The students gathered outside the school on Thursday as soon as the bell rang, shoulder to shoulder in the basketball court. People pushed past Aysel and Z as they went out. Aysel and Z watched from the library window as the school emptied out. The teachers stood in a ring around the group of teenagers, looking interested and nervous at the same time. After about ten minutes of confusion, Charley Salt emerged from the group and climbed onto a chair, and began speaking to those assembled on the cement.
“What do you think he’s saying?” Z asked. They tried to sound nonchalant. They held Hamlet in their lap and were flipping in a perfunctory way through the pages.
Aysel crossed her arms over her chest. “Probably talking about how terrible werewolves are or whatever.” She let out a little laugh.
“Let’s open a window. Try to hear what they’re saying.”
It took some time to pry the window open, and by the time Aysel had wrenched the pane up and propped it in place with a book, Charley was concluding his speech.
“. . . a new future, with hope and unity, where none of us must live in fear,” he shouted through the megaphone.
The students applauded. At the edge of the crowd, Aysel and Z could see Mr. Holmes clapping with a hysterical gusto.
“God, can you believe that guy?” Aysel said, pointing. “Look at the bald spot on the back of his head.”
“He’s pathetic,” Z agreed.
“We need to brace ourselves for the storm ahead,” Charley finished. “Whether or not we have magic, we can stand together against the dark, and keep this town safe for its citizens. Just because we are young does not mean we are blind, or defenseless. Let’s show the people of Salem that we know what must be done!”
Out on the basketball courts, students cheered again. Aysel leaned out the window so her arms dangled out over the rhododendron bushes, and rested her head on the sill, scrutinizing the scene below. Z sat on the bookshelf next to her. Down on the ground, Charley smiled out at his audience through the applause and shrugged his shoulders humbly. He got down from the chair and raised a fist in the air—met with cheers— and then began to march toward the gates of the school. Other students followed him. As they filed out onto the sidewalk that led to the center of town, the teachers remaining in the parking lot looked after them. There was an eerie silence. Then the teachers, too, got in their cars and drove away, or returned to the building. The chair where Charley had stood was left standing in the middle of the parking lot, as if none of the teachers wanted to be the one to move it back inside.
“I feel like we should go and watch the rally,” Aysel said. “Especially since we know all these idiots will be there.”
“That sounds incredibly dangerous,” Z said, smiling a little to show they were kind of joking. They picked instinctively at a scab on the side of their face.
Aysel shrugged. “Better than not knowing what’s going on. And we’ll take suspicion off ourselves by being there. Do you really think it’ll be dangerous?”
“It might be.”
“It’ll probably just be some people with signs and stuff, don’t you think? Nothing, like”—Aysel paused and took the book from under the windowpane, which shut with an enormous noise—“Nothing, like, violent. Right?”
“You tell me,” Z said. They stood up and turned from side to side, listening to their muscles and bones pop with the movement. They felt much stronger than they had yesterday, but an immense soreness had crept through them. Every twist of their wrist or turn of their head was painful. It was better, Z supposed, than creeping numbness, but it didn’t go very far toward convincing you that you were all right.
When the bus came, its doors opened with a hiss. Z and Aysel sat next to each other, looking out the window at the street names passing by. Aysel reached out and quietly took hold of Z’s hand on the seat. Z froze for a moment, and then uncomfortably drew it away. Their hand was paper-dry and still had a weird greenish cast to it and they felt like it was repugnant against Aysel’s soft, living warmth.
Downtown, unlike in the neighborhoods around the school, there were cars everywhere. People, too, crowded the streets in numbers Z hadn’t seen since the last Fourth of July. The gray buildings and low brick-fronted shops that normally looked out on fairly deserted thoroughfares now were witness to an immense mass of people—young and old people, hurrying—and cars trying to park along the sides of the roads. Z watched as the bus passed a group of middle-aged men in suits carrying signs. They couldn’t make out the words on the signs. They tried to steal a glance at Aysel to see her reaction, but her face was blank and unreadable. As the bus pulled into the transit center across from the courthouse, Z saw that the front lawns before the building were covered with people. They turned and looked back over their shoulder.
“Did you see that crowd?” they asked Aysel.
“Yes,” Aysel said.
“Do you still want to go to the rally?”
“I didn’t come downtown for nothing. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. I’d understand.” She stood up and got off the bus. Z followed her, their knees popping.
The front of the courthouse was overrun with people. The crowd spilled off the lawn and onto the streets, and traffic officers paced helplessly along the sides of the building, trying to keep the crowd out of the road, to no avail. Z and Aysel were surrounded by people as they moved into the crowd. They sat on the lawn or milled around as Z and Aysel were doing, as if they were waiting for something.
