me voy (part ii)
[part i]
~
It-being a werewolf-doesn’t work like Erica had assumed it would. She can, indeed, smell just about everything off of everyone, but it works a bit like reading people’s expressions. While some are so open that it’s impossible to not understand what they’re feeling-she knows more, for example, about Scott McCall and Allison Argent’s sex life than should be legal under the terms of the Geneva Convention-but others require familiarity and context clues to place the particulars.
The experience is sort of like being handed a sixth sense and not being told how to use it; a sixth and a seventh, really, since Erica’s sexuality is unexpectedly difficult to operate properly. She’s been handed the keys to a piece of heavy machinery and the one who did the handing over, she learns eventually, knows fuck all about how to work it.
~
All in all, that it takes her parents until the end of the summer to say anything is more than a minor miracle: it’s frankly astonishing, and Erica at first dismisses it as lucky and then circles back around to viewing it as a manifestation of years of guilt they’ve been stockpiling about their homebound useless epileptic daughter. Until April of her sophomore year of high school, Erica has never slept with her bedroom door shut; she’s never left the house without one of her parents in attendance; she has a cell phone but it’s the least used of any on their family share plan, because no one calls or texts Erica except the members of her own family.
And then, of course, April happens and Erica’s bedroom door is shut more often than not, to account for the fact that Erica isn’t home at night. She has more texts than she knows what to do with: perplexing orders from Derek, frantic question marks from Isaac when he doesn’t hear back from her right away, perfectly organized and grammatically flawless interjections or comments or questions from Boyd.
Erica hits her former crush in the face with a piece of a car; she wears a leather jacket and puts on enough lipstick that she smears red like blood across Derek’s face; she walks with an exaggerated sway and she wears shoes with stupidly high heels and she goes to H&M and blows allowance normally regulated to books on a set of tank tops a size too small and jeans that run up her new legs like a hot pair of hands.
She breaks both of her arms, dislocates one of her shoulders, cracks a rib, and shatters her tibia. She is kidnapped and tortured by both a human and a werewolf; she kisses four men, one woman, and has her nose broken, for the second time, by a fist that is as hard as steel. The second time that her nose heals, the damage from the original break disappears altogether. Erica methodically runs a finger across all the scars on her life from her years with epilepsy and she wipes them away; she molds the clay back into as perfect a shape as she can manage.
And Erica kills a man with her bare hands; she rips out his throat with her teeth and she drinks so much of his blood that it makes her sick and dizzy and she has to stumble, with her arm looped over Boyd’s massive, rock formation of a shoulder, back to Derek’s house under the pale sliver of the new moon.
Maybe it’s unsurprising that it’s six hours after Erica becomes a killer that she climbs through her bedroom window, holding herself awkwardly to brace her still-healing bones, and her parents are both sitting on her bed. She knows better than to think Ben is asleep; she can see the knee of his pajamas where he’s crouched outside of the door. Even worse, she can hear him breathing.
“Hi,” Erica says, classic Stiles, as she levers herself up over the sill. This is the first time Erica has ever heard her mother be silent, and it’s a terrifying calm.
“Are you,” her mother finally asks, in flawlessly cold Spanish, “trying to kill yourself, Erica?”
The question is so breathtakingly missing the point that Erica wants to laugh. She’s watched herself do it in the mirror, the way that the red of her lipstick cuts a swathe across her lower face. It’s attractive and dangerous, just like Erica has become. As she perches half in and half out of the window, her legs straddling the sill, she draws her wolf eyes over her parents, eager both to see and not.
What catches her eye is the pile of books by her bedside table; purchases picked on a whim from the library book sale. She’d gone with her father and Ben in May but with the press of the kanima along her shoulder blades like a razor, Erica hadn’t been able to devote to it her usual level of focus and she’d ended up with a handful of things that hadn’t seemed nearly as appealing once she’d settled down enough to sort through them: Judith Merkle Riley for the historical mysticism that had fallen flat against the hypnotically magical realism of Erica’s own existence; Aimee Bender, too close to the bone; Orson Scott Card, finally too much of a homophobic racist asshole for even his prose to make up for it.
“No,” Erica finally says, and it sounds patently like the lie that it is.
“Because,” her mother thunders, “this isn’t exactly the best way to go about living! Climbing through second story windows?!” She makes a breathless huff and cuts across the air in front of her face with her thumb pressed to her forefinger; it’s achingly dismissive. “What if you fall? What if you crack your head open on my laurel tree?”
Slightly hysterical, Erica reminds her, “The laurel is too far away for me to hit,” which has exactly the effect that one might expect; Erica’s father turns puce and his face tightens up sourly.
“You can’t do things like other teenagers,” her father says; he speaks in English, because his Spanish is embarrassingly terrible, “and you need to accept that, Erica. We thought you had accepted that.”
“I had,” Erica admits, swinging her left leg so her heel bounces against the outside of the house. “I have. I’m not like other teenagers, that’s true.” Erica has gone from one kind of outcast to another; but once, where she was strung out in a galaxy on her own, light-years from everyone else performing a similar function, she’s now part of a solar system of outcasts, rotating around the sun of their Alpha.
Erica has killed to keep Derek safe; that feels like more of an admission than anything she’d done under his orders in the spring. She now knows, in a peculiarly set sort of way, that all of her talk about killing Jackson and killing Scott and killing this and that and the other thing had been done under a distinct set of circumstances where she had felt unbearably powerful and everyone else weak and stupid. It had felt right to want to kill.
Without conscious input, her fingers dig into the wood of the windowsill and the vinyl siding of the house shrieks in protest. Now that Erica has killed, she doesn’t really want to do it again.
“Then why the hell are you doing this?” Erica’s mother demands. “Look at you!”
“Yes,” Erica agrees, liquid voice slicing through her mother’s objections. “Look at me. I look good, don’t I? I’ve lost all that weight; my acne’s gone away. I have friends.” She’s wearing her favorite corset tonight; in addition to accenting her breasts, it accentuates her point.
Under her breath, Erica’s mother mutters, “Friends, please, you’ve got Ted Bundy and his crazy band of serial killer back-up dancers,” which might be the most relevant social reference Erica’s mother has ever made. It’s sad that only Erica and her mother hear it; it’s the sort of statement that has never failed to shock a bark of laughter out of Erica’s father.
“Cita,” her father begins, wearily, and he cards a hand through his hair, “you’re sick. You have to run your life a certain way because of that. It’s not fair and it’s hard because you’re a beautiful girl and you’ve realized that, but we love you. We don’t want anything to happen to you because you’re out in the woods in the middle of the night and you’re with a bunch of your friends who don’t know what to do if you have a seizure.”
Erica hasn’t had the best track record in the past few months with regards to responding well to logical statements, but she reminds herself that these are her parents and they may have been ill-equipped to deal with an epileptic daughter but they’re at least trying, which is a ten-fold improvement on Boyd’s checked-out mother and a kazillion-fold improvement on Isaac’s psycho dead father.
“Trust me,” Erica finally says, “you don’t need to worry about that.” She doesn’t trust her parents the way that Stiles clearly trusts his father or Scott trusts his mother; she can’t even begin to predict how they might react to the truth about Erica’s recently developed extracurricular activities. It’s hard to trust someone you don’t know, and Erica barely knows her parents. She’s spent the last nine years of her life buried in books.
“Oh?” her mother snaps. “So if you have a grand mal out there, you’ll be fine?”
“That’s not an issue,” Erica replies evasively.
“You can’t pretend you aren’t sick!” her mother shouts. “It doesn’t work like that!” Shockingly, she begins to cry: huge, fat tears that Erica can smell clear across the room. There’s nothing attractive about the way that Erica’s mother cries, which is disconcerting because Erica has always lived under the impression that her mother did everything with a certain baseline attractiveness that had been embarrassing from thirteen onward, when Erica had been forced to recognize her own inadequacies within her own home.
