Aysel walked to town from her house in the morning, hours before the time she and Elaine had agreed on. Azra was still asleep, and Aysel knew if she woke up she would absolutely refuse to let Aysel go out alone when the police were everywhere. Aysel knew there would be a fight when she came home; her mother would be worried sick, and would shout. Aysel pulled a sweatshirt on and shoved Elaine’s clothes into a paper bag from under the counter, to return to her. She tripped over the doormat, sprawling loudly on the floor, and then stood up and set out into the cold day.
The first sign that things in town were still on edge appeared when three police cars in a row drove past Aysel on the sidewalk. They did not flash their lights at her or slow; none of them looked at what to them would seem to be an ordinary young girl with a shopping bag. Aysel still felt her palms start to sweat. What if Elaine had already been arrested?
She knew she couldn’t go straight to the theater because she would be waiting there for hours, so she walked instead to the library and sat down on the curb outside. Police cars drove by one after another. Aysel shivered and went inside the library. The man who sat behind the front desk looked up at her sharply with steely eyes and then waved brusquely. Aysel sat down in a chair. After a few minutes staring at the wall with nothing much going on in her head, she figured it might be a good idea to pick up a book, to make it look as if she was doing something.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a policeman come into the library. He walked up to the desk and spoke quietly to the librarian. The librarian spoke quietly back. Aysel strained her eyes trying to look at them around the corner of her glasses without turning her head. She could not hear what they were saying. The librarian shrugged and pointed in Aysel’s direction, and Aysel felt a coldness creep from the base of her neck all the way down her spine as the policeman turned and stared at her. She chanced turning her head to look back at him, trying to put on an innocent expression. The policeman was tall and white and young and oval-faced. Aysel glanced only quickly at his face and then looked determinedly at his torso. She was worried her eyes might give something away—some sign, which policemen would surely be trained to recognize even from a distance, that marked the werewolf. The cop looked at her with a blank, neutral expression, nodded at her, turned back to the librarian, said something, and then left by the front door.
After reading cookbooks for a while, Aysel got hungry. She didn’t have enough money in her pocket for lunch after the movie ticket, but she thought she might have enough to get a snack. She wandered up the street in search of options, carrying the grocery bag of clothes.
There were not many people out on the street shopping on a Saturday morning in March. Aysel looked around for someplace warm. None of the lunch restaurants were open yet. She paused and dug one of her mother’s cigarettes out of her pocket and contemplated it. She held a lighter to it and looked around. Two officers in blue walked in the opposite direction on the other side of the street. Aysel hurriedly stuffed the cigarette and lighter back in her pocket. She picked up her bag and walked on quickly. The officers across the street spoke to each other in low voices. Aysel set her mouth in a firm line. She would not be afraid. She went into a café full of yellow light and bright people and bought a doughnut. She ate it standing inside the café, watching the barista behind the counter pour hot foaming milk into people’s coffee. Then she returned to the counter and ordered another doughnut to eat while she was walking.
The pavement outside the movie theater was disgusting with layers of dropped gum, so Aysel couldn’t sit on it. She stood awkwardly waiting for half an hour, eating slowly toward the middle of the doughnut with tiny bites. She cast her eyes round uncomfortably through the parking lot. There were, fortunately, more people walking toward the movie theater than there had been walking around town. Going to the movies on a Saturday was a perfectly ordinary thing to do. A large family of thin blond children and a mother passed Aysel and watched her reproachfully as she filled her mouth with the sweet.
Elaine was late. It wasn’t easy for Aysel to figure out the time, but she would look over her shoulder periodically at the clock on the front of the ticket box. Elaine was twenty minutes late.
Part of Aysel was eager to conclude that Elaine had either been arrested or stood her up. Elaine was not her problem, this part of her told her. Aysel did not have to worry about what had happened to her; she should go home, face her mother, have the necessary argument, and then hide in her room until the whole thing blew over. The police would soon leave the streets. There was a larger part of Aysel, though, which was determined to wait for Elaine. This bit of Aysel, admittedly, couldn’t figure out exactly how long a wait this course necessitated. Two hours? An hour? She looked at the clock again. Thirty minutes late. She decided she would wait for another half hour. Aysel leaned back against the cold outer wall of the theater and crossed her arms across her chest.