“Look at that stage,” Aysel said abruptly, pointing. “That’s probably for the people who are going to come up and talk. This is really organized.” Z looked and saw that there was indeed a wooden platform that had been erected near the steps of the courthouse. Nobody was on it, but several empty plastic chairs with water bottles beneath them, a set of speakers, and a microphone all seemed to promise that speakers would soon arrive.
“Where did all of these folks come from?” Z said quietly. “I didn’t even know there were this many people in Salem.”
A family with five or six children passed them. Aysel moved out of the way to avoid being trampled. A little girl in a stroller craned her neck to look backward at Z, then turned her face up to her mother to say something. Z swallowed and pulled their hood up and over their head.
As they passed beneath one of the towering oaks that ringed the courthouse lawns, they were driven close to a group of college-age students gathered in a ring.
“. . . this is why we need looser gun regulations,” one of them, with a huge fluff of blonde hair, was saying. “I was trying to talk to Professor G about it on Monday and he just laughed at me. Now, you know, I’m going to go to class tomorrow and say, Who’s laughing? Look what you get by being lax about these kinds of things.”
“It’s all this academic stuff that makes them think like this,” another boy said. His hair was cut short in back. “Even with the censorship, all the universities are like this. They all want to be lax on monsters. Back in Texas nobody would have stood for this. Werewolves are practically extinct there. It makes you wonder if that’s why a college town like this is so susceptible to these kinds of attacks. And organizations.”
“It totally is.”
Aysel pulled on Z’s arm and Z realized that they had stopped, frozen in place, to listen. They hurried forward away from the college students, looking back over their shoulder.
There was a tent set up on one corner of the courthouse square with some people underneath it. A clot of people crowded around the tent and moved toward it and away. Some of them were carrying rolled T-shirts.
“Let’s go see what’s going on over there,” Aysel said. She moved toward the tent with a heavy stride. Z followed her, afraid that if they got too far from her someone would accidentally trample them, or else realize they were undead and stab them on the spot with a wooden stake. It seemed like the kind of thing this crowd would do. But as they got close to the tent, Aysel disappeared amid a forest of broad and narrow shoulders, and Z lost sight of her altogether. They hugged themselves and stood as still as they could in the middle of the noisy masses of people, feeling the wet grass through their black canvas shoes. It was soggy and uncomfortable. Z looked down at their feet and realized they hadn’t felt any sensation so vividly since the accident.
Aysel appeared at their shoulder. “I got a T-shirt,” she announced, unrolling one of the white T-shirts that others around the lawn were carrying. It was screen-printed with an image of a ferocious wolf overlaid with something obviously meant to be the crosshairs of a gun’s sights. Beneath the image, emblazoned in green, was the legend “Monsters Want to Destroy Human Civilization”.
“It was this one or one that said ‘Citizens’ Vigilante Squad,’” Aysel said. “This one was more charming.”
“I hope you didn’t pay for that,” Z said.
“Nah.” Aysel grinned.
Suddenly there was the screech of speakers turning on and the loud sound of a microphone changing frequencies.
“It looks like the show is about to start,” Aysel said, suddenly scowling. “Let’s get somewhere we can see.” She marched off through the crowd again, and it was everything Z could do to keep up with her. The crowd moved forward and pressed close to the stage, making Z feel claustrophobic. Eventually Aysel stopped at the foot of a tall maple tree with a fork in it close to the ground. She scrambled up and offered a hand to Z.
“I’m fine down here,” Z said.
“You won’t be able to see.”
“Being in the tree makes me feel like they could set fire to it or something if a mob formed, you know? I’d rather not.” Z didn’t say that their arms were suddenly aching and they had a headache which they were fairly sure would increase a hundredfold if they did anything as remotely strenuous as climbing a few feet up a tree.
“Suit yourself,” Aysel said.
Back onstage, someone was stepping up to the microphone. He was a short, broad man with a narrow face and sideburns. Z couldn’t see him very well over the heads of the crowd. He was dressed in a suit. As he took hold of the microphone and tapped it, a few people clapped, and this sent a chain reaction of applause across the lawns until the whole audience—with the exception of a few bystanders like Z and Aysel—was pounding their palms together.
“Welcome,” the man said. The applause was hushed. “I want to thank everyone who has come here today, whether you are local or have driven here to show your support. I see a lot of Washington and California license plates on the cars. If you’ve come a long way, I just want to say that we genuinely appreciate that time and energy. Let’s give a hand to our out-of-state supporters.”
There was a smattering of applause.
