Sigmone and Joel

They’d barely made it two blocks when some pervert found them. He pulled up in a Chevy and called through an open window. “What are you boys looking for?” Thick glasses, sandy hair. Sigmone could see him drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. The boys walked a little faster, but the car kept pace alongside them. Joel muttered, “Let’s turn here,” and they cut across a corner yard to 57th.

The Chevy made the turn, too. “You guys lost?” the creep asked. “Come on in and warm up.”

“No thanks,” Sigmone said. All these years of his mom worrying about white men in cars and here it finally was.

“You better get in,” the guy said, “or I’ll make you.”

Make them? There was someone approaching on the sidewalk, a bum it looked like, and the creep parked to wait him out. Sigmone and Joel picked up the pace. Sigmone glanced over his shoulder; the guy watched them, his face perfectly blank. Should they turn back to Hampton, try to find Kevin? That would mean walking right past the Chevy. What Sigmone wanted was an adult, a black adult best of all, someone who would take his side if the guy in the car said something. This bum was black but he did not seem promising. He had none of the authority of Sigmone’s dad or grandfather, was scraggly and worn down, wore bib snowpants and a John Deere cap. He didn’t even meet Sigmone’s eyes. Sigmone decided that as soon as they got past the drunk he was going to take off running, into a backyard or something. He ran track. He could outrun some white guy in glasses.

As the bum passed them, Sigmone heard him mutter, “I see the monster calls.”

Joel yelped. Sigmone was pretty sure the kid had never been so close to two black people at once. Behind them, pounding, shouting: The bum had planted himself directly in front of the Chevy and was smacking its hood over and over. “The MONSTER CALLS!” he shouted. The creep, astonished, stared up at him through the dirty windshield. The guy was straight up denting his hood. “You seek someone to DEVOUR? You are NOT WELCOME HERE!”

The perv threw it in reverse and backed away. The man raised his arms in the air and roared, roared, and the wind kicked up around him and made the mist seem to swirl. The headlights caught him and made him look for a moment radiant, lit up like the filament in a light bulb. The Chevy pulled away down the street, and the man’s voice echoed through the block, sang from the bare trees: “BEGONE!”

The car begoned. The man stood, trembling, in the frozen street. Sigmone wanted to go to him but was sincerely afraid of the guy’s juju. What was that he had done? Without a glance back at the boys, he stepped onto the sidewalk and continued walking away.

“Thank you, mister,” Joel finally called. The man did not acknowledge him. “I am not telling my dad about this,” he added.

Why had Sigmone become a paperboy? When he was eleven, his mom had put him in the car and driven what seemed like forever before they parked in an enormous lot, a sea of cars. It was the first mall he remembered ever seeing. Beautiful lights lined the balconies inside. Christmas music played everywhere. In the center of the mall stood a tall steel monolith, water cascading down its sides.

His grandfather was waiting by that fountain. His mom had seemed nervous beforehand, talking more than usual in the car, but she seemed to relax when she saw him. Sigmone remembered she kissed his grandfather, her father, on the cheek. He stooped down and looked Sigmone in the eye. “How you doin’, little man,” he said. His mom took a photo of the two of them in front of the fountain; later she would be furious when she got it back from the Kodak place and it hadn’t turned out.

Used to be he saw his grandfather all the time, had even stayed with him while his parents went away. He lived alone, a few blocks from Sigmone’s house. His grandmother, his mom’s mom, had died before Sigmone was born. No one talked about her much. Sigmone saw how the people in the neighborhood acted around his grandfather, a little nervous, a little respectful, and how gruff the man was with them. He wasn’t gruff with Sigmone, though he did talk to him like an adult.

His grandfather had owned a place on Capitol Drive, a storefront that sold cigarettes, hardware, kente cloth—a mix that Sigmone only now was starting to understand was unusual. When Sigmone was in fourth, fifth grade, he’d get off the 15 bus at the end of the school day and hang out in the store. There he’d sit around, open boxes of merchandise, sort nails into their little compartments. Kind of like he was helping Luis, his grandfather’s only employee, but mostly he was getting in the way. Sometimes his grandfather asked him questions, but mostly the man just talked—talked about how things used to be in the neighborhood, and in Bronzeville, where Milwaukee’s black folks had lived before. Talked about how the hoods were ruining everything now, still complaining even when those same young men came in to buy cigarettes.

But then his grandfather disappeared, for a time that seemed like forever but Sigmone now supposed was about a year. At the mall that day, he understood his grandfather was trying to show him a good time, to make up for how long he’d been away. He bought Sigmone a bag of roasted peanuts at Buddy Squirrel and—a miracle—a Paul Pressey jersey at Fan Fair. “Merry Christmas,” his grandpa said, chuckling, as an excited Sigmone pulled it over his T-shirt and admired himself in the mirror.

The mall was decked out for the holidays, garlands and trees everywhere. Here and there gigantic foil-wrapped presents were piled in stacks, taller than his grandfather, as if the people walking the corridors were themselves gifts tucked under a tree. Screaming little kids lined up with their parents to see Santa Claus.

“You don’t need to see him, right?” his grandpa said, and Sigmone knew the right answer was “No way,” even though it did make him feel sad about not being little enough to do that anymore. When he’d been truly young enough to believe, his grandpa had been around all the time. They’d visit the Santa in Harambee every December. One year his grandpa had even been the Santa—had winked to Sigmone as he approached. Maybe his reappearance today meant that could happen again next Christmas.

They considered a movie, but nothing was playing that they really wanted to see. Sigmone remembered his grandfather joking about one of the titles on the marquee: “Out of Africa? I already know that story.” Anyway, there wasn’t time—they had to meet his mom soon. They walked to a back hallway where, to Sigmone’s amazement, there was an arcade full of brand-new games, way better ones than they had in his neighborhood. They waited in line for Pole Position and his grandpa sat next to him in the dual drivers’ seats. As they chose their cars, his grandpa pulled his sunglasses out of his breast pocket and slipped them on. It was corny but also cool. And then he smoked Sigmone in the race.

Looking for a game that no one else was lining up for, Sigmone found Paperboy. But Sigmone loved Paperboy. He’d played it on his friend Roman’s Atari on one of his infrequent visits to Roman’s house. There, he hardly got any time to play before his friend’s anxious Russian mom ushered them outside. But here—his grandpa, amused, watched him steer the bike with the game’s handlebars. “So really, all you’re doing is throwing those newspapers?” He couldn’t believe that was the game, but he slapped Sigmone’s back when he broke the windows in the creepy old houses and laughed when Sigmone smacked into a car. When the game was over, the final screen displayed a newspaper’s front page. AMAZING PAPERBOY DELIVERS! shouted the headline, with a picture of a freckled kid in a baseball hat. “Can I have another quarter?” Sigmone asked. His grandfather gave him two and went off to make a phone call.

Sigmone knew the game seemed silly to other kids. You weren’t boxing Piston Hurricane or shooting aliens with a gun. But something about the geometry of it was so satisfying. He got the same feeling cruising on that bike that he got cruising down the track during a meet—the feeling he was untouchable. He loved swerving around the skateboarders and old ladies, loved darting a rolled-up newspaper straight into a postbox.

His grandpa returned in time to see Sigmone type his initials into the number six space on the score list. “All right, man,” he said, and took Sigmone to the change machine, where he handed him a five-dollar bill. The landslide of quarters from the machine’s mouth was extravagant, obscene. He couldn’t believe he was allowed to take them all. He wished, now, that he’d been listening better to whatever it was his grandfather had said before he walked away, but he was so focused on the quarters weighing down the pockets of his jeans. Usually at the arcade, if you were crushing a game, you’d eventually draw a crowd, but not if the game was Paperboy. So no one saw him hit number five on the score list, then number three. He was right in the middle of his best run ever when his mom came running in crying and shouting and pulling him away from the game. She held him tight and, over her shoulder, he saw his paperboy slowly, slowly coast directly into the path of a car. He didn’t even get to type in his initials.

Maybe that was why he’d gotten the delivery job, Sigmone thought, as he and the obnoxious Joel walked up 57th toward the addresses on their clipboard. Some kind of under-the-surface shit about that game, and how he’d never seen his grandpa again after that day. Or maybe he just needed money to keep up with the kids at the school he took the bus to every morning, and it wasn’t like his mom and dad had a lot to spare. Whatever the reason, his experience was nothing like the towheaded kid in the video game. He didn’t ride a bike down a sunny street. He didn’t even have a bike. He delivered in the dark of morning, in the freezing cold, and mostly dropped the papers in the doors of local businesses: the hairdresser’s, the Chinese restaurant, his grandfather’s old store, now run by Luis, who’d managed to avoid getting tarred with the same brush. It was funny that the paperboy’s neighborhood, with its beautiful houses, was such a danger zone. He wondered how that kid would do if you dropped him in Sigmone’s part of town, where the traps and snares were less visible.

Joel was fretting about his boom box. Did Sigmone know this neighborhood? Was it safe to leave his boom box in the van? “I’ve never been in this neighborhood, either,” Sigmone finally said. “But no one’s gonna guess there’s an expensive radio in that piece-of-shit van.”

