Lying on the living room floor, Daniel helped Mack with his Sunday school project, making a whale puppet from an envelope along with a little paper Jonah for it to swallow.
“I forget. What color are whales?” Daniel asked.
“Red!”
“A red whale.” He reached for the Magic Markers.
“With blue dots.”
Their mom came from the kitchen with the portable phone in her hand. “That was your aunt Leslie. Is Keith going out with Angie?”
“Yeah.”
“Your Angie?”
“Not anymore.”
Mack talked about whales in his usual happy jabber. Neither Daniel or his mom listened.
“Since when? What happened?”
“Since a few weeks ago, and nothing happened. It wasn’t working out.” Daniel busied himself filling in blue circles across the whale. “Are these dots big enough?”
“No. They have to be big. Big like this.” Mack spread his arms wide.
“So who have you been spending all your time on the phone with lately?”
Daniel sighed. “A girl named Misty.”
“Misty what?”
“Sandlin. You don’t know her.”
“But you’re dating now?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And that’s it. I’m seeing a girl named Misty. Keith’s hooked up with Angie. You’re all caught up” Daniel kept coloring. His mom stared at the back of his head for a few seconds, then walked out of the room without another word.
The snap in Daniel’s voice had silenced Mack, too. Daniel handed him a red marker. “Here. Start coloring his head, I’ll start at the tail, and we’ll meet in the middle, okay?”
In the recommendation letter Mr. Fine had written to Cornell, the vice-principal had praised, among Daniel’s other virtues, his organizational skills. For years, his life had run on multiple timetables, hours set aside for studying and homework, for practices and games, for church, student rep meetings, and summer college application workshops. Some nights, Daniel lay awake, slicing the next day or week or month into neat blocks of time. After all that, leading a double life—keeping two schedules from colliding instead of half a dozen—was no sweat.
He needed to fill out a transcript form so the school could send his final grades to Cornell. To make sure none of the pack saw him, Daniel waited until they’d all sat down to lunch, said he needed to piss, then rushed to the main office. At home, Daniel planned his escapes days in advance, thinking up stories, covering his tracks, and once, handing his dad a permission slip for an invented debate tournament. And while his parents slept, the pack’s sign closed like teeth around Southside.
Their howls scraped rooftops and reached a pit-deep fear in human chests. It was a fear rooted in the time before cities, when people huddled around fires, the watching darkness on every side. Now, they gathered beneath electric lights, but either way, the wolves’ call made skin prickle with gooseflesh. Eyes darted around. Steps quickened.
Shifting into wolf skin, though, had nothing on the mysterious change that overtook a soul between Saturday night and Sunday morning.
In crumbling Birmingham, the churches stood as forts against the rot-eater god. The decay spreading around them only inspired congregations to sing louder, to offer up more, to scrub and polish the Lord’s houses until they shone. While sunlight peered through jewel-toned windows, staining his skin lavender and pink, Daniel lifted his voice alongside his brothers and sisters in Christ.
The first week of Lent, Pastor Crowell reached out to Daniel on the church steps after service. “Well, young man?” he asked, squeezing Daniel’s shoulder with his thin hand. “Your dad mentioned you got some good news recently.”
“Uh, yeah.” The milling congregation started glancing over.
“Yeah? Something about college, am I right?”
“Yeah, I got into Cornell.”
“Daniel, that’s just wonderful. We all knew you were somebody amazing. We can’t wait until you get out there and show the whole world.”
Mrs. Applebee, Daniel’s second-grade teacher, hugged him. Friends, the youth minister, and people Daniel barely knew jostled to clap him on the back and congratulate him.
“I’m not sure we can let him go or not,” Pastor Crowell told his parents. “You know how many girls sign up for our youth missions because Daniel’s going to be there?”
Everybody laughed at that, and the press of smiling faces made Daniel smile back. He shook everybody’s hand, thanked them for their prayers, and told them he wanted to study law. He tried not to look at the gas station across from the church, where the pack’s sign stared back from the painted cinder blocks.
On the car ride home, his mom turned to look at him in the backseat. “That was nice, wasn’t it? You know how much Brother Crowell thinks of you.”
Daniel nodded, then cracked the window. His mom’s perfume was supposed to smell like honeysuckle. To the wolf, though, the harsh chemicals weren’t anything like the real honeysuckle blooming across the furnace. They actually made Daniel dry-throated and a little sick. Or maybe that was from being reminded he wasn’t who people thought he was anymore, that he wasn’t sure himself.
After getting home, Daniel decided to meet Bwana and Spence at the park. He’d barely seen them since he’d started prowling with the pack.
They got into a game with some middle-schoolers, with Bwana playing center on one team and Daniel and Spence anchoring the other. The ball was a perfect street ball. The color and slickness of mud, it made a slightly dull whap against the concrete. After the eighth graders went home, Daniel and his friends played horse, laughed over Keith dating Angie, and talked about Spence going to UAB.