“We’ve come here today,” said the narrow-faced man seriously, “to discuss the problem facing Salem.” He paused and looked out at the crowd, his eyebrows lowering with concern over his deep-set eyes. “The things this town has been through recently has shocked the nation. We have seen,” he said more loudly, “an unprecedented rise in the rates of werewolf attacks this winter.” A few people in the crowd yelled their assent. The man raised a fat hand to silence them. “The police,” he continued, “have attempted to respond to this problem, but their efforts have been unsuccessful. Each month, we find that yet another monster has done violence to Salem’s citizens.” The man made a gesture as if he were pounding a podium, though there was no podium. “This cannot go on.”
“I just realized,” Aysel whispered down to Z from her perch in the tree as the crowd responded noisily to this statement, “I’ve seen that guy before. I think he’s Charley Salt’s dad.”
“Makes sense,” Z said, looking up at Aysel.
“Probably where Charley gets it,” Aysel scowled. She looked worried. Z crossed their arms and squinted at the stage.
“And yet,” the man—Mr. Salt—said, onstage, more softly, “This is not the first time we have seen this occur.” He moved the microphone closer to his mouth. “Those of you who, like myself, have lived in Salem your whole lives will remember older horrors. It is only recently that this town has been able to shed a little of its reputation as a site for dangerous and illegal magic, as a haven for monsters. What we are seeing now is a resurgence.” He paused again. The crowd was silent. “The dark forces are testing us. They want to see if we really have the defenses against them that we say we do. They are coming to our gates. The police may be doing their best to stop them. I do not know. What I do know is that what is happening now is not enough. So here today we are organizing—the people of Salem—to collectively call for a needed change.” He stepped back from the microphone and bowed, and then quickly bent to grab a water bottle from under one of the chairs. He paused and coughed into his elbow. “There are, of course, many solutions. This was one of the first states to implement werewolf-tracking programs and require registration. The fey regulations advocated in the 1980s were put into place here right alongside the establishment of institutions to house rehabilitated shapeshifters. Shapeshifters were impounded with a success rate seen in few other places. The citizens of this state have voted for decades to put more money into these programs wherever the opportunity arises, with the hope that the government and all the shades of bureaucracy could protect them from monsters, without the panic and violence earlier generations witnessed. Many times, programs tested in New York and then further developed on the West Coast have gone on to be models for nationwide institutions. You all have been at the forefront. You should be proud.”
The crowd clapped again.
“But it is not enough,” Mr. Salt said, glowering suddenly. He pounded a soft hand on the invisible podium, too lightly. In compensation, he raised his voice, which went up an octave. “You have seen that the government programs have failed to control monsters to the degree you require. You want security. But what do we see? Werewolf attacks, these last few months. Unregistered werewolves under our noses, being given inadequate treatments. A golem attack last year. Rumors of shapeshifters and the undead. Books on dangerous magic missing. You want security—you have not gotten it.”
A few of the college students began to raise their fists and banners and cheer loudly. The rest of the audience looked more interested in what Mr. Salt was saying.
“What we need is discipline, not negotiation. No longer can these programs that you have put your trust in be said to protect you. A crackdown is needed. We must strike back with none of the ambiguity of current practices. Monsters do not deserve due process. Monsters are not citizens.”
The crowd murmured at this, a positive kind of mumble, growing in volume. Aysel and Z looked uneasily at each other.
Mr. Salt continued. “In New York,” he said, “the police force deal with this very simply. In all areas, monster misbehavior is not tolerated. New York has a big population to protect. I’ll give you an example. Werewolves not confined to institutions have to observe a curfew on nights adjacent to the full moon and must remain inside for a full twentyfour-hour period on the day of the full moon itself. Many do this, as they recognize that in wolf form they pose a public menace. The ones who do not observe curfew on nights where they do not transform are taken into custody. If they fail to observe a curfew more than once, they are burned. Meanwhile, any werewolf out in wolf form is shot.” He paused to let this sink in. “Now,” he said after a moment, laughing with a small grin that looked obscene and creepy on his bald-catlike face, “I am not saying that this solution will sound good to everyone. Certainly it is a little brutal, particularly in New York, where there have been no werewolf attacks since 1986. But then we must ask—why have there been no attacks since 1986? Could it be that this approach sends, for once, a strong and definite message, one that actually sinks in?”
“God,” Aysel muttered weakly, somewhere above Z, as scattered clapping broke out.
He sank back and rocked on his heels. “Today I am announcing my candidacy for the position of Chief of Regulations at the Salem Police Department. Our current Chief of Regulations, Samuel Warring, is a good friend of mine, and he has done his best for the eight years he has held the position. He has been held back on all sides by—let me say this politely—a kind of bumbling, good-natured bureaucracy and an apathetic or fearful populace who do not believe in the power of police. If I am elected, I hope you will all stand with me in demanding change, and moving our police department into a new era.”