“Yeah, that’s a good point, man,” Joel said. Sigmone was already annoyed by him. He was a pain. But on the other hand, that boom box was deluxe, the nicest Sigmone had ever seen. He would love to crack it open and see how the CD player worked, watch the laser do its magic. Most of the kids at his school seemed sort of rich, but this kid was actually rich, mansion rich, and it wouldn’t hurt for Sigmone to be nice to him for a while and see what happened.

The first house was around the corner. Joel said, “Here, listen to this,” and then started beatboxing. Beatboxing! Sigmone looked around to make sure there was no one besides him witnessing this. “What are you doing?” he asked, but then the kid busted out rapping.

I walk through the jungle with my dick in my hand

I’m the mean motherfucker from another land!

I see a hundred naked ladies up against a wall

I bet you fifty dollars I can fuck ’em all!

Sigmone had stopped walking. Joel had a voice on him. It rang through the street. The last thing Sigmone needed was some neighbor hearing this crap and calling it in. Joel, too, had stopped walking, and was now grinning like the cat who got the canary, as Sigmone’s mom liked to say. Here came the punch line.

I fucked ninety-eight, ’til my balls turned blue

Then I took a shot of whiskey, and I fucked the other two!

“Cut that shit out,” Sigmone said.

“You don’t think that’s funny?” In a way Sigmone admired Joel’s courage, to try that with a black guy he just met. Or maybe it was plain stupidity.

“Is that some Beastie Boys or whatever?”

“No, I made it up.”

“You made that up.”

“Some of it,” Joel clarified. “The part about being a mean motherfucker. A mean motherfucker from a distant land—”

“Why’s it gotta be the jungle?”

“It’s like, Vietnam or whatever. You want to hear the rest?”

“There’s more?”

Joel beatboxed again, as if letting the spirit recapture him. He seemed entirely unselfconscious, having the time of his life doing this on a frigid street in the middle of the night. He wore, Sigmone saw, a Swatch. He rapped, “I went to the doctor and the doctor said”—he dropped his voice way down low—“‘I’m sorry, son, but your balls are dead.’”

Sigmone laughed. He couldn’t help it.

He knew Joel. At least knew of him. They went to the same school, though Joel was in eighth grade and Sigmone was in seventh. Joel’s mansion was in Whitefish Bay, right on the lake, and he probably got a ride to school in his dad’s Porsche or whatever. Sigmone, meanwhile, rushed through his paper route so he could catch the 15 bus, which took him up through Shorewood and right by the school. His dad never got tired of telling him what a golden opportunity he’d been given, and he supposed he was lucky, though it didn’t feel lucky to be one of three black kids in the entire class.

There were a lot of Joels at his school all of a sudden: white kids who’d just discovered rap. The variety show last spring had been a parade of Beasties, three different groups of boys in sideways Brewers hats lip-synching “Brass Monkey” or whatever. He could tell the teachers hated it and for once he agreed with them. The boys had started talking black with one another, and sometimes even tried it with Sigmone—for example when one of the groups, not the one Joel was in, asked him to join their act. It reminded him of how the kids who barely even looked at him in class got real interested once it was time to pick teams at recess.

He’d suggested to the variety show group that they should do LL Cool J instead. They said they didn’t know any of his songs. He spent a lot of his time in Whitefish Bay just shutting the hell up.

The porch light was on at the first house on their list. Joel propped the storm door open with his elbow and pushed the doorbell. A single eye peered out from behind the frilly curtains. Sigmone backed up behind Joel, holding the clipboard in front of his body. An old white lady with wispy hair opened the door, holding on to her housecoat, flowery and loose like his aunt liked to wear. She looked right at Joel and did her best not to notice Sigmone. Joel started a sales spiel which, to Sigmone’s relief, didn’t include anything weird at all.

While he talked, Sigmone noticed the porch light, which didn’t match the house. It was oversized and black, tricked out like it belonged on some fancy country club, not a little house way out here. But it was clearly cheap and plastic, and the bulb didn’t sit right in the fixture.

The woman politely declined Joel’s offer and started closing the door, but Sigmone stepped forward. “Hey, you need to get that porch light fixed,” he said.

“Excuse me?” the woman said. Joel gave him a look like, What are you doing? Sigmone wondered himself, but he couldn’t stand how bad that light was installed.

“You see how the bulb’s crooked?” He leaned his head right against the house and eyed the fixture from the side. The bulb shone bright, 200 watts, he thought. It nearly touched the front of the plastic cube encasing it. “The socket’s not installed right.”

“My son just put it in,” she said. “It’s new.”

“Yo, I’m sure her son knows what he’s doing,” Joel said. “Come on.”

Sigmone ignored the yo and pointed to the light. “The bulb’s heating that fixture up. Might cause a fire.”

“A fire?” Now he had her attention. The woman opened the storm door and squinted. “It does look a little off,” she admitted.

“You call your electrician,” Sigmone said. “I bet your son just made a tiny little mistake. It was nice of him to put that in for you.”

“I will,” she said. “Thank you, young man.”

“Yo, she should have bought a subscription, you basically saved her life,” Joel said as they returned to the sidewalk. “How did you know all that?”

“My dad takes me on jobs sometimes,” Sigmone said. “I’m good with electrical stuff.” In fact, his teacher had basically made him the person in charge of the AV cart whenever she wanted to show a filmstrip or video. It was him who made sure everything was connected; it was him who got to press the button advancing to the next slide, the job he’d always wanted in third grade but which made him faintly embarrassed now. It did keep him from zoning out, though. His reward, she’d told him, was that at the end of the year he could pick out a movie for the class to watch, though she’d given him a whole lecture about how it had to be “something everyone will enjoy.”

For his birthday his dad had given him a multimeter, which he’d used on every outlet in the house, and a book—the biography of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the Laker. Kareem had written it himself. “I thought you might want to see how another giant lives his life,” his dad said. Kareem reclined on the paperback’s cover, so tall his legs stretched around the spine and onto the back of the book.

Between his eleventh and twelfth birthdays Sigmone had grown almost a foot. People had always tried to get him to play basketball, but now everyone—classmates, teachers, the coach—begged him. He didn’t like it that much, though of course he played. He did like Kareem—liked how reserved he was, as if he was just doing a job out there on the court. Sometimes, when no one was around, Sigmone tried a skyhook. He almost always bricked it.

He wasn’t much for books and was a slow reader, but every night in bed he read a page or two. He skipped the parts about jazz, which he didn’t care about, and drugs, which scared him. He reread the parts about the girls Kareem made it with about ten times. And for the first time in his life, he grabbed a pen and underlined something in a book: what Kareem said about being tall and black. He’d felt a little thrill of disobedience making a mark in the book, even though he knew he was allowed—it was his. The line was something like, Kareem was big, but he never wanted to stand out, so he became an observer.

That was Sigmone to a T. If he went around acting all boisterous like Joel, other kids—hell, his teachers—would be scared of him. So in the past year or so he’d learned to watch. He watched the kids in his school. He watched his dad when he took him out in his truck, watched how he interacted with the neighborhood. He watched his own hands as he took apart and put back together the toaster, the coffeepot, the TV. And although he didn’t understand everything, he learned from what he saw.

Now he watched Joel as the white kid chattered his way down the street, a running commentary of rap lyrics, insults about Kevin, and dirty jokes. His monologue only ceased when they reached a house and they both waited to see who would answer. If the person was white, Joel took the lead. If the person was black, Sigmone did. They didn’t discuss this plan, just fell into it from the start. They didn’t sell any subscriptions to anybody.

The neighborhood reminded Sigmone of his own—the houses were smaller, but there was a similar feeling of the people who lived here just barely keeping the world at bay. A few of the houses had junk all over the lawn, old mowers and table saws and shit, and then the house next door would sport a tidy flower box, as if it were telling the junk house off.

Once they struck out at a house, Joel went right back to talking. “If you like electronics, you should see the recording studio in our basement,” he said. “Sometimes I help set up microphones and stuff.”

“Why do you have a recording studio in your house?”

Joel looked embarrassed. “My dad’s a musician.”

“I didn’t know they have rock stars in Milwaukee.”

They turned the corner. “He’s not a rock star,” Joel began, but then Sigmone threw out an arm and stopped him.

Just a few houses away, standing in the middle of the street, was the biggest dog Sigmone had ever seen. Bigger than that mean German shepherd that his neighbor let roam his yard, who barked at Sigmone every morning and left dog-shaped dents in the fence. The huge dog in the street trotted to the sidewalk, moved from a streetlight to a dark patch, and stopped. It turned in their direction.

“Don’t move,” Joel muttered.

Sigmone couldn’t move. The dog was staring right at him. All he could see from here was the glinting reflection in its eyes, but somehow he could feel those eyes lighting up his insides. The dog was a dark shape against dark shapes, but one that moved with intelligence and purpose. It was familiar to Sigmone, like a creature from his dreams. He heard Joel make a whimpering sound and felt the hairs on his arms and legs crackle.

Headlights silhouetted the dog’s form. It whipped its head toward the car and then loped into a backyard. “Jesus, shit,” Joel said, exhaling. “Was that a wolf?”

“He saw us,” Sigmone said. The car rolled past them, and the street was once again quiet.

“That was like something out of a horror movie,” Joel said. “Like, did you see Teen Wolf?”

“Do we have to go to that house? Where the dog went?”

“It’s on the list,” Joel said, perusing the clipboard. The house looked abandoned. An Oldsmobile, stripped for parts, sat up on blocks in the driveway, half covered by a tarp. “But I think we can skip it.”