Out of the corner of her eye, Aysel saw someone approaching her. She resisted turning her head until the last second, in case it wasn’t Elaine, but then the person spoke.
“Aysel!” Elaine exclaimed.
“Hi,” Aysel said, feeling her hair fluff out around her. There was a warm crackling in her stomach and heart and she felt static electricity in her toes and fingers. The air around her did not feel as cold suddenly. How stupid, Aysel thought. “How are you?”
Elaine laughed. “Not dead yet,” she said loudly, and lowered her voice. “The cops are crawling all over the forest. We had to move camp really quick last week after the moon. We’re staying at a safe house right now—it’s what we came to Salem for. Chad and I thought it’d be a good place to stay for a while; we have friends here. Practically every werewolf within a forty-mile radius is at the safe house right now. How have you been?”
“I’m fine,” Aysel said. “Nothing’s been too bad yet. There were people downtown last night, and that looked scary, but the police made everyone go home.”
“The police don’t want anyone to do their work for them.” Elaine smiled grimly. Without warning she bent and hugged Aysel tightly. Aysel was too surprised to hug back. She inhaled against Elaine‘s warm shoulder. “I hope you stay safe,” Elaine said.
“I will. Here are your clothes back,” Aysel said, pushing her hair out of her face. She thrust the grocery bag at Elaine. “I washed them.”
“Thanks,” Elaine said. She looked inside the bag. “I’m running out of clean clothes. I smell like a garbage dump.”
“No,” Aysel said.
Elaine laughed. “Sure I do. Even Chad says so.”
“You don’t,” Aysel said. “Trust me.” She wondered suddenly if she was saying this because she had been spending so much time with Z. Z literally smelled like something dead, through the layers of clove oil; the smell was imperceptible to most people but strong to Aysel, with her doglike nose. It could be that anything smelled nice compared to that. Aysel didn’t think that was all of it, though. There was something that smelled downright nice about Elaine, despite the body odor that hung around her. It was a friendly smell, salty and fragrant.
They went and bought tickets for the movie. Elaine stepped up to the window first and paid with a credit card. Aysel pulled out her wallet and was preparing to count coins onto the counter when Elaine stopped her and handed her a ticket.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Aysel said, spluttering. “I have money. And you should use your money to buy things like—” She stopped. She was going to say “like food,” but that sounded too patronizing.
Elaine laughed again. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. Aysel stared at her, disconcerted.
They walked toward the theater and went through the doors. Inside, Elaine used the credit card again and bought a huge container of popcorn and a thirty-two-ounce cola, which was almost too much for her skinny arms to hold. She slurped at the straw, her lips curled around the purple plastic. Aysel tried not to watch, as it made the heat in her stomach grow.
“Can you afford all that?” Aysel asked. Movie snacks were expensive. Aysel realized she sounded like a jerk.
“I can right now,” Elaine said, smiling.
“Right now?” Aysel repeated dumbly.
“I got the card from a dude I met in California. He hasn’t canceled it yet. Do you want anything?”
Aysel looked at Elaine, skinny and tall and eating so much food, and thought of the doughnuts she had eaten sitting in her stomach. “No,” she said.
“That’s fine,” Elaine said. She ate a handful of popcorn and grinned.
Aysel decided not to ask any more questions. She had a feeling Elaine was making fun of her. Why, she wasn‘t sure. “Right,” she said.
They went into the theater. They had had to pick a later time because Elaine had been so late, so they were early for this showing. The theater was empty and the lights were on. Elaine and Aysel sat down in seats near the screen. Elaine clambered over each row of seats to get to the next, somehow balancing popcorn and cola in her hands as she went. Her long legs under her spindly body reminded Aysel of storks which strode through deep water. Suddenly Aysel realized she had doughnut crumbs down her shirt. She dusted them off hastily.
“So how’s school?” Elaine asked with a mouthful of popcorn. “Did you make it back on time on Tuesday?”
“Not on time, but I made it,” Aysel said.
“Good.”