The crowd hollered its assent. Somewhere within it someone began to clap again, and the clapping spread, a heavy, pounding rhythm. It went on too long, increasing in intensity until at last Mr. Salt bowed and smiled and stepped away from the platform to chug deeply from a bottle of water.
At the front of the crowd, someone suddenly shouted, “Burn the wolves!”
Aysel dropped down from the tree next to Z. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go. I don’t want to watch any more of this.”
“I thought you were all excited to see what they were about,” Z said sarcastically. They faltered as they saw that Aysel looked as if she was about to cry.
Aysel and Z walked together away from City Hall and down a side road. The blare of the speakers and the noise of the crowd could still be heard distantly as they went down a side street. Aysel was rubbing her eyes behind her glasses, swallowing hard every few breaths. Z wasn’t sure how to comfort her.
“Let’s get something to eat,” Aysel said eventually. She grabbed Z’s hand and began to walk faster down the sidewalk. The streets farther away from the courthouse were less full of people, and the gray sky above seemed to muffle the noise of the crowds behind them. Aysel began to breathe easier. After a couple of blocks Aysel towed Z into a coffee shop. The bell jangled noisily as they entered. The woman behind the counter was watching the news on a tiny television perched on a shelf, her arms crossed over her chest. She looked around when the bell rang. There were only a couple of other customers in the shop. Aysel ordered herself and Z cups of coffee and two muffins, and they sat down near a window looking out into the afternoon street.
“All those people were agreeing with what he said, though. I can’t believe that.” Aysel blew her nose in a napkin. She looked up at Z. “I got . . . haha, I guess I got really scared.”
“That makes sense,” Z said.
They sat there while Aysel ate her muffin. The woman behind the counter switched the TV station over to a soap opera, the theme song for which played loudly and drowned out any noise from outside.
Aysel used a telephone to call her mother and let her know where she was. Azra drove up fifteen minutes later, and Aysel gave her a guilty shrug through the window. Azra stood outside against the car in an olive sweater, crossing her arms over her chest and scowling. Aysel got in and the two drove away down the street.
Z thought that maybe Mrs. Dunnigan would still be at her bookstore. They wanted to go home with her if she was. The town didn’t feel safe. On the way to the store, Z walked a little farther than they had to so they wouldn’t have to pass City Hall again. Z wondered how many people were like Mr. Salt. The afternoon was cold and darkening to an ash color. Steam fogged up windows on the street. Far away, the noise of a crowd continued, almost louder than it had been when Aysel and Z left the rally. Finally Z reached The Reading Circle, with its cracked and taped-over window and the display of were-wolf rights literature untouched in the display case. Z opened the door, their joints cracking. They trembled with relief to find the narrow stacks of books inside pristine, and Mrs. Dunnigan sitting peaceably by the register like it was a normal day.
“Darling! It’s good to see you,” Mrs. Dunnigan said from behind the counter. “I’ve been fretting all afternoon about where you were.”
“Me too about you,” Z said. “We should close up the store. I think these are the kind of people who won’t like your display.”
“I was waiting for Sal to come help me board up the windows,” Mrs. Dunnigan said. “But I don’t think he’s coming. I think I want to stay here and protect the place.”
“Did you see the crowd?” Z asked.
Mrs. Dunnigan looked about to answer, but at that moment the bell on the door jingled.
“Hello,” Mrs. Dunnigan said brightly.
The man who entered was one of the people from out of town, Z could tell. He looked around with a mixture of confusion and something else. The expression was the kind people made when they were ready to be angry but had not heated up yet. He was wearing one of the anti-werewolf shirts from the booth Aysel had stolen from. He walked over to the counter and put both of his large hands on it, and stared Mrs. Dunnigan down.
“I’ve heard about this shop,” he said to her.
“Well, that’s very nice,” she said, her eyes flashing.
“People say you hosted some kind of pro-werewolf get-together in here.” He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a piece of paper, which he squinted down at. “You sell books supporting werewolves, shapeshifters, and monsters living without treatment,” he said, reading from the paper. “That true?”
“We also have a section on LGBT rights and HIV education,” Mrs. Dunnigan said, her voice steely. “As well as the Mexican labor movement.”
“Look,” the man said. He looked a little bit taken aback by the tone of her voice. “The folks I’m with think it’s inappropriate to talk about werewolves not needing treatment just after someone’s been killed. The Salem Anti-Monster Action Council wants to make this town a safe place for people who aren’t monsters, not people who are.”
“I’d like it to be a safe town for everyone,” Mrs. Dunnigan said. “But speaking of town, you aren’t from Salem, are you?”