Next door their knock was answered by a white guy with a mustache and a Miller Lite T-shirt. He only sort of listened to Joel’s spiel, but also seemed to be looking past them, up and down the block. Maybe he was searching for his giant-ass dog. “I already get the newspaper,” he finally said. “Comes every afternoon.”

“That’s the Journal,” Joel said. “We’re selling the Sentinel.”

“The morning paper,” said Sigmone.

The man was already closing the door. “I don’t need two papers.”

“Hey wait,” Sigmone said. “Does anyone live next door?”

“No,” the man said flatly. “You don’t want to go there.” He turned off his porch light, leaving the boys in darkness.

“Okay! Good decision, I guess,” said Joel.

On the way to the next house, Joel started recounting the plot of Teen Wolf, which sounded like some bullshit to Sigmone. “You really believe in that supernatural stuff?” he asked finally.

“Science cannot explain all that happens in the dark of night,” said Joel. Sigmone sang the Twilight Zone song.

At the next house, their unspoken delegation of tasks faltered when the door was opened by an interracial couple. “Uh, hey there,” Joel said.

Sigmone stepped forward, smooth as when he grabbed the baton in the 4x400. “We’re selling subscriptions to the Milwaukee Sentinel,” he said, and the couple smiled and opened up. The white lady held on to her husband’s arm, and when Sigmone was done, they nodded to each other.

“Seems like a good idea,” he said. Sigmone took their cash and handed it to Joel, who slid it into the envelope. The man even shook Sigmone’s hand.

As they walked away, Joel said, “I’m just wondering, why’d you interrupt me there?”

“C’mon,” Sigmone said. “It worked, didn’t it?”

“No, I’m just asking a question here. Why can’t anyone talk to anyone?”

“We’re gonna have better luck if I talk to the black folks. You know that.”

“I think you should let me talk to the next black, uh, black folks.”

Just his luck to get the one white kid who thought he was down. To change the subject, he said, “So your dad isn’t a rock star. Is he a country singer?”

Joel sighed. “No. You know what new age music is?” Sigmone gave him his most practiced blank look. “It’s like, crystals and stuff. Acoustic guitar. Real mellow.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I think it sucks,” Joel assured him. “My dad writes it. Anyway.”

“People buy that crystal music? Enough people so you can live in that house?”

“There’s a whole record label that does it. But that’s not why we have the house. That comes from my grandpa.”

“But you are rich.”

“We’re comfortable,” Joel said with a practiced air.

“If you’re so comfortable, why do you have a paper route?”

“My dad makes me do it. He says it’s important to have a job growing up.”

Sigmone shook his head. “That’s just sad,” he said. “I get rich, I’m gonna let my kids sleep in.”

“My grandpa made him do it when he was a kid.” He did the voice of a grandpa, sounding surprisingly like Sigmone’s grandfather: “‘Builds character.’”

“Getting up at five in the morning to build character? There’s nothing important about getting up at five in the morning.”

“Tell me about it.” They walked a few steps in blessed silence, until Joel finally said, “What about your dad? Is it true about him?”

Sigmone stiffened up. “Is what true?”

“That he was, like, a witness in court.”

“So you do know me.”

“I’ve seen you in school. People say he was, like, against the gangs.”

Sigmone stopped in front of the next house on the list. “People should shut up,” he said.

“It’s fine, forget it,” Joel said. “I’m sorry.” He walked up the path alone and rang the doorbell to the new-looking house, bigger than the ones surrounding it. A black man opened the door and looked at Joel standing there on the porch, Sigmone standing way back on the sidewalk. Joel barely said three words before the man shut the door in his face. As he walked back down the walkway Joel’s look was so hangdog Sigmone almost felt bad about laughing.

“I guess I deserved that,” Joel said.

“You sure did.”

And now the floodgates were open. Joel felt comfortable asking him any old question in between people turning them down for subscriptions. “Do you have to choose between the Crips and the Bloods?”

“Those are LA gangs, come on.”

“But there’s Milwaukee gangs?”

“There’s some guys on my block, but they leave me alone.”

“Why?”

“Because I go to the white school.”

“What music do you listen to? Do you hate the Beastie Boys because they’re white?”

“They’re all right,” Sigmone allowed. The way Joel beamed! “LL’s better. And Public Enemy. But I also like New Edition, Bobby Brown. And I listen to gospel.”

Joel threw his hands in the air and shouted, “Amen!”

There was something refreshing about Joel’s complete lack of manners. He was so obsessed with blackness—and so rich and uninhibited, Sigmone guessed—that he actually talked about race, instead of clamming up whenever the subject arose, like everyone else. Even Sigmone’s teachers, every last one of them white, had nothing to say about black people, and if you pressed them they’d surely say that oh, they didn’t see color. It was just that some of their students came from, ya know, different parts of the city.

“It wasn’t my dad,” Sigmone said. He wondered which of the eighth-grade black kids had blabbed about it, because no way Joel heard about it otherwise. But he did feel the need to set him straight. “It was my grandpa.”

“Okay.”

“He went in front of a judge and testified.” Sigmone’s mom or dad usually picked him up by five thirty, so he wasn’t there when a couple of neighborhood guys held the place up one night. Luis survived the shooting—they visited him in the hospital—but he wouldn’t tell the cops who did it. Sigmone’s grandfather, though: He told. Then he took off. Sigmone’s dad boarded up the front window with its bullet holes until Luis fixed it and opened back up.

“Well, that’s good, right?” Joel asked. “They got the bad guy.”

“Not everyone thought it was good.” For a while Sigmone had harbored a fantasy that his grandpa was out kicking ass like an action hero, but that story had been too pathetic to maintain, even in secret. He had his mom, and he had his dad, and he was doing a damn sight better than plenty of kids, as his parents never stopped reminding him. “How about your dad?” he asked. If Joel could get a crash course in being black, then Sigmone could learn what it was like being rich. “Do you have servants, like the Drummonds?”

“My dad has people who work for him, but they don’t, like, take care of me.”

“Oh yeah? Who cooks?”

“Alex.”

“And who’s Alex?”

“The chef who works for my dad.”

Sigmone laughed. “Do you have actual silver spoons?”

“Dude, I don’t know what our spoons are made of. Ask a real question.”

“Your mom doesn’t even cook?”

Joel shook his head. “My mom died when I was born.”

“Oh shit, man, I’m sorry.” Joel waved him off. They failed to make another sale, and then Sigmone looked for safer territory. “What kind of car does your dad drive?”

Here, Joel had expertise. “We’ve got two. A BMW E30, it’s blue with leather interior. And he’s got a black Porsche 911 Carrera.”

Sigmone stopped in the street as sharply as he had when he’d seen the wolf. He considered himself a car guy, in part because his dad let him drive the truck around the Pick ’n Save parking lot now and then. “You actually have a Porsche,” he said.

“A convertible.”

“Are you gonna get to drive it when you get your license?”

“No way,” said Joel. “He’d rather die. It’s like in Ferris Bueller when Cameron says his dad loves his car more than life itself.”

“I never saw that movie.”

Now it was Joel who stared, shocked. “Oh, man, don’t you see anything?”

“There’s no movie theater by my house.”

“You gotta see it. Ferris skips school for a day, and he gets to be in a parade, he’s on TV, he gets to drive the car. And he gets away with it!”

“Sounds like a great movie about being rich.”

“It’s realistic.”

“Stuff in movies doesn’t happen in real life,” Sigmone said. “I tried that in real life, I’d get expelled.”

A white lady turned them down, saying, “Should you boys be out this late?” Joel said, “Ma’am, we couldn’t agree more. But they won’t let us back into the van unless we sell enough subscriptions.” The lady just closed her door.

“I guess you’re right,” Joel said as they stepped off the porch. “But things go wrong for me just the same as you.”

“Do you get to eat at Burger King all the time?”

“No, like, that’s what I’m talking about. Alex cooks these healthy meals with bean sprouts and things.”

“That’s sad. That’s truly sad.”

“I’m telling you what it’s like. I bet you get to eat fast food all the time.”

“We get McDonald’s two or three times a week.”

“See, you’re lucky.”

Sigmone had to agree with him there. Bean sprouts! What the hell.

Joel started telling a whole long-ass tale—it took, like, four houses—about he and a friend chucking water balloons at cop cars in Whitefish Bay. In Joel’s telling, they’d led the police on a chase over fences and through backyards. “Eric got caught because he was running through some bushes, see, and there were thorns, and the thorns ripped his shorts and ripped open his nutsack”—Sigmone was laughing now but Joel just kept on going—“and one of his balls fell out and it bounced on the ground.”

“You’re crazy.”

“That’s where Superballs come from.”

“You didn’t get caught.”

“I hid under a boat in Bill Orchard’s yard.”

The kid from the Paperboy game would be fine, in the end, even if you dropped him on Holton Street in the middle of the night. Sigmone knew it. His freckles would protect him.

They’d crossed off most of the houses on their list, because it didn’t really take that long for a person to say no. It didn’t seem like they were gonna win the twenty bucks. Sigmone guessed they’d just go back to the van and wait in the cold for everyone else to return, probably with dozens of sales. One of the last addresses was a white house with a neatly maintained yard. As soon as they set foot on the front walk, a light flipped on in the tree above, bathing them in white, illuminating the patchy snow and the little blue flowers poking up here and there, a winter bloom. They must have some kind of fancy motion detector. Joel knocked twice before they heard the latches and dead bolt turn. Someone was saying, “It’s okay, it’s just some kids,” and then a pretty woman with natural hair greeted them.