Spence still had an application at Florida State, but the University of Alabama at Birmingham had offered him a full ride, some scholarship meant to keep the city’s best and brightest from leaving. Bwana thought it was absurd that Spence would struggle to keep up a 3.8 GPA, then matriculate to a college four blocks from his house.
“It’s not going to be like going to college at all. You already take chemistry there.” McCammon High had a good relationship with UAB, and their chemistry classes occasionally used the college’s lab facilities.
“I know, I know.” Spence shot left-handed from the free throw line and missed. Tossing the ball to Daniel, he said, “I’m going to wait until I hear from Florida, but UAB has a good engineering program, I’ll have money to do something on Saturday nights besides eat cold pizza and beat off like you two broke fucks, and—”
“And if you forget your lunch, your mom can just bring it up,” Daniel added. “She’ll be, like, ’Sorry to interrupt, Professor, but my baby gets grouchy without his pudding cup.’”
“And I’ll still be able to go out with Dad on jobs sometimes,” Spence went on. “Oh, yeah. He wants to know if you’re going to work with us this summer.”
Spence’s dad owned Greensweep Landscaping. Daniel had worked for him over the last two summers, planting trees and hauling rolls of sod.
“Um, I’m not sure if I can or not.” Daniel wiped his face with the front of his shirt. “I may be swamped getting ready for school.”
“Yeah.” Spence gave him a sly smile. “And we know who you’ll be getting busy—I mean getting ready—with.”
Bwana laughed. “Actually, we’ve got a question about Misty.”
Spence stopped dribbling. “No, no. Don’t ask him that.”
“What is it?” Daniel asked.
“Well, we were wondering. Does Misty have brown nipples like a black girl or pink nipples like a white girl.”
The wolf bristled. “Fuck off.”
“C’mon. We’re friends, right?” Bwana wrapped an arm around Daniel’s shoulders. “I’m just curious. I’d hook up with her either way.”
“You’d hook up with her if she had one of each,” Spence said.
“Is that it? Damn, Danny Boy, it’d be like she was winking.”
Daniel sank a fist into Bwana’s stomach, doubling him over. Fingers digging into the nape of Bwana’s neck, Daniel pushed him down.
Spence jumped back. “Shit. Relax, Daniel. Shit.”
On his knees, Bwana sputtered, “Sorry. I’m sorry, okay?”
Daniel let him go.
“He was just joking around! Christ! Where the fuck’s your head at?” Furious, Spence whipped the ball at Daniel’s chest. Daniel batted it away and walked off the court. Daniel realized he’d been growling deep in his throat, and he’d been ready to hurt Bwana more if he hadn’t submitted. Crescents of blood dried under his fingernails.
Bwana had just been joking around. Daniel had told him and Spence juicy particulars about almost every girl he’d hooked up with. He knew plenty about Geneva and Claire. Bwana had just wanted to swap the same dumb, dirty chatter they’d swapped since ninth grade.
But Misty was different; she was part of the pack. Or maybe Daniel was different now. Or maybe, after weeks of seething at Daniel’s human self, the wolf had been ready to lash out at any hand-licker.
The wolf or the shooting star. It was getting harder to remember which one was his real shape and which was only a disguise.
Since becoming a wolf, Misty had stopped going to church with Marc, Grampa, and Nana. She felt guilty about that but liked being home when her mom got off work. Misty usually made breakfast while her mom showered and, if she was heading to her dispatching job, changed into her uniform.
“So tell me something about this Daniel boy,” her mom said, sitting down at the table with a soft grunt. She was barely thirty-six, but her joints were stiff and worn out.
“Not much to tell.” Misty shrugged. “His name’s Daniel. He’s a boy. He’s really sweet.”
Lily jumped into her mom’s lap. She fed the cat some bacon. “He have a lip ring too?”
“No. I pierced my lip because I wanted to.” Misty had already explained this to her mom several times. “I didn’t do it because of Andre, Daniel, or any other boy.”
“Probably has a ring in his pecker.”
“Mom! He does not have a ring in his pecker.”
“And you’re so sure of that how?”
Busted. Misty sopped up her yolk with some toast and considered her response. “I know to be careful, Mom.”
Her mom sighed. She trusted Misty, but mostly because she had to. “Just graduate, okay? Please? That’s the only thing I’ve ever asked of you or Marc.”
“I’m going to graduate,” Misty promised. “Don’t worry.”
“Just graduate and never date a guy with a ring in his pecker. Do those two things, and I’ll be happy.”
“You know what would make me happy? If we could stop talking about peckers at breakfast. If we could hold off the pecker-talk until at least noon. Or better yet, never.”
Her mom chuckled. Waving her fork at Misty, she said, “Honey, I’ve made some mistakes in my life. But, God as my witness, I never dated any guy with a ring in his pecker.”
Misty covered her face with both hands, her shoulders trembling with laughter.