But her eyes catch imperfections where before there had been none: wrinkles and sags of skin and the grey hairs tangled in with mahogany brown; the water pools in the lines of her mother’s face and the salt leaves shiny tracks against her mother’s skin. Erica hears the sobs at a deeper register, where they rattle against her mother’s diaphragm. What had once seemed like elfin delicacy now rates as disturbingly frail; now that Erica has killed someone, her mother won’t stop looking like prey.
Stop, Erica thinks desperately, but she can’t turn it off.
“Stop,” Erica whispers. “Mama, stop it.”
Her mother glares through wet eyelashes. “Look at what you do to me,” she hisses. “Crying like a child because my daughter doesn’t care enough about her parents not to kill herself.” Her mother tries to click her tongue dismissively, but she can’t manage it with all of the mucus building up in her nose. She has to gasp for breath. Erica feels rather than sees her father’s fingers dig into the skin of her mother’s shoulder.
“Mama, I’m not going to die,” Erica swears. “I know what I'm doing. You just have to trust me, okay?” She says it without thinking, as she throws her leg over the windowsill and drops onto the carpeted floor.
To her everlasting surprise, this stops the tears. “Trust you?” her mother repeats, and Erica is starkly reminded of her own doubt and mistrust in her parents.
“Yes,” Erica says, weaker this time. “Please. Mama.”
Out in the hallway, Ben shifts onto his heels and the thin cotton of his pajama pants brushes against the wood frame of the door. There’s a handprint on top of the copy of Enchanted at the top of the pile on the bedside table; it’s raised like braille from the dust on the rest of the cover. The hand is too small to be Erica’s and too large for Ben’s. She is trying to imagine her mother resting her hand on a beat-up edition of a book that even Erica has found too misogynistic to enjoy anymore when her mother inhales and says “Vale,” in unison with her father’s, “All right.”
“What,” Erica says, involuntarily. “Wait, really?”
Erica is still fairly awful at lie detecting, but she listens very hard to her mother’s heartbeat as she says, “We want you to be okay,” and it’s not a lie. Now that the original hesitation has been vanquished, that’s gone, too; there is, for an inexplicable reason, trust in her voice.
Erica is seventeen and she’s now a murderer and for some reason, despite the fact that she’s been lying to her parents for five months with such a steady flow of bullshit that her grace period seems like a miracle, they trust her. In retrospect, the fact that it takes her father opening his arms to make her cry is astonishing; once, Erica would have been sobbing the moment that she tumbled through the window and saw them there.
“Get in here, idiot,” Erica mumbles two seconds into the hug, and Ben scrambles on his hands and knees through the door and throws himself onto the pile on Erica’s much-abused twin bed. He smells like cooked wires and copper and the Roomba that he never returned.
“Cita,” her mother murmurs, pressing a trembling hand against the back of her head, “oh, baby, Cita, it’s okay,” and Erica cries until her nose is plugged up and she can’t smell anything except herself, as if being caged in the bosom of her family has caused forced her back into being human. It is not as distasteful a sensation as she would have anticipated. “Todo está bien,” her mother chants, and her father’s big hand cradles the back of her head as she buries her head further into the nest of their shoulders. “Todo va a estar bien.”
~
The next full moon isn’t for two more weeks and Erica needs time to evaluate the repercussions of her new arrangement with her parents; she turns off her phone, props her bedroom door open with her old friend the wooden wedge, and puts an old pair of sweatpants. She then gets unbearably hot and goes downstairs to unearth a large pair of kitchen shears; she stands in her underwear at the kitchen table and cuts the legs off of the sweatpants at what she evaluates as high on her thigh.
Her mother watches from the dining room table as Erica tugs on her newly improvised shorts and pulls the drawstring tight; even with it knotted as far down as she can get it, the shorts still fall to her hips and cling perilously. They stay up solely by virtue of Erica’s fabulous Reyes ass, and they’re barely fit for the house, let alone public consumption.
Erica looks up and her mother has a speculative gleam in her eye, which means twenty minutes later Erica puts her jeans back on and lets herself be shoved by a woman half her size into the passenger seat of her mother’s Golf. Her father and Ben wave from the porch as Erica’s mother peels out of the driveway and aims towards Beacon Hills Mall.
“This,” Erica says to her mother, “is a psychological disaster waiting to happen.” Erica is now far more intimately familiar with psychological disasters than anyone her age should be, but, as Stiles is fond of saying, them’s the lumps.
Her mother huffs high in her throat and pulls the Golf into a parking space outside of Macy’s. “I’ve seen your wardrobe,” she tells Erica. “Corsets and skirts that used to be classified as belts; I’m not exactly impressed.”
“I’m not a doll, Mama,” Erica says, exasperated.
“If you’re nice,” her mother says, “I’ll take you to Barnes & Nobles.”
“Playing dirty, I see,” Erica comments, and her mother grins.
First is Macy’s shoe department-“Don’t think I haven’t see my leopard-print heels disappearing every other week,” her mother admonishes-and then, Erica holding a bag in which is a pair ludicrously inexpensive red patent leather heels, they stop at Aerie, which is having a huge sale, and Erica’s mother flings underwear at Erica like she knows that Erica is half-naked around attractive men 80% of her week. Her mother has always had a very European approach to nakedness, and that’s emphasized when she orders Erica into the dressing room with a variety of bras that lift Erica’s cleavage up around her ears, presumably so she can begin her campaign to phase out the corsets. “Pushy,” the attendant remarks with a genuine smile, and Erica smiles back, rolling her eyes heavenward. “You have no idea,” she says, and the attendant laughs.
The bras are a solid investment, since the weight loss had shifted Erica from a 38C to a 34C and she’d been making do with safety pins-hardly the best option for a werewolf girl on the go-and it’s not like Erica is going to object to underwear that will, hopefully, make Boyd swallow his tongue instead of his default expression of unperturbed. The shoes are more difficult to rationalize, since heels have always been number four on the list of things Erica is forbidden to own, but she rolls with it all the way to H&M, where her mother goes slightly crazy and selects a lot of basically every item of clothing.
“This qualifies as back to school shopping,” her mother says as she shoves more dresses over the door to the dressing room. “Tell me what you think of the pink one!”
“Well,” Erica says to her reflection, “for one thing, it’s pink.” She pulls it on anyway, and the pink is just as nauseating as she’d anticipated, even if it’s paired with a devastating neckline. “What do you think?” she asks her mother, pulling open the door. “I think I look like a bottle of Pepto Bismol, right? A kind of sexy bottle, but a bottle nonetheless.”
Her mother moves her eyes up and down the line of the dress; she swallows twice, eyes inexplicably wet, and says, “Yes, yes, wrong color,” and hands off two more sweaters. “Try these.”
“I demand at least three books in exchange for this!” Erica shouts over the door. She makes a face at herself in the mirror; there’s an unexpected buoyancy to being surrounded by herself and not pathologically despising everything. Just for the novelty of it, she runs her fingers over the part of the glass that reflects the sweetheart neckline of the dress. Her skin glows under the fluorescent light of the dressing room, and it’s a healthy vitality that speaks, more than anything else, to what the bite has done for Erica’s life.
“This is okay,” Erica says, shocked by the sound of her own voice. “I look-okay.” Even in the ludicrously pink dress. She strips it off finally, and replaces it with a chiffon skirt (no) and striped green tank (yes?) and the first of the sweaters, shrunken so its blocks of color can frame her breasts and her face. “This skirt is hell,” she tells her mother when she opens the door to solicit her opinion. “But I kind of like the sweater.”