“We’re selling subscriptions to the Milwaukee Sentinel,” Sigmone said. “It’s only ten dollars for three months, and if you subscribe for a year, you get a special plate.”

“A commemorative plate,” Joel added.

The woman smiled at Sigmone. He was flustered by how pretty she was. “The Sentinel, huh,” she said. “I can’t say I need any new plate.”

Sigmone hunted for the perfect line. “Well,” he said, “you can still get the newspaper, you know, for the news.” Joel looked at him like, That’s what you came up with?

She leaned against the doorframe and crossed her arms. She seemed to be playing with him, just a little. “I get my news from more trusted sources than the Milwaukee Sentinel,” she said. “They really got you out in this neighborhood selling newspapers in the middle of the night?”

Joel put on his saddest voice. “Yes ma’am,” he said.

The woman stayed focused on Sigmone. “Do you get a bonus or something, the more you sell?”

“Our manager says whoever sells the most gets twenty bucks.”

“Huh.” She picked up a purse from a table by the front door and rummaged through it. She was small and sharp-edged, darker than Sigmone. She pulled out two ten-dollar bills and handed one to each boy. “I don’t need to give money to the newspaper, but you all can just have these.”

“Whoa, thanks,” said Joel. Sigmone echoed the thanks, but distractedly. He felt a presence in the next room, another person approaching. The presence itched at him. There was a hole in him where this person should go. He tried to peer around the edge of the door to see.

A man’s voice rang out. “Who that at the door?”

“Just some young salesmen,” she sang, with a wink to the boys. “I’m sending them on their way.”

“We shouldn’t be opening the door to any old visitor,” the voice said. And then the voice was a man in the doorway, and Sigmone had an answer for the question his body had been asking.

“Grandpa?”

The man had a new beard and a new scar down his cheek, but it was him. Sigmone felt like he must be in a fairy tale or something.

The woman looked from Sigmone to his grandfather and back. “This is him?”

“How are you here?” his grandpa asked. He looked stunned. No—he looked angry. “How are you here right now?”

She smiled grimly. “Don’t want surprises, you better not move to Hampton Heights,” she said. “You all better come in.”

Inside, Joel hopped up and down with excitement as the two adults went farther into the house to talk. “This is insane,” Joel whispered, or tried to whisper. It came out more like a screech. “Isn’t this insane?” Sigmone wished he would shut up so he could think.

The front door was closed and bolted behind them. The front hall opened onto a living room in one direction and a dining room in the other, both decorated simply. A Pan-African blanket draped over an easy chair. A small table set for two. Somewhere behind the dining room, his grandfather and the woman were arguing. He didn’t know why they’d bothered withdrawing; the house was so small that he and Joel could hear them just fine.

“You cannot just put him out into the night,” she said. “Not tonight.”

“What’s tonight?” asked Joel. Sigmone waved him off.

In the other room, his grandpa said, “This is my problem to solve.”

“My house, too. My front door.” He heard a familiar sigh of exasperation, the same sound his grandpa used to make when Sigmone got bored and started messing around in the store. “Don’t you give me that,” she warned. “Augustin, he’s here for a reason. What do you think that is?” Augustin was his grandpa’s middle name. In the neighborhood he went by Charles.

“How am I supposed to know?”

“Well, you gotta figure it out.”

“Let’s go,” Sigmone said to Joel, who was nearly vibrating. His grandfather didn’t want him here and he didn’t want to be here. He didn’t need this. But then there were footsteps, and the two adults returned to the front hall. The woman put her hand on Sigmone’s shoulder. “I’m Kamika. You boys come in and sit down.”

“I’m Joel,” blurted Joel.

“Take your shoes off first, okay?”

Sigmone had spent a lot of time preparing things to say when he finally saw his grandfather again. He’d played out whole conversations in his head, in which he explained exactly how he felt about him leaving them, about how it felt to live in Harambee with his grandpa’s offense blinking over him like a neon sign. Now, sitting at the dining room table as his grandpa carried in two folding chairs, he found himself utterly without words. His grandpa wore a work shirt and jeans. The scar on his face stretched from his right ear to his cheek, where it disappeared into a salt-and-pepper beard.

“You got tall,” his grandpa said, making eye contact with Sigmone for the first time since he came to the door. “My mama’s people were tall, too.” When the chairs were set up, he finally sat down.

Kamika was still standing. “You boys want some soda?”

Sigmone said, “No thank you” as Joel said, “What kind do you have?” She brought out two cans of Coke. Sigmone popped his and took a drink. He was waiting, he realized. He was waiting for his grandpa to say something real.

“How is it that you two ended up in this neighborhood?” he finally asked. That wasn’t it, so Sigmone stayed silent.

Joel looked at them both and said, “Our manager just gave us a printout.” He held up the clipboard. “This was one of the addresses on it.”

Sigmone’s grandpa shook his head. Then he looked at Sigmone, really looked, and seemed to register him for the first time. “I’m not mad at you,” he said. “I’m glad to see you, Sigmone.” Sigmone didn’t move, did his best not to respond, but he felt that in the same place inside his body where he’d felt his grandfather’s presence. “It’s just that this isn’t a great time to be knocking on doors. What kind of sense of this neighborhood you get, walking around?”

Joel said, “Poor,” as Sigmone said, “Like half black, half white.”

His grandpa nodded. “Kamika grew up here.”

“We were the first black family on this block.” She sat down, holding her own Coke. Sigmone noticed she hadn’t brought one for his grandfather.

“Who was here before?” Sigmone said.

His grandfather waved his hand. “Before. Well, the animals were here before. The Indians were here. The Kickapoo, the Potawatomi.” Sigmone started to nod, like You know what I meant, but his grandpa cut him off. “It was their land, still is their land. I ain’t saying that you got wendigos or hodags still running around, but the paths they walked, those are our paths, too.”

“Absolutely,” Joel said.

Sigmone’s grandpa barely glanced at him. “But then the neighborhood was German. Farmland, then a village. It was called Granville. Maybe twenty years ago black folks started coming, when Bronzeville got torn down for the expressway. There were good factory jobs up here.”

“I wonder how the white folks felt about that,” Sigmone said.

“It wasn’t as bad as some places,” Kamika said. “No one’s holding hands and singing, but most people just stick together and don’t bother anyone else.”

“But things are changing. They used to make drill bits right down the street. That closed. There’s less to go around, and, you know—” He snapped his fingers. “Conflict flares up, like a match.”

Kamika nodded. “Sometimes when things get bad, that’s when your grandpa and his crew step in.”

Sigmone sat up straight, all his foolish hero fantasies rushing back. “Your crew?” He could just tell Joel was about to say something stupid about Crips and Bloods and dealt him a quick look to tamp him down.

His grandpa got up from the table and looked out the window. The light in the front yard had turned itself off, and there was nothing to see, just the islands of illumination cast by the streetlights. He turned and gave a look to Kamika, who threw her hands up in the air. “What you want, a written invitation?” she said.

Sigmone knew this feeling, watching this man decide whether to bother talking to his grandson, who came from miles away and, somehow, found him here. It was powerlessness. He couldn’t make his grandfather care about him. It was how he felt so much of the time. Knowing his dad was at work all hours, fixing things in the houses of people who knew what his own family had done. Knowing his mom wanted only one thing from him, for him to go to college and get away from them. Staring out the window of the bus to the suburbs, watching the houses get bigger and the lawns get greener. Sitting in class, staring at the page, the words squirming before his eyes.

This fall his teacher had made the class read Romeo and Juliet out loud. Hearing a story was much better than reading it, and his class was full of loudmouths who volunteered for every role. But this time Ms. Schulz assigned characters out of a hat, and Sigmone ended up playing some guy called Tybalt, who had a lot of lines, and his reading was so quiet and halting that it brought the play to a standstill every time it was his turn. No one said anything, but Sigmone could feel the pity and scorn in the air. When he heard Chris McSorley muttering to his friends, doing an impression of slow Sigmone reading like some kind of moron, he shoved Chris into the lockers as hard as he could. So then he had in-school suspension, even though the week before Jason Kriefall had straight-up punched a kid and only got detention.

“Of course they’re gonna punish you worse,” his dad said. “What kind of world do you think you’re living in?” He had to ride the bus to school just to spend the whole day in the conference room by the vice principal’s office. Outside the closed door he heard the business of the school day: bells ringing, students complaining, younger kids out on the playground. Inside he had nothing but a book he didn’t want to read and homework he didn’t know how to do.

They didn’t even let him go to track practice. And then the next day he was even farther behind. The only good thing was that Ms. Schulz had to make someone else play Tybalt.

Even now he thought about the look of fear on Chris McSorley’s face when he hit the lockers. Even now he thought he could feel that powerlessness inside him, assuaged not even a little bit by what he did. It was an awful presence inside him, a thing alive.

Now Sigmone’s grandpa said, “What sports do you play?”

“Uh, basketball. And I run track.”

“What’s your best sport?”

“It’s track,” Joel said. “He’s fast as—he’s really fast.”

Sigmone’s grandpa looked at Joel for the first time and nodded. Joel might as well have had a light bulb inside his head, the way he glowed. God, this guy had it bad.