“People are all acting really weird,” Aysel said. “There’s one teacher at my school who used to be really great to me, but he’s avoiding me now. He knows I’m . . . you know. He’s the only one besides my mom and my best friend. I trusted him enough to tell him, and I don’t think he’d tell the police, but I’m worried.”
“Never trust anyone, is what I say,” Elaine said dryly. “I mean, it’s more stressful to do that, but you’re never disappointed.”
“Yeah,” Aysel said uncomfortably. “I just . . . he seems like a good person, is why it’s worrying. He’s afraid, I think. I thought he was braver than that. Maybe it’s just that I’ve been so protected until now. Nothing’s happened recently to remind me that . . . what I am . . . means anything. But it does, really. It makes a lot of difference when something like this happens.” She looked at her hands, her face grim.
“You’re lucky it’s only one guy who knows,” Elaine said. “Only one bomb to go off.”
Aysel shrugged. “Well, I mean, if I don’t trust anyone, there’s three bombs to go off. My friend and him and my mother.” Aysel wrinkled her brow. “My friend Z and my mom wouldn’t tell anyone unless they were being tortured, but still.”
“That’s true. You’re beginning to think like a real werewolf now.” Elaine picked up a piece of popcorn between her forefinger and thumb. “Want a piece of popcorn?”
“Sure,” Aysel said miserably. She was suddenly thinking of all the ways she might not be as safe as she thought she was. Z and her mother would never willingly betray her, she knew— but if they messed up and somehow accidentally revealed her, she would be in for it. Danger suddenly felt very close.
“Open up and I’ll toss it,” Elaine said.
Aysel looked up, alarmed.
“Open up your mouth,” Elaine repeated.
“That’s stupid, just hand me the popcorn,” Aysel said. Elaine looked at her, smiled, and then put the bag of popcorn behind her back. Aysel glared at her, blood rushing to her face in embarrassment. Aysel looked at Elaine and realized that the older girl was not going to move until Aysel allowed her to throw the popcorn. Grumpily, after a small pause, she opened her mouth. She felt like the stupidest person in the world. Elaine threw the popcorn kernel at her and it hit her on the nose. It left a small buttery spot on Aysel’s skin. She wiped at it with her sleeve.
“Sorry,” Elaine said.
Aysel said nothing. She felt humiliated and desolate.
“Here,” said Elaine. She took a different piece of popcorn from the bag and put it in Aysel’s hand. “A consolation prize. It was a good attempt.”
“Thanks,” Aysel grumbled.
“You’re great, don’t stress,” Elaine said, and patted Aysel’s hand.
This was too much. Aysel felt a spark shoot out into Elaine as their skin made contact.
“Ouch,” Elaine said, looking down. There was a tiny white burn mark on her skin.
“Sorry,” Aysel said.
“You’re a hell of a witch,” Elaine said, rubbing her hand.
“I’m just really—anxious today.”
“I wish I could shock people when I was anxious,” Elaine said. “That’d come in really handy.”
Aysel shrugged. “I have a lot of magic, I guess.”
“I wish I were you. I would have fried so many people’s brains by now.” Elaine sucked cola into her mouth and sloshed it through her teeth. “If the police get their hands on you, you can just—zap!”
“I’d be burned.”
“Zap!” Elaine made an enthusiastic motion with her hands. “And they’d be all—” She shook her arms as if being electrocuted. “They wouldn’t stand a chance. You could take out a whole police station.”
Elaine’s smile inspired confidence in Aysel, but Aysel also was horrified about the police beyond the point of being able to be confident. She felt scared and wanted to hug something to her chest—a pillow or a stuffed animal. She wanted to be nine years old again with nothing to be afraid of, in a world where she was still welcome.
“Sometimes I think there’s something true about what they say about werewolves,” Aysel said. “I think that maybe we are more crazy or more violent or something. I get mad so much, and I beat people up.”
“Every werewolf I meet has some kind of issues.”
“How encouraging,” Aysel muttered.
“Werewolves can’t get jobs or houses, so we’re unemployed and homeless unless we do electroshock,” Elaine continued—quietly, because people were coming into the theater now. “Doctors want to operate on us or feed us weird drugs or shock us, or else they worry we’ll infect them, so we can’t get health care. We get mad.”