“I’m from Eugene, ma’am,” the man said. “Close enough for me to be worried about what’s happening here.”
“I’m just interested,” Mrs. Dunnigan said, “in why they’ve sent you to tell me this. This Salem Anti-Monster Action Council.”
“There are some others on their way,” the man said. “In an hour or so. They sent me to ask you if you would like to issue a formal apology, or if you wanted to publicly state that you supported monsters.”
“I won’t issue an apology,” Mrs. Dunnigan said. “I think what you people are doing is very silly and wrongheaded and vicious.”
The man cast his eyes around uneasily. As he was doing so, he saw Z. He gave a start. “Oh Jesus,” he said. Z winced and turned away from him and edged around the corner of a bookshelf. They crouched, pretending to be browsing.
“Oh Jesus indeed,” Mrs. Dunnigan said. “That’s just what I thought when I saw you walk in.” She looked down at her watch. “You said they would be coming by in an hour, your friends?”
“Once the rally winds down. I imagine they’ll be pretty feisty.”
“The shop will be closed by that time.”
“They will still plan on coming by,” the man said.
“Well, how about you all leave a nice little manifesto stapled to my door, then,” Mrs. Dunnigan said.
“I don’t imagine that that is what they have in mind,” the man said. He turned toward the door, but then hesitated, and moved over toward Z. They were on their hands and knees pretending to look at the spine of a book called Les Guérillères. The man stood uncomfortably close for a moment, leaning over them. Z felt his eyes on their neck. They felt paralyzed. They heard Mrs. Dunnigan shift and start to come over, her feet tapping on the floor.
“Can I help you with something before you go, sir?” she said, resuming her customer-service voice with only a slight metal edge. “You’re right on top of our sizable French section, there.”
“I’m just going,” the man said. Z glanced up at him, and at the same moment they felt a heavy weight come down on their left hand, and heard a pop. It was not exactly painful for the first moment—there was too much surprise. They looked down and saw the man’s heavy boot lifting off their fingers. He walked toward the door and went out, striding heavily down the street away from the shop.
“Did he just step on my fingers?” Z asked slowly.
“Good fucking god,” Mrs. Dunnigan said, and Z almost laughed in surprise. They had never heard her curse. “Your hand!”
“It’s okay, I can barely feel it,” Z said.
“It’s mangled,” Mrs. Dunnigan breathed. She wheeled toward the door. “I’ll kill him,” she said, and started off.
“Don’t!” Z exclaimed. They lifted their hand and studied it. Several fingers were bent at an angle. “We should just board up the shop and go.”
Mrs. Dunnigan put her hand to her forehead. “Yes,” she said. “I guess you’re right. We’ll fix your hand as best we can when we get home. God, I want to kill that bastard.”
“It won’t do any good,” Z said.
The bus was nearly empty, and filled with an amber glow from intermittent streetlights that lined the route. Mrs. Dunnigan sat next to them with her hand over their injured fingers. They had boarded up the shop with the plywood panels Mrs. Dunnigan had in the back. Z tried to become mesmerized by the passing lights and forget what had happened that afternoon. It did not work completely. They glanced backward as the bus rounded a corner, and saw a thin pillar of smoke rising from the place where the rally had been.
“It’s burning,” Z said, their voice rising a little too much. “Something’s burning.”
“Shh,” Mrs. Dunnigan said. “Let’s not look back at it. We can worry later.”
Z felt their chest draw inward painfully and clenched their good fist around Mrs. Dunnigan’s hand. They submerged the panicked yelp that was swelling in their throat and stared at the scratchy upholstery of the bus seats. They tried to think of something to talk about that didn’t have to do with the man from Eugene or the fire. They realized they hadn’t spoken to Mrs. Dunnigan much in the last few weeks, beyond the daily routine speech needed to communicate. It wasn’t the right time, or really the right place, but Z suddenly felt a question rise in their throat.
“Mrs. Dunnigan, I wanted to ask you about Cassie,” Z said.
“Cassie?” Mrs. Dunnigan looked into Z’s eyes. There was a little bit of fear there.
“Well, I mean, for one, she’s the reason you have the views you have, isn’t she?”
“Yes. One of the reasons,” Mrs. Dunnigan said.
“Did you ever feel like maybe the other people were right? The people that say monsters should be locked up or sent away? That they’re dangerous?” Z didn’t say we. They were on a public bus.
“No,” Mrs. Dunnigan said quietly. “It’s about loving someone, and seeing them as part of your family. I think some people have the capacity to see different people as part of their family and some don’t.”
“With your marriage,” Z said, “and the way she could change gender.” They lowered their voice. “Did you ever feel like Cassie was both or neither? Or did she ever talk about not being sure about being a woman? It would have been easier for both of you if she were a man, right?”