“That true?” his grandpa asked.

“Yeah, I guess,” Sigmone said. It really was no contest. He’d gone to county as the anchor in the 400 relay. It took until the county meet to face a school that could build a lead big enough that Sigmone couldn’t erase it on the last leg.

His grandfather stood in the doorway now, blocking the light from the front hall. He seemed bigger now, bigger than Sigmone, but that was a trick of perspective. “How do you feel when you run?” he asked.

“How do I . . .”

“How do you feel,” his grandfather intoned, “when you’re at your fastest?” Sigmone felt a tug deep within. It came from his grandfather’s eyes, which gleamed in the light from the chandelier.

He took a breath. “I feel powerful. Like no one can even touch me. Like I know exactly where to go and how to get there.”

His grandpa nodded, as if Sigmone had passed some test. He couldn’t imagine what it could have been. But his grandpa said, “Come on out back with me. You can do something, and I’m going to show you how.” Sigmone let himself yearn, just for that moment, to know his grandfather, and for his grandfather to know him.

And that’s when Joel went nuts. “Oh shit!” he shouted, punching Sigmone on the arm. “He’s gonna show you how to be a werewolf!”

“Shut up,” Sigmone said, at the exact moment that his grandpa said “Goddamn it,” and Kamika started laughing. His grandpa stalked out of the room. Kamika was nearly doubled over. She called to him but could not keep it together. “Augustin! Come on!”

“What are you—”

“I could tell he wanted to do a big unveiling or whatever, in the backyard,” Kamika said, going after him.

“I knew it!” Joel was up out of his chair and bouncing around the dining room. “That giant beast thing! And he’s all mysterious! He’s got a crew, like, that’s his pack!”

Kamika pulled Sigmone’s grandpa back into the room. He was clearly annoyed, which just made her laugh harder. “The term,” he said, trying to recollect his former dignity, “is wearg.”

Sigmone said, “Man, go to hell,” his chair clattering behind him. He could barely see where he was going through the tears but he didn’t care, he just wanted to be out of this stupid house, away from his stupid grandpa. He wanted to get the hell away from Hampton Heights, the place that had returned his grandfather into his life, unwilling, unsmiling, talking like a fool.

The problem was his shoes were off. He plucked them off the hall floor and just walked out the door. The front step was freezing through his socks. Halfway down the walk he stopped and tried to balance on one foot to pull on a shoe. His grandpa had followed him and was saying his name, something he’d wanted to hear forever, “Sigmone” in his grandpa’s deep voice, but now he lashed out with all the courage he could muster. “You’ve been gone forever!” he shouted. He gave up on the shoe and let it fall to the ground. His voice cut through the silent chill of the night. “I’ve been waiting! And I find you by accident and you don’t even want to see me and you make up this stupid story.” His grandpa was smiling now, hands on his hips. “You think this is funny?” Sigmone felt huge in his rage. “I wanted my grandpa! Not a bunch of bullshit! I wanted YOU!”

As he shouted the last few words, his grandpa’s eyes glinted. Then Sigmone was on all fours, howling his sorrow and anger at the sky.

And he knew, knew instantly, that this was what he had felt when he’d seen his grandfather in the middle of the road, what he had felt when he sensed his grandfather in the house. It was the unseen thing, the ancient thing, tugging at his heart.

His feet were no longer cold. But there were more of them. He felt perfectly balanced, ready to spring. And there was his grandpa, his scent sharp and familiar. His face was triangular, his teeth long. It felt good to launch himself at him, to clamp his fur in his teeth, to snarl. But his grandfather turned him over. The world upside down, Sigmone on his back. His grandfather snapped at him. Instantly Sigmone cowered and apologized, his anger gone as if blown away in the wind.

The world was paler and smaller through his eyes. But it didn’t even matter because now his nose and ears brought him such riches. Faraway danger, the roots creeping underground, the snow coming soon. Water in the distance. Paths and barriers in every direction, clear and easy to read. The boy, Joel, bursting out of the house and stopping and shouting. Even from here Sigmone could smell the thrill on him.

The big one took off running and Sigmone followed. They left the house behind because it was no longer theirs. The grass crunched underfoot. He cleared fences at a bound. His path was marked by the scents laid out by his grandpa and many others. The trails crisscrossed one another, and here and there Sigmone sensed places he wasn’t meant to go, routes he wouldn’t follow. And underneath, the tracks burned into the earth by centuries of people, the deep memory of the land.

For just a few steps, pat-a-pat-a-pat, the ground was hard under his feet: a road. Then he followed his grandfather at a trot down a long embankment to a stream. Here he could smell that people of every sort used this place to get water—he saw their trails everywhere and knew which people were small, which were big, which he needed to beware, which he could eat. The trails all converged on the brook as it burbled bright and cold through the snow and slush. His grandpa stopped to drink so Sigmone did, too, his fur brushing against his grandfather’s as they stood side by side.

And then there was another, on the other side of his grandpa. The big one was not alarmed so he, too, wasn’t alarmed, not even when a second person silently slipped next to him, or when a third sniffed him and nosed his side. He was new to the pack. He saw how they surrounded his grandfather, how alert each was to his surroundings. Each drank his fill in turn, paws sinking into the snow, tracks mixing with the paw- and hoof- and footprints dotting the riverbank.

Sigmone watched them all.

One lifted a leg at a tree. One bounded after a rabbit. They were gray and white and black. He could see that each person made his own choices but that all those choices were influenced by his grandfather—made to fit in the shape the big one established for all of them. His grandfather was the hill, and they were the trees arranged upon that hill. Each person was his own creature but was also ready at any moment to respond if his grandfather required it. And so when his grandpa lifted his head to sniff at the air and then trotted back up the embankment, each member of the pack turned away from whatever task had been occupying him and followed. Sigmone found his place at the corner of the group. And then they were running again, at the edge of the road, parallel to the stream, and Sigmone was filled with a sense of power.

The pack flowed like water across the snow and Sigmone was a part of it. They crossed the road, slithered single file between bushes. In a flat plain surrounded by hedges they gathered around Sigmone’s grandpa. At the far corner of the space a pair of people stood at alert. The wind brought Sigmone fresh information: These people were like them but not like them, could change like them but were not part of their pack. They were not enemies, but they were not friends.

Sigmone’s grandfather yipped once, then led the pack in a slow, wide circle. They hugged the line of hedges that held the plain within. The heads of the others followed them along their path. Now there were three there. Now there were four. They were also gray and white and black yet different in some indisputable way. The tracks and scents scattered across the ground here were wild and confusing: this was a border, a zone where the conflicts of this place got negotiated.

One of the others leapt forward, and Sigmone’s grandpa sprang toward him, and then they were bounding alongside each other, snow and dirt flying. Sigmone might have thought they were playing but for the bared teeth. He didn’t know what this fight might look like, had no sense of how far it could go, but he found he was not afraid. His confidence in the big one was absolute.

One person snapped, the other plowed into him; they were a whirl of fur and teeth. It happened too fast for Sigmone to catch it, but with a cry the other person ducked away. Sigmone could smell the blood from where he was standing, just a few drops spattering the snow.

Sigmone’s grandfather stood in the center of the space, neck bristling. The other person retreated, favoring a foreleg, the other streaked red. He retreated through a hole in the hedge and was followed by the other pack. Sigmone’s grandpa barked and chased, and soon they all stood in a new space behind a house. Sigmone could tell that this space was not theirs—was not theirs at all. But they spread to all corners and marked while they could: Sigmone pissed on something rusted and metal, another person on a small building, another on a circle of sand. From a ledge attached to the large house at one end of the space the injured one watched them decorate the yard. Finally he turned and limped into the house. The pack surrounded Sigmone’s grandfather. He howled and they all joined him. What a noise! What a sound! It carried into the sky, seemed to bounce off the moon and return to them.

A car stopped for them as they crossed the road. The man in the car stared at the line of people in his car’s lights. Sigmone looked the man straight in the eyes and he saw him flinch.

What the nature of this victory was, Sigmone did not know. His grandfather didn’t suddenly own the house. Sigmone may have made his mark, but that yard wasn’t his, he could sense that. The confrontation, the brief fight, the sharp scent of the urine—all those things had meaning far beyond themselves, having to do with subtle dynamics he, a stranger to this place, did not understand. There were rules that everyone else knew, and those rules had changed ever so slightly as a result of what he’d seen, what he’d done. He understood this at least.

He also understood that whatever comprehension he had of all this—the tracks in the snow, the sounds his pack made, the boundaries and paths—would fade when he stood upright again.

For now, he didn’t care. For now, he ran, and felt the joy and power of running.

The rabbit was bright as a shooting star, bolting across the grass just ahead of him. Its fear made it stand out against the blank nighttime. Sigmone veered away from his pack and loped after it, feeling his legs stretch. He didn’t want to eat it, exactly. But he did want to chase it, to test himself against it, to feel its heart beating, its crunch. It zigzagged away, lightning against the grass. It was headed for the far corner, a wooden barrier, and he pushed to get there first.

He did not. The rabbit squirmed between two pieces of wood—an opening much too small. He yelped, he leapt. It happened before he even knew he was going to do it. As he soared over the wooden barrier he saw the rabbit down below, wriggling back through the hole in the other direction. By the time he landed and gathered himself it was gone.