Aysel stared sadly at the blank movie screen. “God, I’m so scared to grow up,” she moaned.
“Or,” Elaine added, “we do get shocked, and lose our magic, and don’t transform, and either we report to the Department of Regulations every month—that’s if we did it legally—or we get illegal shocks and then live in secrecy pretending we can’t do magic for some other reason.” She swallowed a mouthful of popcorn. “My least favorite type of wolf is the kind that shocks himself out of his own magic and then spends his life being all anti-werewolf.”
“What would you do if you weren’t a werewolf?” Aysel asked Elaine.
“What?”
“If you were nonmagical, or just regular magical, and could get a job. Any job.”
“When I was little I wanted to be a marine biologist. I’d never seen the ocean.”
“The only grown-up lesbian I know had a wife who was a marine biologist,” Aysel said. “Maybe it’s a gay thing.” She said it before she remembered that she didn’t actually know if Elaine was gay.
Elaine let out a scream of laughter. “Oh my god,” she said.
“I’m gay, so if it is I need to know,” Aysel said.
“Ohhh my god,” Elaine said.
“A lot of us must like science,” Aysel said, pretending that her heart wasn’t racing. “I’m literally president of my school’s science club.”
“Holy shit,” Elaine said. “Solidarity.”
Elaine reached over and took Aysel’s hand from her lap and held it like they were on a union poster. Aysel didn’t shock her this time—maybe she was more prepared for it. Elaine didn’t let go; she held it lightly on the armrest between their two seats as the movie started. It was not a tight grip—Aysel could have taken her hand back if she had wanted to, moved it and put it back in her own lap. But this was far from her mind. Elaine’s skin was hot and her palm slightly sweaty, and her fingers were thin and bony and long. Aysel knew Elaine only meant it as a friendly gesture, but she let herself get carried away anyway. Closing her eyes, she thought: small swallows. My hands are small swallows.
After the movie, they hesitated on the periphery of the theater, cautiously watching a cop car drive by on the street, the tires spraying mud up into the air in slow arcs.
“Want to see where I’m staying right now?” Elaine asked. “I can introduce you to some people. Other werewolves,” she added quickly when Aysel’s mouth pursed in concern. Aysel was thinking about her mother.
“Okay,” Aysel said anyway.
The house was low and seemed to sag in the middle. It was painted black. There was an overgrown brown garden sprouting from the space in front of the porch and behind the sidewalk. Out on the front porch, three women sat looking out at the street. Aysel couldn’t tell how old they were, though they were somewhere between seventeen and thirty. All of them were dressed in clothes that had a slightly ragged look—patched jeans and heavy sweatshirts. They still managed to exude a sense of solid confidence and beauty.
“Hey, Elaine,” one of them said. Her face was heartshaped, her chin pointed, and she wore lipstick that was coming off around the middle of her mouth. She had three piercings in her nose. The back of her head was shaved and bleached. She held a cigarette between two fingers and stubbed it out on the step she was sitting on.
“Hey, Alice,” Elaine said. “This is Aysel.”
“Uh, hi,” Aysel said, lifting her hand halfheartedly and waving. Aysel wasn’t good at making eye contact with new people, so she looked behind Alice to the house. She noticed that in the shadows of the porch there was a deer skull mounted over the window.
“Aysel, this is Alice, Carmen, and Matilda,” Elaine said, grinning, gesturing to each woman. Alice grinned at Aysel. Carmen smiled. Matilda didn’t seem to be paying attention. She was eating macaroni out of a Tupperware container.
“Hi,” Aysel said again, feeling idiotic.
“Heyo,” said Carmen. She was smoking a cigarette, too. Her hair was elaborately braided in a way that made Aysel think it must have taken hours. She had wide-set shoulders and a strong jaw and large eyes, and she stood to greet Aysel. “Is this the kid you were telling us about, Elaine?”
“I’m not a kid,” Aysel said predictably, defensively.
“Yes you are, sweetie, but it isn’t a bad thing,” Carmen said. She blew smoke straight into the air.
“I’m fourteen.”
“We know,” Carmen laughed. “Elaine’s been on and on about you for days.”