Erica’s mother promptly bursts into tears.
“Holy shit,” Erica says, reaching out and grabbing her mother around the upper arms. “Mama? Mama? Are you okay?”
“Cita,” her mother blubbers, framing her face with her hands. “My beautiful girl.” The girl in the next stall leans out of her door; it’s Letty Westfield, from Erica’s fourth period Spanish class last year. Erica’s feelings on Beacon Hills’ non-werewolf teen population have remained fairly negative; she bares her teeth at Letty, and the latter swings back into her dressing room, slamming the door shut after her.
“Mama, what the hell?” Erica asks, pulling her mother out of the hall and into the tiny dressing room.
“You’re so precious to me, baby,” her mother wails. “You’re my baby girl.”
Erica doesn’t really know what else to do, so she wedges her mother’s head between her neck and chin and holds on as her mother’s hands clench into the fabric of the sweater and pull, her body shaking. “I love you, Mama,” she says, and it only makes her mother cry harder. A little abruptly, Erica realizes that she hasn’t said the words in years; in fact, if Erica thinks about it, she hasn’t said anything in years.
“Don’t leave me, Cita,” her mother sobs.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Erica says. “Look, I’m buying all these clothes you want me to buy, aren’t I?”
“I want you to want them,” Erica’s mother cries.
Erica doesn’t know if it’s appropriate to laugh at your parent’s panic attack in the middle of an H&M dressing room, so she coughs lightly and swallows it. “Mama, I have plenty of clothes.”
This makes her mother cry harder.
“Okay,” Erica admits, “a lot of them don’t fit and we should probably burn everything that’s larger than a size 12, but you don’t have to buy me clothes to prove that you’re okay with this, Mama.” She runs her hand through her mother’s hair. Perhaps this is why Derek does it to Stiles all the time; it’s comforting to feel the scratch of hair against her palm and nails, and it releases her mother’s scent into the air. “You could’ve just gotten me the books.”
“No,” her mother says forcefully. “You look great in that sweater.”
“Well,” Erica admits, “my boobs look pretty great, yeah,” and so her mother buys her the sweater-when Erica puts her foot down, only the sweater-and then Erica and her mother spend four hours in Barnes & Nobles, drinking white mochas and arguing about which Margaret Atwood novel better represents dystopian decay. Her mother looks vaguely shocked when Erica finishes a particularly compelling point about Oryx and Crake and she forgets to parry with her next argument in her defense of The Handmaid’s Tale.
“What?” Erica asks, tonguing at her upper lip. “Do I have foam somewhere?”
“No,” her mother says. All signs of tears have been eradicated by caffeine and the flush of a good intellectual argument; in their place is the woman that Erica has come to expect across the dinner table from her, vital and thriving and full of the sort of flushed vivaciousness that Erica could only envy, never emulate. “How many times have you read Oryx and Crake?” she asks.
“I don’t know, seven or eight,” Erica says. “My copy’s getting pretty worn, actually.” She looks at the pile of books at her feet, which is two more than the number to which she and her mother had originally agreed, and sends a beseeching look at her mother. “Just one more?”
“You’ve plenty of books already,” her mother says. “We should get one for Ben.”
“He has an unhealthy taste for Rick Riordan,” Erica reminds her. “Derivative and tacky, but he has it. Isn’t there a new one of his Egypt series out?”
“Maybe?” her mother says blankly. Erica explains Rick Riordan and then Peter Jackson as a concept, which derails into mythology as a literary construct, and then they circle back into the Science Fiction/Fantasy section so Erica can find a quote in Dune that she wants to use to convince her mother to read it.
She’s thumbing through the middle section, trying to find the part about Paul’s first sandworm ride, when a cowed-looking employee with a nametag that says JOSH sidles up to them and says, in an awkwardly croaking voice, “We’re going to be closing soon.”
“Ah-ha!” Erica says, “this is it,” and she reads the paragraph cleanly through to the end of the chapter. JOSH is staring at her as though he’s never seen a girl in a leather jacket recite from Frank Herbert’s seminal classic before. “We got it,” she tells him, unable to keep from growling some of her irritation, and he meeps and bolts for the door marked employee-only behind him.
On the ride back, as Erica thumbs through her new books, scenting the fresh ink smell with her highly appreciative wolf’s nose, her mother locks her grip around the steering wheel and begins, in a queer voice, “It’s easy to love your children and not like them, Erica.” All that Erica can think of that is Isaac’s father and the repressed way that Isaac sometimes holds himself, waiting for the click of the freezer door shutting over his head. “What I mean,” her mother continues, “is that you can love your children and it won’t be the kind of love that you have for a friend. You never treat them like anything more than just your child; you’re stuck in that relationship.” She smiles, absently, out over the stretch of road in front of her car. “I thought that would be us, Cita. You’ve always been so locked inside your head, it feels like we’ve never talked to each other, just past.”
Erica closes her books and places them on the floor of the car, wedging them between her legs. “Mama,” she begins, and then she has no idea how to continue.
“You have lovely thoughts in here,” her mother says, letting go of the wheel to run a finger along Erica’s forehead. “I’m glad you can say them now, Cita.”
~
After dinner, which is ordered-in Chinese, Erica claims one end of the couch and Ben the other, his Rick Riordan haphazard mess already parted to the second chapter. “You’re such a dweeb,” Erica notes in a deeply suspicious voice, and Ben doesn’t look up as he kicks her thigh.
“Because you can talk,” he says huffily. “Seriously, like you needed your own copy of Atonement.”
“I couldn’t read the other one,” Erica says, distracted into answering honestly. “I can smell Papa’s tears all over it.”
“Creepy,” Ben observes, and then they’re both submerged. Erica devours like she hasn’t read in ages; she reads to dig herself in, to burrow deeply and pull apart herself and rebuild from the pieces. She can never read Atonement in one sitting, especially not the war scenes-they scrape up her throat from far down in her stomach. She fudges on the chapter pauses and uses them for little things, like bathroom breaks and another glass of water, recklessly racing towards the discerning moment where Robbie climbs over the hill, one of the twins draped over his shoulders, the other holding his hand.
She finishes the chapter and reflexively checks the clock over the mantle; it’s half past midnight, and Ben has made a significant dent into his Riordan trash. “Isn’t this past your bedtime?” Erica asks suspiciously. If she tries, she can remember her parents shouting something about bed as they retired an hour ago, but everything external to the pages had been repressed by the starkness of the sticky English summer heat.
“Maybe,” Ben says distractedly. “Isn’t it past yours?”
“Cute,” Erica replies, and she snatches the book out of his hands. “At least do Mama and Papa the courtesy of reading under the covers with a flashlight, not out in the open of the living room, flagrantly defying their every edict.”
“I preferred it when you were quiet and shy,” Ben informs her, nose at a very Lydia angle as he picks himself off of the sofa. He holds out his hand like a disgruntled cat; Erica laughs as she puts his book on his palm.
“You and the rest of the world, kid,” she says in her best Sam Spade, which is not very good.
The contentedness of returning to her books blends with the peacefulness of her wolf; Erica showers and pulls on a pair of her new underwear and then her favorite t-shirt, worn thin and big around the shoulders. She debates starting part two of Atonement, decides against it, and then burrows into her comforter with The Once and Future King on her lap. Even if her door were closed-which, it’s not-she’d still be able to hear her parents’ even breaths in their bedroom, and Ben’s frantic heartbeat as he pages through whatever exciting adventure Rick Riordan has crafted in his pursuit of the bastardization of Egyptian mythology.
Erica cheats and skips ahead to Lancelot’s section, which is her favorite. An hour later, as she gnaws steadily on her lower lip and mouths, Don't fall in love with her you beautiful idiot, there’s a quiet knock on her bedroom window.