Never mind! Look what he could do! Snow flew as he sprang forward. Ahead was another, taller fence. He jumped over that one, too, dancing a few steps along the top just because he could. He landed next to a house, and suddenly his senses were shouting at him, because there were three new people next to the house.

The people turned as one and looked at him. They were lined up next to a car with no wheels, lifeless and dark. He wasn’t afraid. He stood his ground while they approached him. He let them sniff. He did not make himself small. And the people didn’t growl or raise their hackles. They circled him a few times, then broke off and moved together toward the house. No one of them led the group. Sigmone wondered how they knew what to do. At ground level there was a broken opening to the house, bright light inside, and one by one they disappeared into it. On the way in, the last person looked back at him. An invitation.

Sigmone was not frightened. He was curious. So he walked to the opening, pushed himself through, and braced himself for the landing.

The people were humans now. He shied away from their scents, their upright forms. One of them stepped forward and said, “You can change here.”

Could he? Did he even know how? How would he appear? But then before he even finished asking the questions, he was human again. In a moment of panic he looked down at himself, but there were his clothes, his coat, even the shoes he hadn’t managed to get on in his grandpa’s front yard.

“You’re new,” a girl said, lighting a cigarette.

“Finally,” one of the boys said. “Some fresh meat around here.”

They stood in a triangle in the empty basement, lit by a camping lantern on the floor. A white girl and two boys, one white, one black. They looked to be a couple years older than him. They were dressed like the high school burnouts who skulked past him at the bus stop by his school: dark jeans, trench coats over T-shirts. The white guy, who’d just spoken, had hair so curly and poofed up he looked like a poodle.

“Did we ever work out what happens to our clothes when we change?” the girl asked her friends now.

“Nope,” said the black guy. He had a high fade and a flat top. Sigmone eyed his shoes; he didn’t know if he’d ever seen a brother wearing combat boots like those. “I guess it’s just”—here he raised an eyebrow dramatically—“ancient magic.” The three of them laughed.

“Once I was wearing earrings when I turned, and when I turned back I only had one of them,” said the other guy. “Totally different look.”

“You all, what, a gang?” Sigmone asked.

“Yeah, one of those interracial gangs,” the black guy said. “Like in Spider-Man.”

The teens smiled at one another, some private language. “Just stealing purses in dark alleys,” said the white kid. “I’m Justin.” The girl, his sister, was Jenny. The black guy was Greg.

Sigmone introduced himself. The good thing about being tall was people didn’t necessarily know right away you were barely thirteen.

“How’d you get here?” Greg asked. In a dark corner of the room Justin was messing with something, which turned out to be a radio. Finally, music came on, some kind of fast rock and roll.

Sigmone explained about the canvassing, about how against all odds he had stumbled upon his grandpa. They all laughed. “Fuckin’ Hampton Heights,” Justin said.

“It’s like the crossroads,” Greg agreed.

“One time I was just trying to get my hair cut and the ghost of my grandma kept blocking the razor,” Jenny said. “I had to be like, ‘Grandma, just let me get the buzz.’”

“Then she comes complaining to me,” said Justin. “I’m like, ‘Granny, she doesn’t listen to me, either.’”

“What’s funny is the ghosts don’t care if we smoke,” said Greg.

Jenny took a drag. “No, they love it. ‘Join me in the afterlife!’” They all spoke airily, half-grinning, in such a way that Sigmone could not guess if what they were saying was real or a story they liked to tell one another. It was a kind of code, but unlike at school when kids told inside jokes, Sigmone didn’t feel made fun of. Instead, he wanted to find a way in.

“So we roamed around the neighborhood, I guess,” Sigmone said. “My grandpa got into a tussle, sort of, with another wolf.”

“Did you know?” Greg asked. “Before tonight?”

Sigmone shook his head. “I didn’t know anything.”

“You never been in Hampton Heights before.”

“Does it only happen here?”

“I never turn when I’m somewhere else,” Jenny said. “It’s real weird the first time. It’s like it’s all new but, also, like you’ve been doing it all your life but you didn’t know it.”

“And did you like it?” Greg asked.

Sigmone was thinking about the kinship he’d felt as part of that pack. He couldn’t remember exactly how they’d communicated or what it had all meant, but that feeling had stuck with him. He had belonged. There was no fumbling for comprehension, no switching how he talked or acted based on who he was with. He had a kind of power among them, those wolves. Sometimes in his everyday he felt something like that, when he flipped a circuit breaker and saw the lights come to life, or when he made the turn and saw the finish line ahead and picked off his opponents, one by one. But he never felt it with anyone else, only alone, and most of the time he had nothing backing him up as he struggled to read in class, walked the streets of his neighborhood before dawn, rode the bus home as the afternoon faded away.

“I liked it,” he said. “I wish I understood how it all happened.”

“My friend, that question is irrelevant in our part of the world,” said Justin. He offered Sigmone a cigarette, and Sigmone awkwardly declined. “Okay, don’t give yourself cancer, see if I care,” he said, but cheerfully.

“It’s a little bit mind-blowing,” Greg said.

“Yeah. Partly just the wolf thing”—they all laughed and Sigmone nodded, acknowledging that this was a funny thing to say—“but partly because my grandpa was, like, the leader.”

Justin and Jenny looked at each other, quickly, but not so quickly that Sigmone didn’t notice. “Your grandpa’s Augustin,” Greg said.

“Yeah.” Sigmone shook his head at the weirdness of it all. “That’s what he goes by here, anyway.”

Jenny pulled a raggedy lawn chair from the wall. The chair gave a tiny shriek of pain as she opened it. “Our dad is . . . the leader, I guess, of the vargr,” she said, sitting down.

“The white wolves?”

“Yeah, although really all the wolves have the same color fur,” Greg said.

“I noticed that,” said Sigmone. “That shit’s confusing.”

“Tell me about it, man.”

No one spoke for a moment. Greg pulled another chair out and sat down. He nodded at the cooler at Jenny’s feet and she tossed him a soda. From the boom box, a man and a woman sang together, each one’s voice winding around the other’s. “She had to get out,” the man sang, and the woman echoed him in a shout: “Get out!” Sigmone didn’t usually like guitar songs, but this was okay.

“So y’all don’t run around with those packs?” Sigmone asked finally.

“No, we have better things to do with our time,” said Justin.

“Like sit in this freezing cold basement.”

“Listen to music.”

“Tell jokes.”

“Do our nails.”

“Tea parties.”

“I get to watch Greg and Jenny make eyes at each other,” said Justin. “That’s awesome.”

“Oh please.” Jenny dismissed him with a gesture. “Says the world’s biggest flirt.”

“It’s true, I am,” Justin said, delighted. “You’re very handsome, Sigmone. A little young for me.”

“Uhhh,” Sigmone said, and everyone laughed, even Sigmone. He didn’t feel made fun of. He was being gently hazed, but by people who liked him.

“We choose not to participate in that mess,” Greg said.

“The packs are fine,” said Jenny. “They make the neighborhood work.”

“We’re a little more civilized down here.” Justin raised his can of soda, pinkie in the air. “I have no interest in battling it out with animals.”

“I’d kick your ass, for starters,” said Greg.

“Oh, absolutely. I can’t make any devastatingly cutting remarks,” he confided, “when I’m a dog.”

“You want something to drink?” Jenny asked, opening the cooler. “We have beer and soda.”

“Do you have anything to eat? I’m starving.”

All three made faces of sympathy. “Oh yeah, first time on four feet,” Jenny said. “Sorry.” She pulled a bag of Doritos out of her backpack.

“Thanks,” he said, tearing the bag open and popping three chips into his mouth. They tasted amazing. He kept talking even as he chewed. “We’re supposed to go to Burger King after we finish selling newspapers, but—what time is it?”

Greg looked at his watch. Sigmone decided not to wonder how he could wear a watch when he was a wolf. “Twenty to nine.”

“Ah shit,” said Sigmone, spraying Dorito crumbs. “I gotta find Joel and get back. That’s my ride home.”

“We can give you a ride,” said Justin.

He had a license? Damn, they really were older than him. “No, that’s cool, but I gotta find Joel, and I need to go back with my manager. He’s responsible for all of us and I don’t want him to worry.”

The three looked at each other, shared some brain wave. “We’ll come with you,” Justin said. He turned off the music and picked up the boom box.

“It’s fine. I’ll be fine.”

“We know, man,” Greg said. “It’s just, it’s better if we all go together.”

Sigmone decided not to push it, because he was relieved. “What do we do? Do we jump back out the window?”

Jenny opened a door to the backyard. “We do have opposable thumbs, Sigmone.”

They walked up the driveway past the Olds on blocks. Belatedly, Sigmone realized this was the abandoned house that the neighbor had told him and Joel to avoid. “I think I remember the way to my grandpa’s house from here,” he said.

“I know it, too,” Greg said. “My dad was in his pack.” Jenny and Justin were a little ways in front of them, their heads together. Greg and Sigmone lagged behind. This was his first chance to really get a look at Greg, nearly as tall as Sigmone, light-skinned. His trench coat was weird, but he had big friendly eyes.

“So is there really a white pack and a black pack?” Sigmone asked.

“Hey, what else you expect in Milwaukee?” Greg said. “Even in a neighborhood where white people and black people live together, they still gotta separate themselves somehow.”

