straight. Jake might be oblivious to Carly liking him, but he’s smart enough to know how Mike feels about her. Jake’s also got a fair idea of what Mike’s contemplating at that very moment, and there‘re decent odds that Jake’s fair idea is dead accurate.
Jake says, “You want to talk about it?”
So Mike tells Jake what’s happened, about the cigarettes lingering on Carly’s lips and the thing she didn’t ask Mike to do, and Jake listens and nods and asks questions in all the right places. Then Jake says, “I was at that party, you know,” and Mike says, “Oh,” and Jake says, “Yeah.”
“If it were me,” Jake says, “and if I was obsessing this way, and if I was a werewolf, then I’d go do something about it right away. Right now. Because even if it didn’t work, you’d have done a thing and if you don’t do something while you’re you…”
Jake lets that thought trail off, but Mike knows which direction to go and he nods. Jake’s thinking about the next full moon, about Werewolf-Mike and that tendency that a werewolf who’s angry with a guy, the kind of angry that boils deep down in your bone marrow… well, it’s not pretty. You tend to worry for that bloke the werewolf is mad at when the next full moon arrives. Mike’s been a pretty good werewolf. He hasn’t really hurt anyone since all this started, except for the wild pigs, and it seems like the pigs always start those fights. So Mike and Jake sit there for a while, pondering this, and eventually Jake pats his brother on the shoulder, all awkward and not really comforting, and goes downstairs to watch TV.
And Mike does do something, the only thing he can imagine doing for his best friend. Mike goes next door and watches horror movies with Carly, closing his eyes in the scary bits, pretending he doesn’t notice how she smells like plasticky-lipstick and someone else’s cigarette smoke. Pretending he doesn’t recognize the sick churn in his stomach, the one that’s kind of like that warm, angry feeling he gets after eating too much porridge.
Later, after they’re tired of watching feral clowns disemboweling American college kids with steel hooks and chainsaws, Mike and Carly sit on the couch in Carly’s lounge room, not doing anything really, idle channel surfing. And after they’ve done that for a while, long enough to figure out that there’s nothing on, Mike takes a deep breath and says, “So I know you kissed Oscar Delluna,” only he says it real soft, like he hopes that Carly won’t actually catch him saying it, and he doesn’t take his eyes off the dancing gummy bear that fills the TV screen. Except Carly does hear him, loud and clear, and she puts the TV remote down on the arm of her parents’ paisley green couch and says, “Oh.”
“Did Jake tell you?” Carly asks, because she remembers that Jake was there and she was really hoping Jake hadn’t heard, given he’s nicer than Oscar Delluna and generally more interesting, even though Jake has never really noticed Carly as anything more than Mike’s friend from next door. Mike nods, a white lie, because he’d prefer not to discuss being a werewolf, not right now, and Jake probably would have told him, sooner or later, maybe.
“You wanted me to bite him,” Mike adds. “Before, when you came over, that’s what you were going to ask.”
“Yeah,” Carly says. “I guess.”
“I will, you know,” Mike says. “If you still want me too.”
“No,” Carly says. “It’s okay.”
And then Carly tells Mike the whole story, even though Mike doesn’t really wish to hear it, because Carly needs a friend and Mike’s always been there and he’s a good listener despite all his other faults. She tells Mike about Oscar’s sloppy kisses came with an aftertaste like ashes and the way Oscar Delluna disappeared when she ducked off to the bathroom. About catty Caitlyn Morse, who bailed up Carly while she was searching the party for Oscar, and how Caitlin explained Oscar had been dared to make out with Carly by Glen Dougherty and how Glen owed Oscar twenty bucks for going through with it. And about that itty bitty part of Carly that still wishes that Oscar Delluna would kiss her again. Launch into an elaborate, detailed explanation about hiding his true feelings behind the bet. Because, if you like someone enough, it’s scary. And you really want to forgive them for being a gosh darn idiot.
“He won’t, you know,” Mike says. “It doesn’t work that way, liking someone. It sucks, but it doesn’t.”
And he knows right then that Carly is about to cry, because he can smell the tears coming before Carly even knows she’s about to cry them. It’s the least punk-rock thing Mike has ever seen Carly do.