It’s Boyd, of all people. Erica holds a finger up to her lips and glares; she slips out of bed and silently shuts her door before opening the window. “Are you taking stalking lessons from Derek?” Erica demands. “How are you even standing out there? I barely fit and I’m half as big as you.”
“Magic,” Boyd says drily. “It’s got a timer on it, though, so…”
Erica steps to the side and gestures him in. “What brings you to the Reyes household at this hour?”
Boyd’s grin is so fast that it’s already gone by the time Erica’s brain has caught up to seeing it. “Erica, it’s not even two yet.”
“Oh,” says Erica lamely. “Yeah, right. Of course.” Now that Boyd points it out, Erica can’t remember a time in recent memory that she was even home at this hour, let alone tucked into her bed. She wants to hate it, as a reminder of the nine years of her life that she spent reading books under tables and not talking to anyone, but her native response to life-threatening situations appears to be turtling in her bedroom under a pile of words from T. H. White.
“You’ve been missing,” Boyd rumbles. He moves his eyes methodically over the contents of Erica’s tiny bedroom; the walls, which Erica’s father had painted green as a birthday present seven or eight years ago, are barely visible under acres of white IKEA bookshelves. Erica has more paperbacks than hardcovers and everything looks secondhand because she rereads obsessively, but the point is made rather glaringly. “You’re a bigger nerd than Stilinski,” Boyd says, sounding delighted.
“Shut up,” Erica hisses, punching Boyd in the shoulder. He’s a giant, so she has to aim above her head to make contact. “I’m not. I passed the tenth grade by the skin of my teeth and the fact that no one, not even Harris, wants to be the hard-ass giving a failing grade to a severe epileptic.”
“So these aren’t yours?” Boyd replies.
“Shut up,” Erica says again. “They’re just books.”
She doesn’t meant that, especially since she could write some very high-quality college admissions essays-in a world where Erica Reyes could dream about getting into college, that is, which is a world that Erica doesn’t live in-about how her life has been shaped by having books instead of friends. The scary feeling in the pit of Erica’s stomach, the one she’s tried to cow into submission by being sexy and fun and dangerous, has unclenched itself after a full night’s sleep with no worry about what awaits Erica when she wakes up. There’s always another disaster on the horizon, as the past five months have elucidated, but for now, Erica doesn’t know what waits for her and it feels like a series of deep, centering breaths.
Boyd slips his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “No,” he says, “they’re not,” and Erica is struck with the realization, like she has been in isolated moments in the past, that the decision to take the bite was the right one for Boyd. He’s the calmest and wisest of their fledgling pack and as far as Erica can tell he’s never needed an anchor the way that Scott pins himself to Allison Argent. The wolf suits Boyd in a way that ill-fitting humanity had been bad for him.
Erica is starting to think that maybe what she needed was friends and a weekly appointment with a therapist. The bite has made her more, but the “her” it was working with was basically nothing; all it did was exponentially increase empty air and assumptions. There’s no way to tell if Erica is a better wolf than human because she never really tried to be human in the first place. It has always been much easier to slip underneath her skin and ignore all of the parts that hurt.
“No,” Erica echoes, a minute and a half too late to play that off as anything other than deeply introspective. “They were everything. For me.”
“I remember,” Boyd says, and Erica can peel back the words and see what’s framed inside of them: Boyd, watching her as she pretended not to look at him, her knees tapping the underside of her desk as she balanced a broken spine on her legs and bit at her thumbnail.
This feels like the kind of moment where something important has to be said; Erica knows that if she wastes moments like this, the ones that fall on the very edge of a rocky cliff face, she’ll just never say the vital things at all. “I can’t be sorry that it fixed me,” Erica tells him. “Maybe I should be, since I spent a lot of time fucking things up and hurting people, but I don't want to be sorry.”
Boyd shrugs. “Don’t be,” he says. It’s not dismissive; it’s the same tone he’d used when Erica had said, Derek is a mess and we’re going to die if we stay with his pack, and when she’d said, The Alphas are too dangerous to have full control of Beacon Hills. When Boyd has an opinion of a situation, Erica can count on it being full: fully weighed, fully measured, fully evaluated. Boyd is probably the most decisive person Erica knows.
“Okay,” Erica says breathily, and then, “Okay, good,” with a nervous tinge to it. This is the first time she’s ever had anyone, other than a member of her immediate family, in her bedroom since she was eight. Against her will, Erica feels herself succumb to a numbing blush. “What’s up?” she asks, and even if theoretically she knows how to ask that without sounding tremulous, she doesn’t manage it in practice.
Boyd looks down and seems to suddenly notice The Once and Future King, splayed across Erica’s quilt. “You didn’t answer any of your texts today. Isaac was worried.” Erica gets a trembling flake of guilt stuck in her throat for that; she can see in Isaac that fragility that she doesn’t have to worry about in Ben. Isaac has a complex understanding of the world and its myriad ways of being cruel and if she shields him from that, she feels a little better about how out of control her own behavior has become.
“Sorry.” She doesn’t have to sneak looks at Boyd out of the corner of her eye anymore; she can openly watch as he gently lifts her book off of her bed, flipping it over and scanning the passage to which it is open. “My parents caught me sneaking in last night and we had to talk about it, and then my mom wanted to bond.” The words are classic snarky teenager, but Erica can’t muster enough disdain to make the point really stick.
“Sounds nice,” Boyd observes. He uses his thumb to save her page as he flicks forward, reading of what’s to come.
“I-I mean, yeah,” Erica says, since nice is inoffensive and toothless and ambiguous enough to cover at least some of her day. “It. Um. How was yours?”
Boyd finishes what had occupied him in the text; he returns to her page and puts the book back in its original place on her quilt, the square ends of his fingers brushing up along the spine in a way that makes the muscles in Erica’s lower back knot. However she feels about Boyd is quieter than the blazing LOOK AT ME that has characterized her pseudo-sexual experiences of the past five months; she doesn’t really know what to do with it.
The tic tic tic of the clock in the hall decelerates as Boyd trails his eyes up, from the ragged carpet fibers under Erica’s bare toes to the places on her leg where she’s missed hairs while shaving to her knees, no longer knobby or fat or ill-proportioned when Erica looks in the mirror; then to the place where her t-shirt skims the tops of her thighs, strong and muscled from the bite and running and locking her legs around things; and the inside of her left elbow and the heavy, obvious curve of her breast, and then her exposed collarbone and the ball of her shoulder, which are sun-dappled and golden and no longer look like the bruised surface of the moon; and then her mouth.
Boyd says, “You don’t have to feel guilty about them.”
He’s catalogued so many parts of Erica in the past minute that she’s dizzy with the possibilities. “About what?” she breathes.
“Your family,” he says. “They love you. It’s okay that you have them and we don’t.”
“I,” Erica croaks helplessly, “what?”
“My parents aren’t really around and Isaac’s are both dead; we have the pack because we don’t have anyone else. But you don’t have to choose, Erica. You can have both.”
As if to underline this important thematic concept, Erica’s mother breathes out in her sleep, a steady, huffed, “Naaaahh,” and it layers over Boyd’s heart and his breathing and both are faster than usual, because this is important to Boyd, for some indecipherable reason: this is a thing Boyd needs Erica to understand.
Maybe, most importantly, it’s something that Boyd understands that Erica needs. “I,” Erica repeats, and she thinks, Did I do that? But she doesn’t even need a slideshow of her greatest hits of the past five months to know that she has, in fact, been doing exactly that: becoming Isaac’s new mom and licking her lips obnoxiously to make Stiles jealous enough that he’ll finally make a move on Derek and trying to point out to Scott that he doesn’t need to pine over Allison when Isaac is right there, staring at him with stupid moon-calf eyes. Erica has been crafting a new family and ignoring her old one because always crackling at the back of her mind has been the awareness that, for Boyd and Isaac, the pack is everything.