“I am so sick of Milwaukee,” said Justin from ahead. “I want to move to Minneapolis.”

“Where do you live?” Greg asked Sigmone.

“Harambee,” he replied. Justin and Jenny nodded politely but Greg raised his eyebrows.

“I’ve been there,” he said. “That’s cool.”

The truth was that Sigmone was proud of his neighborhood, proud of his block. His mom and dad had drilled that into him, at least. Along with his grandfather, they’d been part of the protest group that had gotten Green Bay Avenue changed to Martin Luther King Drive. Yes, it was shabby compared to Whitefish Bay. Yes, he felt as alone there as he felt everywhere else, sometimes, when neighborhood kids sniffed at his white-kid school. But that was his home.

It had never really dawned on him that there might be something wrong with Milwaukee until he’d read Kareem’s book. He’d known Kareem had played for the Bucks out of college; he used to watch games with his grandpa, when the last few players from that championship team were still kicking. What he hadn’t known until he read the book was that Kareem didn’t like Milwaukee. It was too cold; it was too white. He was Muslim and he didn’t want to go out to taverns. He grew up in New York and went to college in LA. Suddenly here he was in the middle of nowhere dealing with—he said in the book—farmers! After six seasons Kareem had demanded a trade to the Lakers.

He’d never realized you could feel one way or another about Milwaukee. It was just the place he lived. Yes, he was loyal to Harambee, and he resented White Folks Bay. But not liking Milwaukee? You might as well not like air.

And now here was Justin, about as unlike Kareem as a person could be. But he, too, wanted out. As they walked, Sigmone thought, maybe for the first time ever: If he didn’t live in Milwaukee, where would he live?

“What’s in Minneapolis?” he asked.

“The Replacements,” Justin said. “Prince. Any place that’s got both of those, you gotta say, that’s a real city, you know?”

Sigmone didn’t know what he meant by the replacements, but he thought back to the book, to another line he’d underlined: “Milwaukee just wasn’t a real city to me.”

“It’s okay here,” Jenny said, blowing out smoke from a fresh cigarette. “These two can’t wait to get out, but I like it. Lots of opportunities for a werewolf.”

“You can’t stay here,” Justin said. “We’re a pack. We all have to stick together forever. Too bad for you!”

“That is too bad, yeah,” Jenny deadpanned.

“Oh please. Without me, how would you ever have any fun? You’d be studying chemistry twenty-four hours a day.”

“Someone’s gonna have to make money!”

“Sometimes,” Greg said to Sigmone as they carried on, “it’s like you wind ’em up and they just go and go.”

“I like them,” Sigmone said.

“Yeah, they’re okay,” said Greg. “It’s good to have you here, though. Someone for me to talk to while they’re just yappin’ at each other.”

“We do not yap,” Justin said. “We howl.” Then he struck a pose and, in an utterly human voice, said, “Aroo.” Sigmone, too, got why that was funny. Sigmone, too, laughed at that. He didn’t have to pretend. With these three unusual kids, he could just be. Now he just needed them not to figure out how young he was.

“What do you think they’re doing now?” Joel asked.

“Probably marking lampposts,” Kamika said. He could tell she was sick of him, but he couldn’t stop himself from talking, asking questions, jiggling his knees—all the stuff that annoyed his dad. Everything bubbled up in him like a pot boiling over. He couldn’t turn off the heat.

He was sitting at the kitchen table. She was washing dishes at the sink. She’d been really nice. She’d given him some potato chips and another Coke, which, honestly, probably wasn’t helping things. Though she was trying not to show it, he could tell she was nervous—she kept looking up at the clock on the wall. Joel did, too. Pretty soon he had to get back to the van.

The other problem was that she was beautiful. He didn’t know what to do about that. It seemed to demand some acknowledgment from him, but also, he felt as though he would drop dead if he said anything about it at all. He knew his stupid, fourteen-year-old words would crumple in the face of her perfection.

Last year Joel’s science teacher, Miss Abraham, had been new to the school. She was younger than all the other teachers, and pretty, and a lot of the boys in class made fools out of themselves. “Who can wash out the pipettes for me?” she would ask, and boys would fall all over themselves to help. He’d overheard girls in the class complaining to one another about Miss Abraham’s low-cut blouses, how she loved toying with the stupid boys. They sounded annoyed with her but also grudgingly admiring. Every once in a while she would look at him and ask him a question, and it would be like his brain turned off. He studied, he really did, but faced with Miss Abraham’s blue eyes he couldn’t remember a thing about the periodic table of elements.

At least he wasn’t as bad as Danny Donoghue, who actually wrote Miss Abraham a love letter at the end of the year. Somehow word got around, because soon everyone knew about it, and then he had to go through with leaving it on her desk. No one saw what happened when she picked it up, but when Joel had asked Danny about it on the playground Danny had shoved him over.

Now, sitting in the kitchen with Kamika, he thought he could finally understand how a person could be driven to do something that insane by a woman’s beauty. It made him nervous, and when he was nervous, he talked.

“Are they fighting?” he asked now. “With the . . . with the white wolves?”

“The vargr,” she said.

“Are they at war with the vargrs?”

“It’s not as simple as all that,” said Kamika. She tore a paper towel and dried her hands. “The neighborhood is changing, so there’s a lot of tension out there.”

“And so the black people are fighting with the white people. I’m on your side, by the way,” he said.

“They’re not fighting. The wolves are why they’re not fighting, mostly. You got some ideas about black people and white people, Joel.” He could see her trying to work out how best to explain it, and he tried to look old enough for her to just say it, whatever it was. “Most of the time, everybody just deals with everybody else. One reason why is that most nights, the wolves are out.”

“They keep an eye on things.”

“Sure, yeah. But also in between them they sort of act out the everyday issues, and because they get settled there, everyone can relax in real life.”

Joel wished he could relax. He was thinking about what she’d said, about his ideas about black and white. What were his ideas? He loved rap because it was cool, and because it made him cool, or sort of cool. He was the first one in his class with Licensed to Ill, and it had gotten kids over to his house all last year to listen to it and then, once they were there, to marvel at the gate, the studio, his room, all his shit. This year he could feel those friends fading away; the more time they spent with him, the more irritating they seemed to find him, a response he was used to from his dad. Being funny and outrageous helped a little. He’d come up with the fart tape, which had gotten him through a bad weekend at Boy Scout camp. Each time he said something outrageous, he felt people drawn to him, but he had to keep doing wilder and wilder things to keep their attention. Acting black was outrageous, at first, but then a bunch of white kids started doing it. And he couldn’t help but notice that the four black students in his class didn’t talk to him. He guessed they didn’t really care how down he pretended to be. All they saw was a white kid trying on their blackness like an outfit.

“You’re not a wolf,” he said.

“No, that’s right,” she replied, sitting down. She rubbed her eyes. “I’m not a wolf.”

“Are you two married? If you had kids would they be, like, wolf puppies?”

She looked at him levelly. “Not that it’s any of your business, but we’re not married. I’ve been married. I don’t need to do that again.” Joel guessed he wasn’t going to get an answer to the second question. But oh, oh, now she was sitting so close to him! She reached across the table, took a potato chip, and ate it! And he could smell her, some kind of stuff she must use on her hair or her skin. She smelled different from any person he’d ever met. He felt that sometime tonight, he would get a chance to prove his quality to Kamika, and he hoped that when the time came, he’d be able to find, deep within himself, a man worthy of her love.

He sipped his Coke. His knee jiggled so hard it hit the underside of the table at the exact moment the back door opened. He felt relieved, then resentful when he saw how she brightened at Augustin’s arrival, then alarmed. Where was Sigmone?

“He’s not here?” Augustin asked at Kamika’s look. “Damn.” He looked the same as when he’d left, same clothes, same shoes. It was hard to believe Joel had seen him actually for real transform into a wolf. It hadn’t been a long, gruesome transition like in the movies: hair growing, tail sprouting, mouth roaring in agony. One moment he and Sigmone had been in the front yard, lit by the spotlight like two actors on a stage, Sigmone yelling at his grandpa. Then Sigmone was a wolf, and then Augustin was a wolf. It happened in a blink—faster than a blink. It happened so effortlessly that for a moment Joel had felt fooled, like, oh, hadn’t there always been wolves there?

“Don’t you take those shoes off,” Kamika said. “You gotta go back out there and find him.”

Augustin shook his head and went to the refrigerator for a beer. “That’s a bad idea,” he said. “I go out alone, I’m liable to lose what we gained tonight.”

“What did you gain?” Joel asked. “What happened?”

Augustin looked at him and raised his eyebrows at Kamika. “We tussled,” he said. “Me and Owen. The pipefitters’ union was slow-walking our guys’ applications.”

Kamika scoffed. “That’s why you won’t go out and find your grandson? For a union application?”

“That’s jobs for three brothers who need them. And anyway, he can handle himself. He ought to be able to, anyway.” He sat down at the table and folded his arms. “That boy needs some room to explore.”

“Talking about what that boy needs,” Kamika said. “You barely know him.”

Augustin stared at the table, not at her, not at Joel. “I know him,” he murmured.

No one said anything. Joel thought of those kids at school, the ones who never talked to him. He thought how much he wanted to have a chance to make Kamika laugh, even just once. To show her he was more than what she thought he was.

He stood up. “I’ll look for him,” he said. “We need to get back to our manager soon.”