Aysel blushed and looked at Elaine for confirmation. “Really?”
“I don’t know, sure,” Elaine said, smiling. “I just haven’t met that many werewolves who are doing as good as you, you know?” Elaine reached around Aysel’s shoulder and thumped her on the back. “It’s cool to meet werewolves who are young and not dead and not messed up. Especially in this fucking town.”
Aysel didn’t know what to say to that.
“You smoke, kid?” Alice asked, relighting her own cigarette. Next to her, Matilda finished her macaroni and put the lid on the container.
“Not really,” Aysel said quickly—too quickly, she worried. She sounded like a loser. But none of the older women seemed to care one way or the other.
“Did Elaine tell you what this house is?” Carmen asked.
“Not yet,” Elaine said before Aysel could answer. “I mean, I told her it was where we all stayed, that it was a safe house. She hasn’t met too many of us before, so I wanted to take her to talk to people.”
Alice smiled, and Aysel saw she had a tongue piercing. “Man, I remember the first time I met some other kids like me. Aysel, right? I hope we get along.” She held out her hand. Aysel reached forward and Alice grabbed her hand in a powerful handshake. It seemed like everyone’s hands were bigger than Aysel’s. Aysel wondered if her hands would ever be so large.
The interior of the house was a blatant, unrepentant mess, like one would expect a house of werewolves to be. The shelves that lined the room were crammed with books and loose papers and jars and empty paper bags. At first one’s eyes were overwhelmed by the superficial chaos, but it became clear after a few seconds that there was a method to the spread of objects and scattering of nouns. Parts of it, true, were organic matter: half-empty teacups and beer cans littered a kitchen counter, a pizza crust sat on the edge of the sofa. Most of it, though, was paper. As Aysel looked around, she realized she was standing in the middle of an amateurish printing workshop. The smell of hot ink filled the air and in a corner a fat gray copy machine whirred like a storm, spitting out pages and pages of tiny text intermingled with images. In the corner, a small, fat man was kneeling and stacking each fresh page onto different piles. As everyone came in from the front porch, he stapled a pile together and folded it into a booklet. Aysel craned her neck trying to read the title.
Elaine looked horrified.
“Jesus, are you making a library?” Elaine asked. She glanced over at Aysel and back to the man. “You weren’t doing this when I left.”
“Josh thought it’d be best to go ahead and copy and distribute the zine now,” Carmen said casually over Aysel’s befuddled head. “Alice and her girlfriend are leaving tomorrow for Texas and can take a box of copies with them, leave ’em at safe houses along the way.”
“Ah. Are there more safe houses than I remember?” Elaine asked. There was an edge in her voice. “Why do we need this many copies?”
“Calm down, Josh paid for the paper,” Alice said loudly, stepping over a box of pens and assorted wires and disappearing around the corner into the kitchen. There was the sound of a fridge opening.
Elaine made a scoffing noise. “I don’t care if we shoplifted all eight boxes of copy paper or whatever this is.”
“Well, then, I don’t see what your problem is,” Alice shouted.
“Josh isn’t even a werewolf, he’s a white anarchist dudebro who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing,” Elaine said. “And Alice, you are too. What the hell do you know about wolves besides the fact that you’ve been dating one?”
“I’m not a fucking dudebro!” Alice said. She said it loudly enough that the people outside turned around. Carmen came up the steps and stuck her head inside.
“Chill out, Elaine, I know you don’t like Josh but just because you don’t like him doesn’t mean we don’t. It has nothing to do with him being a white guy.”
“Go suck it,” Elaine said. “Josh is probably with the fucking FBI. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“That’s unnecessary,” said the fat guy named Josh. “I know you don’t trust me—”
“I don’t,” Elaine said.
“Oh, piss off,” Alice said, and stormed out the front door.
Elaine turned to Aysel apologetically. “Sorry,” she said. “It usually isn’t this messy or this stressed out here.” She glared over at Carmen and then toward the kitchen.
“It doesn’t seem stressed out. What’s the zine?” Aysel asked. She stooped over one of the piles and picked it up, turning it over in her hands. The cover had a picture—a scratchy woodcut—of a full moon and two silhouettes of wolves. Wolf Guts #3, the title read.