“I was right about Mimir, I think,” Erica says finally, and it’s not the most embarrassing thing she could’ve chosen to blurt out, but it’s certainly not a spectacularly smooth statement, either.
“What?” Boyd asks. His attention is so sharp that Erica doesn’t feel any pain when it slides into her body; like Excalibur, it slips seamlessly into stone and she grips it tight within herself.
“It’s not important,” Erica tells him. The words are very easy, when she has him locked inside already: “So, are you going to kiss me at some point or are you just going to stand there like Scott and look dumb?”
On look, Boyd lifts Erica with big, searing hands and palms her upper thighs as he presses her into the bookshelf against the wall that her room shares with Ben’s-children’s classics and young adult, including the entire Harry Potter series in both English and Spanish-and follows with his tongue where before had been only his words, the ones spoken and unspoken. He traces them to the back of Erica’s mouth and he bites, to give them permanence.
Erica scrapes her nails through the thin shell of his hair and bites back, until the blood trickles across her tongue and she can taste an aura, in waves of shivers that coast down from her head to her toes, and she hears ozone crackle in her ears and she rides it clear through to the other side, where Boyd’s hands ground her against the shelves and the cold spines of the collected books of Narnia slip under her hair. She tastes blood, and then she tastes Boyd: lake water and graphite, steady as Yggdrasil itself.
~
It-being a werewolf-doesn’t work like Erica had assumed it would. She can, indeed, smell just about everything off of everyone, but it works a bit like reading people’s expressions. While some are so open that it’s impossible to not understand what they’re feeling-she knows more, for example, about Scott McCall and Allison Argent’s sex life than should be legal under the terms of the Geneva Convention-but others require familiarity and context clues to place the particulars.
The experience is sort of like being handed a sixth sense and not being told how to use it; a sixth and a seventh, really, since Erica’s sexuality is unexpectedly difficult to operate properly. She’s been handed the keys to a piece of heavy machinery and the one who did the handing over, she learns eventually, knows fuck all about how to work it.
~
All in all, that it takes her parents until the end of the summer to say anything is more than a minor miracle: it’s frankly astonishing, and Erica at first dismisses it as lucky and then circles back around to viewing it as a manifestation of years of guilt they’ve been stockpiling about their homebound useless epileptic daughter. Until April of her sophomore year of high school, Erica has never slept with her bedroom door shut; she’s never left the house without one of her parents in attendance; she has a cell phone but it’s the least used of any on their family share plan, because no one calls or texts Erica except the members of her own family.
And then, of course, April happens and Erica’s bedroom door is shut more often than not, to account for the fact that Erica isn’t home at night. She has more texts than she knows what to do with: perplexing orders from Derek, frantic question marks from Isaac when he doesn’t hear back from her right away, perfectly organized and grammatically flawless interjections or comments or questions from Boyd.
Erica hits her former crush in the face with a piece of a car; she wears a leather jacket and puts on enough lipstick that she smears red like blood across Derek’s face; she walks with an exaggerated sway and she wears shoes with stupidly high heels and she goes to H&M and blows allowance normally regulated to books on a set of tank tops a size too small and jeans that run up her new legs like a hot pair of hands.
She breaks both of her arms, dislocates one of her shoulders, cracks a rib, and shatters her tibia. She is kidnapped and tortured by both a human and a werewolf; she kisses four men, one woman, and has her nose broken, for the second time, by a fist that is as hard as steel. The second time that her nose heals, the damage from the original break disappears altogether. Erica methodically runs a finger across all the scars on her life from her years with epilepsy and she wipes them away; she molds the clay back into as perfect a shape as she can manage.
And Erica kills a man with her bare hands; she rips out his throat with her teeth and she drinks so much of his blood that it makes her sick and dizzy and she has to stumble, with her arm looped over Boyd’s massive, rock formation of a shoulder, back to Derek’s house under the pale sliver of the new moon.
Maybe it’s unsurprising that it’s six hours after Erica becomes a killer that she climbs through her bedroom window, holding herself awkwardly to brace her still-healing bones, and her parents are both sitting on her bed. She knows better than to think Ben is asleep; she can see the knee of his pajamas where he’s crouched outside of the door. Even worse, she can hear him breathing.
“Hi,” Erica says, classic Stiles, as she levers herself up over the sill. This is the first time Erica has ever heard her mother be silent, and it’s a terrifying calm.
“Are you,” her mother finally asks, in flawlessly cold Spanish, “trying to kill yourself, Erica?”
The question is so breathtakingly missing the point that Erica wants to laugh. She’s watched herself do it in the mirror, the way that the red of her lipstick cuts a swathe across her lower face. It’s attractive and dangerous, just like Erica has become. As she perches half in and half out of the window, her legs straddling the sill, she draws her wolf eyes over her parents, eager both to see and not.
What catches her eye is the pile of books by her bedside table; purchases picked on a whim from the library book sale. She’d gone with her father and Ben in May but with the press of the kanima along her shoulder blades like a razor, Erica hadn’t been able to devote to it her usual level of focus and she’d ended up with a handful of things that hadn’t seemed nearly as appealing once she’d settled down enough to sort through them: Judith Merkle Riley for the historical mysticism that had fallen flat against the hypnotically magical realism of Erica’s own existence; Aimee Bender, too close to the bone; Orson Scott Card, finally too much of a homophobic racist asshole for even his prose to make up for it.
“No,” Erica finally says, and it sounds patently like the lie that it is.
“Because,” her mother thunders, “this isn’t exactly the best way to go about living! Climbing through second story windows?!” She makes a breathless huff and cuts across the air in front of her face with her thumb pressed to her forefinger; it’s achingly dismissive. “What if you fall? What if you crack your head open on my laurel tree?”
Slightly hysterical, Erica reminds her, “The laurel is too far away for me to hit,” which has exactly the effect that one might expect; Erica’s father turns puce and his face tightens up sourly.
“You can’t do things like other teenagers,” her father says; he speaks in English, because his Spanish is embarrassingly terrible, “and you need to accept that, Erica. We thought you had accepted that.”
“I had,” Erica admits, swinging her left leg so her heel bounces against the outside of the house. “I have. I’m not like other teenagers, that’s true.” Erica has gone from one kind of outcast to another; but once, where she was strung out in a galaxy on her own, light-years from everyone else performing a similar function, she’s now part of a solar system of outcasts, rotating around the sun of their Alpha.
Erica has killed to keep Derek safe; that feels like more of an admission than anything she’d done under his orders in the spring. She now knows, in a peculiarly set sort of way, that all of her talk about killing Jackson and killing Scott and killing this and that and the other thing had been done under a distinct set of circumstances where she had felt unbearably powerful and everyone else weak and stupid. It had felt right to want to kill.
Without conscious input, her fingers dig into the wood of the windowsill and the vinyl siding of the house shrieks in protest. Now that Erica has killed, she doesn’t really want to do it again.
“Then why the hell are you doing this?” Erica’s mother demands. “Look at you!”
“Yes,” Erica agrees, liquid voice slicing through her mother’s objections. “Look at me. I look good, don’t I? I’ve lost all that weight; my acne’s gone away. I have friends.” She’s wearing her favorite corset tonight; in addition to accenting her breasts, it accentuates her point.
Under her breath, Erica’s mother mutters, “Friends, please, you’ve got Ted Bundy and his crazy band of serial killer back-up dancers,” which might be the most relevant social reference Erica’s mother has ever made. It’s sad that only Erica and her mother hear it; it’s the sort of statement that has never failed to shock a bark of laughter out of Erica’s father.