Mrs. Dunnigan held Z’s hand. “People often ask that about shapeshifters and fey and werewolves, you know. Except about their species. Trying to figure out where their allegiance is. Cassie could have shifted into any body, but she chose to be a woman, and to be a lesbian. She just liked it that way. There are other shapeshifters who choose to live in many bodies, though it’s true that makes people afraid of them.”
“Like people are scared of my body now.”
“You’re defying death. It frightens people who believe in death. People are worried that there will be a time when shapeshifters and fey overtake humans, overtake women and men, and make the whole world shifting or formless. When things like life and death will stop meaning anything.”
Z closed their eyes. “I kind of wish that would happen.” They looked at the colors on the back of their lids.
The town grew distant behind the bus. When the bus reached their stop the two stumbled on the curb and almost fell, and then shuffled as quickly as they could toward Mrs. Dunnigan’s home. Z was thinking of Aysel and her mother, of fire . . .
The night seemed longer than usual. Z watched the wall. They realized they were waiting for mobs to come and break down their door. But the hours dragged on and the smoky night became a mist that shrouded the shrubs around the apartment complex at dawn. The road outside Z’s room remained empty of cars. No mobs came.
Only an effigy of a werewolf was burned, everyone learned on the news Friday. Some students had made it out of socks and old sweatshirts and a Halloween mask and brought it out after all the speakers had finished. City Hall had not been notified that the effigy was to be burned, and now there were some minor felony charges being pressed against the people who had set up the bonfire. However, these all paled in comparison to what happened afterwards, when the crowd dispersed into the streets. Three Salem Homeless Beaten by Mob; In Critical Condition, read one headline on the cover of the Portland Tribune. Bookstore Ransacked. Z grabbed the paper and studied the story beneath it.
In the wake of the Thursday night protest, the copy went, crowds fanned out around the metropolitan area of Salem. The crowds spread leaflets which explained their views. They also attacked three transients who were sleeping in the doorway outside a warehouse near City Hall, after proclaiming them to be werewolves. Those responsible for the attack were described by witnesses as young college students. These transients sustained bruises and two broken bones before being removed to the hospital. None are currently suspected of any crime, though policemen will make inquiries. The anti-monster activists sought, according to one anonymous informer, to look for people who might be werewolves. Additionally, they broke the windows of a bookstore, the name of which has not been disclosed. One source said the bookstore was targeted for supporting radical pro-monster views. Charles Salt, a candidate for Chief of Regulations with the Salem Police Department who spoke at the rally earlier in the evening, clarified that the activists do not generally see themselves as violent or want violence. “It is in self-defense,” he said. “Citizens perceive themselves at risk, and take action to protect themselves.” Charles Salt continued that his campaign platform was based on giving citizens a greater feeling of security, so that outbreaks of mob violence become unnecessary. The police department responded to the popular discontent by issuing a statement early this morning saying they would be deploying a full-scale investigation into recent werewolf attacks, and to possible connections with terrorist groups. Chief Fuller of the Portland police will be present at a more comprehensive press conference this morning to elaborate on this plan.
Mrs. Dunnigan looked over the story, little puffs of breath escaping from her nose intermittently. She was stirring her coffee with a fork in the Friday morning light that struggled through the windows and lit up the aloe vera plant next to the sink. The paper folded and made crackling sounds against the crumb-covered table. She looked up at Z. Her wispy white hair was illuminated from behind and resembled a halo.
“Well, it doesn’t say they burned my place down,” she said. “Nice way to find out about it, though.”
“Are you going to close the store?” Z asked.
“Not for now,” Mrs. Dunnigan said. “I’ve had this kind of thing happen before. Just after the ’92 election, for one, a few years ago. I’ve never closed it before. Besides, your mother wouldn’t have wanted me to.”
“My mom?”
“She and I first became friends at the store,” Mrs. Dunnigan said. “She was political.”
“I didn’t know.” Z paused. “So if you aren’t closing the store, what are you doing?”
“I’ll get a concealed-carry license for my revolver.”
“Are you sure? That doesn’t seem like a good idea,” Z said.
“I’m all right,” Mrs. Dunnigan said. “It’s you who needs to be careful. Make sure you bring people to protect you next time you go hang around in public. That Aysel girl is strong, but I don’t know if she would be very good against a mob.”
Z shrugged and looked down at their blue flower-pat-terned plate. Half a well-blackened sausage still sat uneaten in a puddle of runny egg yolk and rosemary.