“It’s a werewolf information journal we put together every once in a while,” Josh said. “Mostly when there are a lot of us here at once to work on it. It’s nothing special usually—”
“Usually, as if we’ve done more than three,” Carmen laughed.
“Well, we try to put information in there that people can use,” the man continued. He pushed his straight greasy hair out of his eyes and over to the side of his head. “Where to get health care, legally or illegally, which doctors to see if you feel like you want to try experimental drugs, how to avoid cops, where to go during moons, that kind of thing. We also have essays and advertise shows and events,” he added as an afterthought. “It’s modeled on other community zines people give each other. Down in the Bay Area—”
“This is Josh, Aysel,” Elaine interrupted. “He thinks the zine will change the world.” Her voice was light and sarcastic.
“Hi, Josh,” Aysel said. “I’m Aysel.”
Elaine was trying to play the role of a good hostess, but it was clear to Aysel that this wasn’t a role she was meant to play. “This whole thing is a mess,” she said in a flat tone, looking around at the interior of the house. She picked up the pizza crust off the edge of the couch and crunched it between her teeth. “I hope you all haven’t left any peanut butter open anywhere, or Craig’s allergy is gonna act up like a bitch. You’d think we were like five years old.” She turned and glared at Josh.
“I think it’s pretty cool,” Aysel said quietly.
“Look at this sweetie,” Carmen said, smiling at Aysel. She reached up and tugged at one of the braids in her hair, took out a hairpin, and pinned the braid into place on a different part of her head. “I’m sorry, everything’s just a little crazy right now with everything happening. Can I get you anything to eat? Show you around?”
“Uh,” Aysel said, looking over at Elaine.
“Oh, go on,” Elaine said. “It’s not you I’m mad at, Aysel, don’t worry. And it’s a cool space, mess or whatever. Carmen will show you around.”
Aysel followed Carmen into the kitchen and out into a long yellow hallway. The voices from the other room still projected clearly through the walls, and Aysel caught every word of the argument still under way in the front room. Elaine’s voice was the loudest.
“Just can somebody tell me why the hell we are printing out copies of this like mad just when the police are looking for evidence that a gang of werewolf terrorists exists?” Aysel heard her shout. “It talks about how Archie Pagan did electroshock for people and has just died and so won’t be doing it anymore! For the cops, that’s tantamount to saying we killed him. And when we’re planning a homeless encampment? Someone’s gonna give ’em a tip that we’re all wolves, and they’ll come here, and they’ll ransack every single fucking place we mention in this fucking trash and kill a million homeless people who aren’t even wolves.”
“Oh, ’cause this is the time to lie low, when we’re being persecuted, good thinking,” Matilda said. Aysel looked over her shoulder as Matilda strode into the kitchen and shoved past a pile of boxes to get to the sink. She filled the Tupperware container with water and shouted over the noise, “Best to stay silent, right? Maybe they will leave us alone.”
“What else are we supposed to do, get killed? Do you like, remember last moon? Or did you forget y’all dated before the wacko shot him in the head? People are dead. It’s time to stop.” Elaine’s voice, issuing from the front room, grew inappropriately loud. Aysel looked back over her shoulder. She could see Matilda through the kitchen door, gesturing in exasperation with a fork.
“We knew it was dangerous. It’ll keep being dangerous. That’s a risk we have to take. That’s the price of liberation. We aren’t going to win against them by shutting up.”
“The price of liberation! They didn’t get shot because of this shit. They got shot for being wolves out in the forest after dark.”
“Come on,” Carmen said. “They’re gonna be arguing awhile. It’s a hot topic lately.” She opened a door at the end of the hall, and Aysel followed her through it.
They had left the house and were outside again, looking out at the backyard. Aysel paused and stared with incredulity. She was staring at a blooming garden. Under the gray sky green spread out thickly across the ground and up the tall fences that bordered the yard. High walls of fat pink climbing roses and sweet peas flowered, and bizarre rotund pumpkins and red cabbages nestled in the black earth. Aysel looked across the yard and saw chamomile flowers, lavender, and a mess of zucchini spreading into the paths that traversed the soil. And there, near the foot of the makeshift wooden ramp which led down into the midst of it—
“Strawberries in March?”