“Cita,” her father begins, wearily, and he cards a hand through his hair, “you’re sick. You have to run your life a certain way because of that. It’s not fair and it’s hard because you’re a beautiful girl and you’ve realized that, but we love you. We don’t want anything to happen to you because you’re out in the woods in the middle of the night and you’re with a bunch of your friends who don’t know what to do if you have a seizure.”
Erica hasn’t had the best track record in the past few months with regards to responding well to logical statements, but she reminds herself that these are her parents and they may have been ill-equipped to deal with an epileptic daughter but they’re at least trying, which is a ten-fold improvement on Boyd’s checked-out mother and a kazillion-fold improvement on Isaac’s psycho dead father.
“Trust me,” Erica finally says, “you don’t need to worry about that.” She doesn’t trust her parents the way that Stiles clearly trusts his father or Scott trusts his mother; she can’t even begin to predict how they might react to the truth about Erica’s recently developed extracurricular activities. It’s hard to trust someone you don’t know, and Erica barely knows her parents. She’s spent the last nine years of her life buried in books.
“Oh?” her mother snaps. “So if you have a grand mal out there, you’ll be fine?”
“That’s not an issue,” Erica replies evasively.
“You can’t pretend you aren’t sick!” her mother shouts. “It doesn’t work like that!” Shockingly, she begins to cry: huge, fat tears that Erica can smell clear across the room. There’s nothing attractive about the way that Erica’s mother cries, which is disconcerting because Erica has always lived under the impression that her mother did everything with a certain baseline attractiveness that had been embarrassing from thirteen onward, when Erica had been forced to recognize her own inadequacies within her own home.
But her eyes catch imperfections where before there had been none: wrinkles and sags of skin and the grey hairs tangled in with mahogany brown; the water pools in the lines of her mother’s face and the salt leaves shiny tracks against her mother’s skin. Erica hears the sobs at a deeper register, where they rattle against her mother’s diaphragm. What had once seemed like elfin delicacy now rates as disturbingly frail; now that Erica has killed someone, her mother won’t stop looking like prey.
Stop, Erica thinks desperately, but she can’t turn it off.
“Stop,” Erica whispers. “Mama, stop it.”
Her mother glares through wet eyelashes. “Look at what you do to me,” she hisses. “Crying like a child because my daughter doesn’t care enough about her parents not to kill herself.” Her mother tries to click her tongue dismissively, but she can’t manage it with all of the mucus building up in her nose. She has to gasp for breath. Erica feels rather than sees her father’s fingers dig into the skin of her mother’s shoulder.
“Mama, I’m not going to die,” Erica swears. “I know what I'm doing. You just have to trust me, okay?” She says it without thinking, as she throws her leg over the windowsill and drops onto the carpeted floor.
To her everlasting surprise, this stops the tears. “Trust you?” her mother repeats, and Erica is starkly reminded of her own doubt and mistrust in her parents.
“Yes,” Erica says, weaker this time. “Please. Mama.”
Out in the hallway, Ben shifts onto his heels and the thin cotton of his pajama pants brushes against the wood frame of the door. There’s a handprint on top of the copy of Enchanted at the top of the pile on the bedside table; it’s raised like braille from the dust on the rest of the cover. The hand is too small to be Erica’s and too large for Ben’s. She is trying to imagine her mother resting her hand on a beat-up edition of a book that even Erica has found too misogynistic to enjoy anymore when her mother inhales and says “Vale,” in unison with her father’s, “All right.”
“What,” Erica says, involuntarily. “Wait, really?”
Erica is still fairly awful at lie detecting, but she listens very hard to her mother’s heartbeat as she says, “We want you to be okay,” and it’s not a lie. Now that the original hesitation has been vanquished, that’s gone, too; there is, for an inexplicable reason, trust in her voice.
Erica is seventeen and she’s now a murderer and for some reason, despite the fact that she’s been lying to her parents for five months with such a steady flow of bullshit that her grace period seems like a miracle, they trust her. In retrospect, the fact that it takes her father opening his arms to make her cry is astonishing; once, Erica would have been sobbing the moment that she tumbled through the window and saw them there.
“Get in here, idiot,” Erica mumbles two seconds into the hug, and Ben scrambles on his hands and knees through the door and throws himself onto the pile on Erica’s much-abused twin bed. He smells like cooked wires and copper and the Roomba that he never returned.
“Cita,” her mother murmurs, pressing a trembling hand against the back of her head, “oh, baby, Cita, it’s okay,” and Erica cries until her nose is plugged up and she can’t smell anything except herself, as if being caged in the bosom of her family has caused forced her back into being human. It is not as distasteful a sensation as she would have anticipated. “Todo está bien,” her mother chants, and her father’s big hand cradles the back of her head as she buries her head further into the nest of their shoulders. “Todo va a estar bien.”
~
The next full moon isn’t for two more weeks and Erica needs time to evaluate the repercussions of her new arrangement with her parents; she turns off her phone, props her bedroom door open with her old friend the wooden wedge, and puts an old pair of sweatpants. She then gets unbearably hot and goes downstairs to unearth a large pair of kitchen shears; she stands in her underwear at the kitchen table and cuts the legs off of the sweatpants at what she evaluates as high on her thigh.
Her mother watches from the dining room table as Erica tugs on her newly improvised shorts and pulls the drawstring tight; even with it knotted as far down as she can get it, the shorts still fall to her hips and cling perilously. They stay up solely by virtue of Erica’s fabulous Reyes ass, and they’re barely fit for the house, let alone public consumption.
Erica looks up and her mother has a speculative gleam in her eye, which means twenty minutes later Erica puts her jeans back on and lets herself be shoved by a woman half her size into the passenger seat of her mother’s Golf. Her father and Ben wave from the porch as Erica’s mother peels out of the driveway and aims towards Beacon Hills Mall.
“This,” Erica says to her mother, “is a psychological disaster waiting to happen.” Erica is now far more intimately familiar with psychological disasters than anyone her age should be, but, as Stiles is fond of saying, them’s the lumps.
Her mother huffs high in her throat and pulls the Golf into a parking space outside of Macy’s. “I’ve seen your wardrobe,” she tells Erica. “Corsets and skirts that used to be classified as belts; I’m not exactly impressed.”
“I’m not a doll, Mama,” Erica says, exasperated.
“If you’re nice,” her mother says, “I’ll take you to Barnes & Nobles.”
“Playing dirty, I see,” Erica comments, and her mother grins.
First is Macy’s shoe department-“Don’t think I haven’t see my leopard-print heels disappearing every other week,” her mother admonishes-and then, Erica holding a bag in which is a pair ludicrously inexpensive red patent leather heels, they stop at Aerie, which is having a huge sale, and Erica’s mother flings underwear at Erica like she knows that Erica is half-naked around attractive men 80% of her week. Her mother has always had a very European approach to nakedness, and that’s emphasized when she orders Erica into the dressing room with a variety of bras that lift Erica’s cleavage up around her ears, presumably so she can begin her campaign to phase out the corsets. “Pushy,” the attendant remarks with a genuine smile, and Erica smiles back, rolling her eyes heavenward. “You have no idea,” she says, and the attendant laughs.
The bras are a solid investment, since the weight loss had shifted Erica from a 38C to a 34C and she’d been making do with safety pins-hardly the best option for a werewolf girl on the go-and it’s not like Erica is going to object to underwear that will, hopefully, make Boyd swallow his tongue instead of his default expression of unperturbed. The shoes are more difficult to rationalize, since heels have always been number four on the list of things Erica is forbidden to own, but she rolls with it all the way to H&M, where her mother goes slightly crazy and selects a lot of basically every item of clothing.