“This sort of thing always makes me nervous,” Mrs. Dunnigan added. She fiddled with the large silver hoop earring that nestled in the velvety brown skin of her right earlobe. The left earlobe held a pearl earring. “I expect they’ll have stolen things. Sal will be nervous. We won’t make any sales. Maybe I should just close up shop for a while.”
“It makes me nervous, too,” Z said. They ate the rest of their sausage and drank the milky coffee Mrs. Dunnigan had put in front of them. “People at school agree with what’s going on.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Dunnigan spat. “They’re all the children of these people, these violent nasty people. You stay clear of them unless you’re with me and my revolver. Keep yourself safe.” She brandished her coffee fork at Z, and dripped brown onto her newspaper.
“I already do,” Z said. “I mean, I try.” They bit their lip. “Do you really have a revolver?”
“Somewhere in the front hall closet,” Mrs. Dunnigan said. She stood up and took her cup to the sink. “It’s been a while since I’ve had to carry it. I used to in the eighties all the time, even though I didn’t have a license then.” She sighed. “I suppose I have to go in now. Take care of whatever they did to the shop.”
On the intercom that morning, before the Pledge of Allegiance, it was announced that the police would be conducting a search of the school sometime next week. Z skipped second period and instead stood in a janitor’s closet, swaying slightly but not sitting down on the cement floor. They smelled their wrists, their hair obsessively. Did they smell dead? They pulled up the collar on their shirt. The lamp in the closet flickered.
Tommy and Z walked to the cafeteria together at lunch. Tommy had cut his hair the previous night, and it was now shoulder length. The long yellow halls echoed with the noise of people and the screech of rubber shoes on linoleum.
“I like your haircut, Tommy,” Barbara Walsh said to Tommy from where she stood in the lunch line, as Z and Tommy passed. Barbara was thirteen years old, probably no more than eighty pounds, and shorter than Tommy, but her voice carried.
“Thank you,” Tommy said, raising his chin higher. Z could hear his heart begin to pound as Barbara’s friends and the boys around them began to laugh.
“It really reminds me of a fairy I saw in a picture book as a kid. Is that what you were going for?”
Tommy swung his head haughtily around—his soft hair flipping— and turned away.
“Or was it a fairy princess? I can’t recall.” Barbara’s voice rose an octave on the word princess. “I wonder if princesses are above the law around here. I wonder what the police will say.”
Z felt a prickle of anger beneath their skin and in the stitches on their neck. They turned to Barbara. “What’s your problem?”
“I don’t have a problem. I was saying I liked his haircut.” She giggled.
“Oh, really.” Z crossed their arms over their chest.
“Z, leave it alone,” Tommy said softly, looking around uncomfortably.
“Tommy looks great and you all can go eat mud,” Z said. They spun around and grabbed Tommy’s skinny arm, hooking it around their own, and tried to move away. Behind them, Barbara laughed. Z felt like hurting her, but there were lunch ladies all around them, and Barbara wasn’t the only one giggling. They bit their lip, feeling the skin peel.
Someone passing Tommy and Z abruptly stepped in front of them, their foot catching the end of Tommy’s long cloak. Tommy gave a little gasp and stumbled into Z. The person in front of them—it was one of Charley’s friends— spun around, quickly. The contents of their tray—a fish burger, a large container of runny ketchup, and carrots in ranch dressing—collided with Tommy in a heavy, wet thunk. It happened so fast that neither of them registered what had occurred for a few seconds. Tommy dropped his lunch box. Z, who had caught the spray from the impact, wiped their eyes. People around Tommy and Z were watching them, giggling. The container of ketchup had hit Tommy square in the face before spinning down his front. It was now oozing onto the linoleum at his feet.
One of the lunch ladies looked over from where she was checking students into the system on a large computer. “Did someone have a spill?” she asked, her voice raised loudly enough so that everyone in the cafeteria could hear. Z was sure she did not mean it unkindly. The laughter around Tommy increased. Z saw Bethany laughing with a group of girls by the door. They turned away.
“Someone just tripped and fell into me, that’s all,” Tommy said to the lunch lady brightly. He turned to a table of boys who had stopped their card game to snicker at him and smiled broadly.
“We’ll get some paper towels to help you clean it all up,” the lunch lady said. She wiped her face with the back of her gloved hand.
“He shouldn’t have to clean it up,” Z said loudly. “It isn’t his fault.”
“Well, it isn’t mine,” the lunch lady said. She tilted herself off the stool she was perched on and marched heavily over to where the napkins were, next to the silverware. She handed a stack to Tommy. “It’s too bad.”
Z and Tommy scrubbed the floor with the dry napkins. Behind them, someone said something; Z heard Tommy’s name, and then a laugh. They spun around and glared but could not tell who had spoken.
“Let’s get out of here,” Tommy said quietly, touching Z’s arm. “I’m not hungry anymore.”