Kamika turned her head from him to Augustin, Augustin to him, and then said the words he’d been dreaming of: “Fine. I’ll go with you.”

Look, he told himself as they walked out into the night. He knew she wasn’t going to fall in love with him or something. He wasn’t stupid. There was a huge cultural barrier between them, and also he was fourteen. But he felt an irresistible urge to do something, anything, with her. Yes, to get her away from Augustin, who was indisputably more impressive than him, even setting aside the part where he was a werewolf. But really just to be in her presence. To hear her voice.

“Should we call for him?” he asked. The street was quiet but felt maybe a little warmer than before. The snow was coming for sure.

“No, better not,” she said. “We don’t need to stir anything up.”

He didn’t see anything out there. No wolves, no monsters, no vampires, no nothing. The clouds obscured the moon (was it full tonight? He couldn’t remember) but were themselves illuminated by the city light, casting an even glow over the street. He clutched the clipboard. The envelope with its single bill was in his coat pocket. His Swatch said it was a quarter to nine. He hoped they found Sigmone soon, but also, glancing at Kamika, he hoped they never found him.

From the shadows at the end of a dark driveway a wolf emerged, as big as Augustin. Or had it always been this man, in work boots and a Packers jacket? His face was stubbly with five o’clock shadow and he held one arm awkwardly at his side, as if it had been hurt. Even as a person, not a wolf, he intimidated Joel, because he could see that he was powerful, could feel Kamika tense up next to him. She tried to step in front of Joel, to get in between the man and him, but Joel sidestepped her and claimed his own spot in the conversation.

The man nodded. “Where’s Augustin?”

“He’s around.”

The man tilted his head sideways and gave her a quizzical look. “I don’t smell him,” he said.

“Owen. What do you want?”

“There’s a new one in your pack. Who is he?”

“It’s not my pack.”

He barely smiled. “Your people.”

“Who Augustin runs around with is his business.”

“And who are you running around with?” he asked, glancing at Joel. “Why’s he with you?” Kamika took a step back. In the yards around them, in the dark corners, Joel sensed shadows moving silently, watching.

Joel took a deep breath. He stepped forward. “I’m selling subscriptions to the Milwaukee Sentinel,” he said. “I see you’re a Packer fan.”

“Who’s that down the street?” Greg asked.

“Ugh, that’s our dad,” Jenny said.

Sigmone squinted. “That’s Joel!” He jogged a few steps forward and called his name. The three figures at the end of the block turned to look at them. Behind Joel, he could see, was Kamika, and he could tell, even from here, that the man in the Packers jacket was the wolf he’d seen his grandpa fighting.

As they approached, the man stepped away from Joel and Kamika and toward them. He gave a once-over to Sigmone, then turned to Justin and Jenny and talked to them as if the others weren’t even there. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

“We’re hanging out,” Jenny said. “Jesus.”

Justin laughed. “What is this, West Side Story?”

“Very funny.”

“Hey, Sigmone!” Joel said, waving his clipboard. “I told you, man! That was bad, man!” He stopped short. “Are you all gonna eat me?”

“No, we’re not gonna eat you,” Sigmone said.

“Are they werewolves, too?” Joel asked.

Sigmone was instantly, painfully embarrassed to be known by this kid. “What exactly are you guys doing out here?” he asked.

“I was just telling this guy here about the commemorative plate,” Joel said, cocking a thumb at Justin and Jenny’s dad. Sigmone looked again. He felt the presence of other wolves, not far, and he clocked Joel standing in front of Kamika, and he thought, Huh.

“This is all going to end badly,” the man said.

“It’s only gonna end badly if y’all end it badly,” said Greg.

“I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to my kids.”

“He’s right, though,” Kamika said. “You all retreating to your own sides, fighting for the scraps. Instead of fighting the real enemy.”

“Yeah, who’s that?” the man said.

“Is it vampires?” Joel asked.

“The bosses!” Kamika said. “The people moving the factories away!”

“There’s no vampires here,” Jenny said. “They’re all on the South Side.”

A new voice chimed in, his grandpa’s. “And what are we gonna do? March on Washington?” He emerged from behind a parked truck into the pool of light they all stood in. Sigmone had no idea how long he’d been nearby. He nodded at Justin and Jenny’s dad, who nodded back.

“Boycotts!” Kamika said. “Community action! It’s not rocket science!”

“Kamika went to school, unlike some of us factory men,” Augustin said. “I think this is a discussion for another time. These kids need to get home.”

The other man turned to his children. “We’re only going if you come with us,” Jenny said before he could speak.

The man turned back to Augustin. “I guess we’ll continue this later,” he said.

“Look forward to it.”

“Dear Lord,” Kamika said. “Just a bunch of mangy dogs fighting in the yard.”

“Bye, Sigmone,” Justin said, but his father was already ushering them up a driveway into the dark. Jenny gave a little wave, and then they were wolves, and then they were gone.

“We’ll take Sigmone and Joel back to where they need to go,” his grandpa said to Greg, his arms folded.

Greg looked at Sigmone and at Augustin. Sigmone wanted him to stay. He wanted to ask him how he got along with his white friends, how he got along in the world. He wanted to know more about the music they were listening to, and why his dad wasn’t in the pack. But Greg ducked his head and said, “Okay, I understand.” He looked up at Sigmone. “I’ll see you around, maybe.” And then he was running, four legs flying, a gray blur in the dark street.

“I’ll never get tired of seeing that,” Joel said happily.

Sometimes Sigmone had dreams where he was talking to a girl—sometimes a girl from his class, sometimes a girl from TV, sometimes (embarrassingly) his science teacher—and he could actually talk to her. He didn’t clam up from shyness. He didn’t stumble over his words. He didn’t say anything stupid. He just told jokes, or complimented her, or asked her questions, and the girl responded. And they would talk awhile, and in the dream, the girl would draw close, smiling, and put her arms around him, and he could feel her up against him, and feel her warm breath on his face, and Lisa Bonet or his science teacher or whoever would lean in to kiss him, and just before their lips connected he would wake up.

This happened at least one night a week. And the instant he woke he would feel as miserable as a person could feel. The girl was gone. The dream was gone. He was alone in his too-small bed in his messy room. He could scramble all he wanted to remember what it felt like; he could even try to force himself back to sleep in the hopes of returning to it. But that kiss was never happening. Even worse, the kiss had never been real in the first place. He hadn’t been smooth. He hadn’t gotten someone to like him. It had been a dream.

Walking back toward Hampton with Joel and his grandpa and Kamika, he was reminded of this feeling, thinking of those older kids who had, for a brief moment, seemed like they could be his friends. It had been a powerful feeling, more powerful, even, than the feeling of running around with his grandfather’s pack. But then he had woken up. He didn’t have a car, he didn’t have their phone numbers, he barely even knew where he was. Tonight he would climb into Kevin’s van and return to his neighborhood. Tomorrow he’d get on the bus back to Whitefish Bay, awake and alone.

He could tell Joel had it bad for Kamika, the way he covered his awkwardness with chatter. The guy just didn’t quit. He didn’t think he could be friends with him, but he guessed he wouldn’t mind seeing him around the halls. It might be good to have an eighth grader who knew his name, even a twerp like this one. At least he had that. At least they sold one subscription. At least he had Kamika’s ten-dollar bill in his pocket. At least he was going to Burger King.

At least he’d found his grandpa, even if it was different from how he’d hoped it would be.

The tavern came into view, and the white van parked in front of it. There were two boys waiting there. Which ones were they again? As they got closer it looked like Mark and whatsisface, the quiet one. They both looked different, in some way Sigmone couldn’t quite peg. Were they bigger somehow? Ryan—that was his name—he waved, obviously confused to see other adults walking with Sigmone and Joel. Then both boys’ faces brightened with alarm, and they pointed behind Sigmone. He turned just in time to see the vargr leap at his grandpa.

In a snarl and a crunch of ice the two wolves rolled, tearing and snapping. And then there were more wolves, flooding out of the bushes and the backyards, both packs colliding here on busy Hampton Avenue, of all places. A car honked and screeched as two wolves rolled into the road. Another pair wrestled each other into a tree, which dropped a shower of ice onto their fur. It sounded like the inside of a pound. A terrified Mark and Ryan held themselves tight against the van, and Sigmone felt exhausted at the very idea of listening to Joel explaining everything to them.

A wolf rushed past them and Joel jumped in front of Kamika, took the hit, spun to the ground. Sigmone was so done with this shit. Done with these fucking wolves and this hero white kid and Hampton Heights. Sigmone grabbed Joel by the arm and dragged him toward the van. “My coat!” Joel said, showing Sigmone his ripped sleeve. “If he bit me, am I gonna turn into a wolf?”

“No,” Sigmone said. “You’ll turn black.” He took a tiny bit of pleasure in the mixture of shock and fear that crossed Joel’s face, felt bad about it, decided to think about it later.

You should expect trouble before you expect peace, Kareem had said in his book. Sigmone had underlined that, too. It had felt true then. It still felt true now. He reached into the wheel well where he’d seen Kevin hide the keys, and there they were. As the wolves fought in the yards and in the street, as cars honked and neighbors started coming out their front doors, as Kamika ducked into the tavern, he herded the other boys into the back of the van and climbed behind the wheel. “Look out for them back doors, they don’t look sturdy,” he said, and turned the key.