“This qualifies as back to school shopping,” her mother says as she shoves more dresses over the door to the dressing room. “Tell me what you think of the pink one!”
“Well,” Erica says to her reflection, “for one thing, it’s pink.” She pulls it on anyway, and the pink is just as nauseating as she’d anticipated, even if it’s paired with a devastating neckline. “What do you think?” she asks her mother, pulling open the door. “I think I look like a bottle of Pepto Bismol, right? A kind of sexy bottle, but a bottle nonetheless.”
Her mother moves her eyes up and down the line of the dress; she swallows twice, eyes inexplicably wet, and says, “Yes, yes, wrong color,” and hands off two more sweaters. “Try these.”
“I demand at least three books in exchange for this!” Erica shouts over the door. She makes a face at herself in the mirror; there’s an unexpected buoyancy to being surrounded by herself and not pathologically despising everything. Just for the novelty of it, she runs her fingers over the part of the glass that reflects the sweetheart neckline of the dress. Her skin glows under the fluorescent light of the dressing room, and it’s a healthy vitality that speaks, more than anything else, to what the bite has done for Erica’s life.
“This is okay,” Erica says, shocked by the sound of her own voice. “I look-okay.” Even in the ludicrously pink dress. She strips it off finally, and replaces it with a chiffon skirt (no) and striped green tank (yes?) and the first of the sweaters, shrunken so its blocks of color can frame her breasts and her face. “This skirt is hell,” she tells her mother when she opens the door to solicit her opinion. “But I kind of like the sweater.”
Erica’s mother promptly bursts into tears.
“Holy shit,” Erica says, reaching out and grabbing her mother around the upper arms. “Mama? Mama? Are you okay?”
“Cita,” her mother blubbers, framing her face with her hands. “My beautiful girl.” The girl in the next stall leans out of her door; it’s Letty Westfield, from Erica’s fourth period Spanish class last year. Erica’s feelings on Beacon Hills’ non-werewolf teen population have remained fairly negative; she bares her teeth at Letty, and the latter swings back into her dressing room, slamming the door shut after her.
“Mama, what the hell?” Erica asks, pulling her mother out of the hall and into the tiny dressing room.
“You’re so precious to me, baby,” her mother wails. “You’re my baby girl.”
Erica doesn’t really know what else to do, so she wedges her mother’s head between her neck and chin and holds on as her mother’s hands clench into the fabric of the sweater and pull, her body shaking. “I love you, Mama,” she says, and it only makes her mother cry harder. A little abruptly, Erica realizes that she hasn’t said the words in years; in fact, if Erica thinks about it, she hasn’t said anything in years.
“Don’t leave me, Cita,” her mother sobs.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Erica says. “Look, I’m buying all these clothes you want me to buy, aren’t I?”
“I want you to want them,” Erica’s mother cries.
Erica doesn’t know if it’s appropriate to laugh at your parent’s panic attack in the middle of an H&M dressing room, so she coughs lightly and swallows it. “Mama, I have plenty of clothes.”
This makes her mother cry harder.
“Okay,” Erica admits, “a lot of them don’t fit and we should probably burn everything that’s larger than a size 12, but you don’t have to buy me clothes to prove that you’re okay with this, Mama.” She runs her hand through her mother’s hair. Perhaps this is why Derek does it to Stiles all the time; it’s comforting to feel the scratch of hair against her palm and nails, and it releases her mother’s scent into the air. “You could’ve just gotten me the books.”
“No,” her mother says forcefully. “You look great in that sweater.”
“Well,” Erica admits, “my boobs look pretty great, yeah,” and so her mother buys her the sweater-when Erica puts her foot down, only the sweater-and then Erica and her mother spend four hours in Barnes & Nobles, drinking white mochas and arguing about which Margaret Atwood novel better represents dystopian decay. Her mother looks vaguely shocked when Erica finishes a particularly compelling point about Oryx and Crake and she forgets to parry with her next argument in her defense of The Handmaid’s Tale.
“What?” Erica asks, tonguing at her upper lip. “Do I have foam somewhere?”
“No,” her mother says. All signs of tears have been eradicated by caffeine and the flush of a good intellectual argument; in their place is the woman that Erica has come to expect across the dinner table from her, vital and thriving and full of the sort of flushed vivaciousness that Erica could only envy, never emulate. “How many times have you read Oryx and Crake?” she asks.
“I don’t know, seven or eight,” Erica says. “My copy’s getting pretty worn, actually.” She looks at the pile of books at her feet, which is two more than the number to which she and her mother had originally agreed, and sends a beseeching look at her mother. “Just one more?”
“You’ve plenty of books already,” her mother says. “We should get one for Ben.”
“He has an unhealthy taste for Rick Riordan,” Erica reminds her. “Derivative and tacky, but he has it. Isn’t there a new one of his Egypt series out?”
“Maybe?” her mother says blankly. Erica explains Rick Riordan and then Peter Jackson as a concept, which derails into mythology as a literary construct, and then they circle back into the Science Fiction/Fantasy section so Erica can find a quote in Dune that she wants to use to convince her mother to read it.
She’s thumbing through the middle section, trying to find the part about Paul’s first sandworm ride, when a cowed-looking employee with a nametag that says JOSH sidles up to them and says, in an awkwardly croaking voice, “We’re going to be closing soon.”
“Ah-ha!” Erica says, “this is it,” and she reads the paragraph cleanly through to the end of the chapter. JOSH is staring at her as though he’s never seen a girl in a leather jacket recite from Frank Herbert’s seminal classic before. “We got it,” she tells him, unable to keep from growling some of her irritation, and he meeps and bolts for the door marked employee-only behind him.
On the ride back, as Erica thumbs through her new books, scenting the fresh ink smell with her highly appreciative wolf’s nose, her mother locks her grip around the steering wheel and begins, in a queer voice, “It’s easy to love your children and not like them, Erica.” All that Erica can think of that is Isaac’s father and the repressed way that Isaac sometimes holds himself, waiting for the click of the freezer door shutting over his head. “What I mean,” her mother continues, “is that you can love your children and it won’t be the kind of love that you have for a friend. You never treat them like anything more than just your child; you’re stuck in that relationship.” She smiles, absently, out over the stretch of road in front of her car. “I thought that would be us, Cita. You’ve always been so locked inside your head, it feels like we’ve never talked to each other, just past.”
Erica closes her books and places them on the floor of the car, wedging them between her legs. “Mama,” she begins, and then she has no idea how to continue.
“You have lovely thoughts in here,” her mother says, letting go of the wheel to run a finger along Erica’s forehead. “I’m glad you can say them now, Cita.”
~
After dinner, which is ordered-in Chinese, Erica claims one end of the couch and Ben the other, his Rick Riordan haphazard mess already parted to the second chapter. “You’re such a dweeb,” Erica notes in a deeply suspicious voice, and Ben doesn’t look up as he kicks her thigh.
“Because you can talk,” he says huffily. “Seriously, like you needed your own copy of Atonement.”
“I couldn’t read the other one,” Erica says, distracted into answering honestly. “I can smell Papa’s tears all over it.”
“Creepy,” Ben observes, and then they’re both submerged. Erica devours like she hasn’t read in ages; she reads to dig herself in, to burrow deeply and pull apart herself and rebuild from the pieces. She can never read Atonement in one sitting, especially not the war scenes-they scrape up her throat from far down in her stomach. She fudges on the chapter pauses and uses them for little things, like bathroom breaks and another glass of water, recklessly racing towards the discerning moment where Robbie climbs over the hill, one of the twins draped over his shoulders, the other holding his hand.
She finishes the chapter and reflexively checks the clock over the mantle; it’s half past midnight, and Ben has made a significant dent into his Riordan trash. “Isn’t this past your bedtime?” Erica asks suspiciously. If she tries, she can remember her parents shouting something about bed as they retired an hour ago, but everything external to the pages had been repressed by the starkness of the sticky English summer heat.