In the hall outside the cafeteria Aysel was carrying her lunch box and grimaced at Tommy’s spattered visage as if it was no better than could be expected.
“We have to get you cleaned up,” she said, and Z heard the tones of Azra in her voice.
They all went to the girls’ bathroom; Z thought it would be a good place to wash up. The strong acrid smell and graffiti would deter anyone from hanging around long enough to continue to harass them. Tommy looked over his shoulder as they went inside.
“I’m not meant to be in here,” he said.
“It’s fine,” Aysel responded, wetting some napkins in the sink and pressing the soggy pile into his hands. Tommy shrugged and set to work getting the ketchup out of his eyebrows and off of his shirt.
“That was the dumbest prank in the world,” Z said, watching him. “Like, what the hell do they want to say to you by doing that?”
“It’s better than getting beaten up. This shit is going to smell like vinegar and corn syrup and tomato paste into the next century, though.” Tommy scrubbed at the cotton with a napkin, which disintegrated from the friction.
“Do you want me to lend you a shirt?” Aysel asked.
Tommy lifted the hem of the stained shirt and picked a few pieces of wet napkin from the black cotton. “That would be really great,” he said.
“I’ll go grab a sweatshirt from my locker. Be right back.” She hurried back out the door, nearly knocking over a girl who was coming in. The girl looked apprehensively at Aysel’s retreating form and then glanced with trepidation toward Z and Tommy before going into a stall. Z and Tommy stared at each other.
Aysel came back and handed Tommy the sweatshirt. It was black and had zigzag green stripes along the chest. Tommy accepted it graciously and went into a stall to change. Aysel turned to the mirror and began to fix her makeup. She had been wearing more lately.
“I have to decide whether I’m going to go meet Elaine or not,” she said to Z.
“Did you ask your mom?”
“No. She’ll just say no.”
“Who’s Elaine?” Tommy asked, coming out of the stall and straightening Aysel’s sweatshirt.
“Someone Aysel met this week . . . downtown,” Z said, looking over at Aysel for approval. Aysel shrugged and nodded.
“I really want to go see her. I haven’t met any other people . . . like her, like me, before.” Aysel glanced shiftily at Tommy as she said this. Z knew she was still suspicious of him.
“Lesbians, you mean?” Tommy asked, looking at Aysel with interest.
Aysel and Z looked at each other and Z turned away to suppress a giggle. “Exactly,” Aysel said. “Lesbians.”
“Why wouldn’t you be able to go? Is your mom like, homophobic?”
“No,” Aysel said, barely containing her grin. “Or I don’t think so, anyway. It’s just that she is worried about me going anywhere on my own lately, never mind meeting new people. I got a lecture yesterday. I’m not supposed to go places on my own. She wants to keep me safe.” Aysel pulled at her eyelashes where her makeup had made them clump together.
“I mean, at least it was only a lecture,” Tommy said.
“I don’t think she has too many other tools,” Aysel said. “There isn’t that much you can do if you ground your kid and they just keep going out, right? You just say that they’re grounded again.”
“I guess,” Z said. They noticed Aysel seemed to be talking herself into going to meet Elaine. “It is still good to be careful, though.”
“We’re just going to the movies,” Aysel said dismissively. “It won’t be dangerous.”
“That’s cute. You should go,” Tommy said. He grinned at the floor. His shirt was soaking.
Aysel looked at him and smiled. “Thanks, Tommy.”
Tommy walked Z to the bus stop after school. He had pulled his hair—still a little sticky—into a ponytail. The sun had come out during the afternoon, and illuminated the puddles on the street left over from the rains of the night before. The bus was late, and they sat together on the bench waiting for it. There were moments when the clouds covered the sun, but then they would draw back and everything would flash into brightness again.
“I’m worried about you,” Tommy said suddenly.
Z looked at him. “Don’t be. I’m fine.”
“I’m still worried,” he said, turning his face away. There was a group of girls approaching the bus stop. Z didn’t want to look at them too closely in case one of them was Bethany. They stared at their hands, and at the wet pavement.
“I can take care of myself,” Z said. “You’ve already helped me a lot, and Aysel too. Besides, Mrs. Dunnigan is looking after me too.”
“I really care about you, for some reason,” Tommy said in a confidential way. He looked profoundly embarrassed, his ears reddening. “Not in a weird way,” he added, looking up at Z. “Just . . . you know. Like you’re someone who is important, and I’m lucky to know you.”
The bus arrived, and the doors flung themselves open. “Thank you, Tommy,” Z said, feeling like they should add something. “You’re a good friend. Take care of yourself, too.”
Tommy smiled, and then turned quickly and hurried away.