Carmen smiled and jumped over the railing of the ramp to stand in the patch of strawberries. Aysel noticed a tattoo on the dark skin of her calf as she jumped, though she couldn’t tell what it was. “Yeah. This is all Alice and Craig, they’ve got like, hella green thumbs.”
“My mom’s a garden witch too, but she can’t make anything grow like this,” Aysel said reverently, looking down at a plump red strawberry near Carmen’s foot. “It’s—it’s amazing.”
“Yeah. It’s funny how magic power works. Some people have all the luck. Werewolves who’ve never gotten shocked are crazy good magicians.” Carmen bent down and picked a strawberry between two fingers and held it out to Aysel. It looked so bright and odd against the gray of the early spring that surrounded it, redder than anything was supposed to be before May.
“So what is this place?” Aysel asked. “I heard Elaine say it was a safe house . . .”
Carmen shrugged. “I don’t know how much I’m supposed to tell you, really,” she said. “But yeah, that’s one of the things the house is for. Werewolves come through here and can stay here if they want. Used to be some of ’em were coming for Pagan’s stuff, like, they didn’t want to transform any more. Others were just coming to wait out moons. Of course, it’s not perfect, ’cause when it gets near full moon we all have to clear out and find a patch of forest, and we can’t all do that together, ’cause it attracts attention. Such as the attention you’ve seen lately. Scary stuff, you know. But the rest of the month we can stay here, get hooked up with resources and all that. We don’t always have food and stuff, but we do what we can.”
“Do you all own it?” Aysel asked. The dilapidated house didn’t look like it would be expensive, but it seemed as if everyone in it was otherwise homeless or traveling. She couldn’t imagine them being able to buy it.
“Nah. It’s just the landlord lives in New York or Los Angeles or somewhere, owns hella property here and in Portland, doesn’t really care what’s happening. It was abandoned for a while. The house used to be a bunch of college kids partying.”
“How long—I mean, how long has it been here?”
Carmen shrugged again. “Few years. I came here the first time two years ago, when I was moving up from LA. It’s one of the only places in Oregon you can like, hunker down if you’re a registered werewolf. Otherwise it’s backpacking. Unless you have a false ID.”
“Do you stay here a lot?”
“As much as I can when I’m traveling.” Carmen smiled and leaned against the rail of the ramp. “It’s a good place. We’re trying to set up this camp, because of what happened to the homeless guys after the rally. Not just for werewolves, just in general, to raise awareness of how many people here need housing and are persecuted not even for being monsters, just for being poor. The argument Elaine’s having is about whether we should say we’re werewolves while we do it.”
“Yeah,” Aysel said. She hoped that Carmen would continue to talk, but she didn’t, so Aysel went over and examined some chamomile. Carmen ate a strawberry and smoked a cigarette. Eventually the argument inside the house stopped. There was the slam of a door. After a few minutes, Elaine came outside. She looked very tired.
“Hey, y’all. We’re done. Aysel, Josh and Chad want to know if you want to come back here when we have the meeting tomorrow. Get filled in on stuff. I talked to him, he says it’s okay.”
“Sure,” Aysel said. She wanted to know what the meeting was about. She was burning with the very idea of a meeting, a place where other werewolves gathered and spoke to one another. She thought of her mother waiting for her to come home. “When’s the meeting?”
“It starts at seven p.m. Is that okay? Can you make it?”
Aysel smiled a little at how earnest Elaine was. “I don’t know. I’ll try. I’ll tell my mom I’m at Z’s house.” If she isn’t enraged about me going out today, Aysel thought.
“Should she be coming to meetings without knowing what they’re for?” Carmen asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Where do you want to start?” Elaine asked.
Carmen lit a cigarette and looked at Aysel. “Where do you want to start?”
“I don’t know, wherever. I’m all ears,” Aysel said.
“Well, basically,” Elaine said, “we’ve all come here for the supermoon, but now shit has hit the fan and there are a ton of us in one place just as everyone goes all bonkers and decides to kill us all and also maybe kill all homeless people in general. And we have to figure out what to do about it. So we’re organizing a homeless camp.”