“I think I will bite him,” Mike says. “Stupid Oscar Delluna. I’ll chomp his ass so hard.”
“Don’t,” Carly says. “You’ll hurt him, really bad. Isn’t that what your parents say?”
“I’m not waiting for the full moon,” Mike says. “Tomorrow. It’s going down tomorrow. I’m going to bite him at school.”
And right then Carly looks over at Mike, and she sees a flash of Werewolf-Mike, right there, in Mike-Mike’s eyes. A quick glimpse, like seeing a goldfish at the bottom of the pond, then it’s gone. The only one left is Mike-Mike, and he runs out of the room, heading home because he’s so angry that he’s going to cry and he really doesn’t want to do that in front of Carly. Carly watches him go, holding her breath.
I don’t really need to tell you what happens next.
I mean, everyone knows this part. Mike jumps Oscar Delluna at school, just runs up and leaps on him while Oscar’s eating lunch with Glen Dougherty and Barry Wilde and that real mean kid that everyone calls Panzo. Everyone was there for the fight, even if it wasn’t much of a fight. A few seconds of Mike trying to gnaw Oscar’s ear off before Barry and Glen and Panzo got involved. After that Mike was on the ground, getting kicked to hell and bleeding all over the concrete. No one wins a fight once Panzo gets involved, so Mike was doomed from the start, even if it wasn’t four on one.
Eventually, Mr. Cook broke things up and Mike scored a suspension, because everyone confirmed he’d started it, even though most folks assumed Oscar Delluna deserved to get bitten. It seemed unfair, especially with Oscar Delluna bragging about it, but two days later Jake found Oscar alone on the bike-track behind Coles and got a little bit of revenge for his brother. I guess Oscar Delluna was kinda cute once upon a time, even if he’s never been nice, but you just don’t look cute once someone’s broken your nose.
Mike’s parents weren’t happy about the suspension, but they did their best to understand—they’d both been teenage werewolves themselves, once upon a time, so they get how hard it gets. They grounded Mike, which meant he spent most of his suspension holed up in his room going all emo—emo, not punk—over the fact that Carly stopped talking to him.
And somewhere between then and now the gossip started, and you’d start hearing things, like Mike and Carly were actually going out and Carly cheated on Mike with Oscar, and that’s why he went insane. Or you’d be told that Carly was going out with Jake, and that she’d cheated on Jake with Mike, and that Oscar was just trying to do the right thing by proving she was doing the dirty on the side. I even heard that Mike really bit off Oscar Delluna’s ear in the fight, and that right now Oscar Delluna’s got a pig’s ear instead, that you can see the scars if you fold the top of his ear down and look real close.
None of that stuff’s true, it’s gossip. And now I’ve told you the real story, the Carly-and-Mike story, the way I know it. Mike and Carly still aren’t talking, and Mike’s still emo for her, and Carly isn’t exactly happy about all this either. She misses Mike, just a little, not the way he’d like her to miss him, but as a friend. They haven’t talked for twenty-six days now, not since that night after the last full moon, and tomorrow night’s the full moon and Mike’s mum has been on the phone with all his friends, struggling to track him down. Mike wasn’t at school yesterday, or the day before, and his family hasn’t seen him since he said he was going for a ride on Thursday afternoon. They’re meant to go camping tomorrow night. They’re trying to plan for what happens next if Mike doesn’t come home.
Me, I saw Mike yesterday, riding his bike along the path on Timothy Road that leads into the national park. I tried to say hello, but he breezed on by without saying anything. Near as I can tell, that was the last anyone’s seen him. Mike’s parents think he’s hiding out in the park, waiting for the moonrise. They’re worried. So is Carly. And if Oscar Delluna understood half of what I’ve told you today, you can bet that he’d be pissing his pants thinking about the next full moon too. Because there’s eight hours of moonlight and Werewolf-Mike’s nose picks up way more than Mike-Mike’s nose can, and no one’s sure what will happen when Werewolf-Mike shows up. Not you, not me, not Mike-Mike or Werewolf-Mike or poor Carly in the middle of things.
All we can do is watch the moonrise and wait.