“And some of us think we can also use it to connect the homeless population in general with the same network of safe houses werewolves have been using, and get some zines out to help educate the public about werewolves,” Carmen added.
“Which is such a great idea,” Elaine added, rolling her eyes. “Not like the cops wanna know where wolves are or anything, or like, some homeless kid isn’t gonna take the chance to nark on us for a couple hundred bucks or whatever reward the pigs are offering.”
Carmen shrugged. “I mean, Chad’s point is, we gotta stop running sometime. Though I gotta say he’s more spoiling for a fight than anything else.”
“I think resistance is a great idea, but we don’t have the means. We got to be restrained. I think now is a good time to just try to make a space for some of the other people to hang out and be safe for a while, prove homeless people aren’t dangerous, don’t mention anything about wolves, and then when stuff dies down we can all get the hell out.”
Carmen nodded and sipped at her mug. “No, that’s all real,” she said. She let out a little hiss through her teeth. “The best thing we can do a lot of the time is help each other escape and lie low. Down in the Bay Area and Los Angeles folks have been sabotaging police werewolf records and helping Mexican werewolves get across the border.”
“Wait, the thing with the police in California, is that what the Timothy Morris thing—” Aysel stopped, looking from Elaine to Carmen. “The guy everyone said killed Archie Pagan?”
“Yeah,” Carmen said. “He was with a werewolf group. But it didn’t happen like the police said. We never attacked nobody. Timothy got shocked when he was younger a couple times, but he didn’t fuck with Pagan. They spin it like we did so nobody asks why they shoot us.”
“So Timothy Morris didn’t attack that Pagan guy or anyone? That was made up?” Aysel asked, thinking of the body on the news.
“Nah. Tim lit a dumpster on fire once and got in a fight with a cop once and did time as a teenager for selling something that was supposed to be fairy dust when he was about thirteen, but he never hurt anybody.”
“Who killed Archie Pagan then?”
“Dunno,” Carmen said. “That’s just how it goes, isn’t it? Sometimes the cops get you when you haven’t done anything at all. It wasn’t anyone here that I know of.”
“Why was he up here?” Aysel asked. “Morris.”
“Couldn’t pay rent, couldn’t find a job. Supermoon. Same reason any of us are up here.”
“Anyway,” Elaine said, loudly, “the organizing and stuff’s what happens at the House of Wolves. It’s what the meeting’s about tomorrow. A few homeless people from downtown are bringing their tents and we’re putting up a fence around the house and just helping people settle in and talking about what to do next.”
“I’ll be there,” Aysel said, though she wasn’t sure if she would be. In the distance there was the noise of sirens.
Aysel walked home, fearing her mother’s reaction. When she walked through the door she heard her mother in the garage doing the laundry. She sat down on the couch waiting for Azra to come back in, squaring her jaw and preparing for the inevitable.
Her mother walked in with a large box in her arms. “Oh, there you are. I thought maybe you’d decide to let me know when you went out this morning. I guess I was wrong,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Aysel said.
“We talked about this before, didn’t we, Aysel? I’m glad you’re safe, but you can’t keep doing this. You’re grounded.”
Aysel’s heart sank. “Okay,” she said. She still planned to go to the meeting later. She knew she had to get there somehow. It was just going to be more difficult now.
“I’m just scared for you,” Azra said for what felt like the thousandth time. “There was a police report today. That Charles Salt man got voted in, in the local election. He wants to give the police more power to shoot on sight, to—I don’t know what all.”
“I’m as scared as you are,” Aysel said, too grouchily. She knew her mother was not trying to make her hurt.
“So why do you do this? You didn’t say, Mom, I’m going to the library! You said nothing to me at all!” Azra banged a narrow hand on the table with an abruptness that startled them both. “Aysel, I am on your side.”
“Mom,” Aysel said, “I’m not saying you aren’t.”
“I want to protect you. I know it feels—suffocating—but this is the worst time for you to assert your independence. You are all I have, Aysel, besides my mother across the world and my work friends, and of them all you are the most precious thing in my life.” Azra said this in the way she often said truly moving things: nervously. Her hand went to her cigarettes again, and this time she lit one.