“Maybe,” Ben says distractedly. “Isn’t it past yours?”
“Cute,” Erica replies, and she snatches the book out of his hands. “At least do Mama and Papa the courtesy of reading under the covers with a flashlight, not out in the open of the living room, flagrantly defying their every edict.”
“I preferred it when you were quiet and shy,” Ben informs her, nose at a very Lydia angle as he picks himself off of the sofa. He holds out his hand like a disgruntled cat; Erica laughs as she puts his book on his palm.
“You and the rest of the world, kid,” she says in her best Sam Spade, which is not very good.
The contentedness of returning to her books blends with the peacefulness of her wolf; Erica showers and pulls on a pair of her new underwear and then her favorite t-shirt, worn thin and big around the shoulders. She debates starting part two of Atonement, decides against it, and then burrows into her comforter with The Once and Future King on her lap. Even if her door were closed-which, it’s not-she’d still be able to hear her parents’ even breaths in their bedroom, and Ben’s frantic heartbeat as he pages through whatever exciting adventure Rick Riordan has crafted in his pursuit of the bastardization of Egyptian mythology.
Erica cheats and skips ahead to Lancelot’s section, which is her favorite. An hour later, as she gnaws steadily on her lower lip and mouths, Don't fall in love with her you beautiful idiot, there’s a quiet knock on her bedroom window.
It’s Boyd, of all people. Erica holds a finger up to her lips and glares; she slips out of bed and silently shuts her door before opening the window. “Are you taking stalking lessons from Derek?” Erica demands. “How are you even standing out there? I barely fit and I’m half as big as you.”
“Magic,” Boyd says drily. “It’s got a timer on it, though, so…”
Erica steps to the side and gestures him in. “What brings you to the Reyes household at this hour?”
Boyd’s grin is so fast that it’s already gone by the time Erica’s brain has caught up to seeing it. “Erica, it’s not even two yet.”
“Oh,” says Erica lamely. “Yeah, right. Of course.” Now that Boyd points it out, Erica can’t remember a time in recent memory that she was even home at this hour, let alone tucked into her bed. She wants to hate it, as a reminder of the nine years of her life that she spent reading books under tables and not talking to anyone, but her native response to life-threatening situations appears to be turtling in her bedroom under a pile of words from T. H. White.
“You’ve been missing,” Boyd rumbles. He moves his eyes methodically over the contents of Erica’s tiny bedroom; the walls, which Erica’s father had painted green as a birthday present seven or eight years ago, are barely visible under acres of white IKEA bookshelves. Erica has more paperbacks than hardcovers and everything looks secondhand because she rereads obsessively, but the point is made rather glaringly. “You’re a bigger nerd than Stilinski,” Boyd says, sounding delighted.
“Shut up,” Erica hisses, punching Boyd in the shoulder. He’s a giant, so she has to aim above her head to make contact. “I’m not. I passed the tenth grade by the skin of my teeth and the fact that no one, not even Harris, wants to be the hard-ass giving a failing grade to a severe epileptic.”
“So these aren’t yours?” Boyd replies.
“Shut up,” Erica says again. “They’re just books.”
She doesn’t meant that, especially since she could write some very high-quality college admissions essays-in a world where Erica Reyes could dream about getting into college, that is, which is a world that Erica doesn’t live in-about how her life has been shaped by having books instead of friends. The scary feeling in the pit of Erica’s stomach, the one she’s tried to cow into submission by being sexy and fun and dangerous, has unclenched itself after a full night’s sleep with no worry about what awaits Erica when she wakes up. There’s always another disaster on the horizon, as the past five months have elucidated, but for now, Erica doesn’t know what waits for her and it feels like a series of deep, centering breaths.
Boyd slips his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “No,” he says, “they’re not,” and Erica is struck with the realization, like she has been in isolated moments in the past, that the decision to take the bite was the right one for Boyd. He’s the calmest and wisest of their fledgling pack and as far as Erica can tell he’s never needed an anchor the way that Scott pins himself to Allison Argent. The wolf suits Boyd in a way that ill-fitting humanity had been bad for him.
Erica is starting to think that maybe what she needed was friends and a weekly appointment with a therapist. The bite has made her more, but the “her” it was working with was basically nothing; all it did was exponentially increase empty air and assumptions. There’s no way to tell if Erica is a better wolf than human because she never really tried to be human in the first place. It has always been much easier to slip underneath her skin and ignore all of the parts that hurt.
“No,” Erica echoes, a minute and a half too late to play that off as anything other than deeply introspective. “They were everything. For me.”
“I remember,” Boyd says, and Erica can peel back the words and see what’s framed inside of them: Boyd, watching her as she pretended not to look at him, her knees tapping the underside of her desk as she balanced a broken spine on her legs and bit at her thumbnail.
This feels like the kind of moment where something important has to be said; Erica knows that if she wastes moments like this, the ones that fall on the very edge of a rocky cliff face, she’ll just never say the vital things at all. “I can’t be sorry that it fixed me,” Erica tells him. “Maybe I should be, since I spent a lot of time fucking things up and hurting people, but I don't want to be sorry.”
Boyd shrugs. “Don’t be,” he says. It’s not dismissive; it’s the same tone he’d used when Erica had said, Derek is a mess and we’re going to die if we stay with his pack, and when she’d said, The Alphas are too dangerous to have full control of Beacon Hills. When Boyd has an opinion of a situation, Erica can count on it being full: fully weighed, fully measured, fully evaluated. Boyd is probably the most decisive person Erica knows.
“Okay,” Erica says breathily, and then, “Okay, good,” with a nervous tinge to it. This is the first time she’s ever had anyone, other than a member of her immediate family, in her bedroom since she was eight. Against her will, Erica feels herself succumb to a numbing blush. “What’s up?” she asks, and even if theoretically she knows how to ask that without sounding tremulous, she doesn’t manage it in practice.
Boyd looks down and seems to suddenly notice The Once and Future King, splayed across Erica’s quilt. “You didn’t answer any of your texts today. Isaac was worried.” Erica gets a trembling flake of guilt stuck in her throat for that; she can see in Isaac that fragility that she doesn’t have to worry about in Ben. Isaac has a complex understanding of the world and its myriad ways of being cruel and if she shields him from that, she feels a little better about how out of control her own behavior has become.
“Sorry.” She doesn’t have to sneak looks at Boyd out of the corner of her eye anymore; she can openly watch as he gently lifts her book off of her bed, flipping it over and scanning the passage to which it is open. “My parents caught me sneaking in last night and we had to talk about it, and then my mom wanted to bond.” The words are classic snarky teenager, but Erica can’t muster enough disdain to make the point really stick.
“Sounds nice,” Boyd observes. He uses his thumb to save her page as he flicks forward, reading of what’s to come.
“I-I mean, yeah,” Erica says, since nice is inoffensive and toothless and ambiguous enough to cover at least some of her day. “It. Um. How was yours?”
Boyd finishes what had occupied him in the text; he returns to her page and puts the book back in its original place on her quilt, the square ends of his fingers brushing up along the spine in a way that makes the muscles in Erica’s lower back knot. However she feels about Boyd is quieter than the blazing LOOK AT ME that has characterized her pseudo-sexual experiences of the past five months; she doesn’t really know what to do with it.
The tic tic tic of the clock in the hall decelerates as Boyd trails his eyes up, from the ragged carpet fibers under Erica’s bare toes to the places on her leg where she’s missed hairs while shaving to her knees, no longer knobby or fat or ill-proportioned when Erica looks in the mirror; then to the place where her t-shirt skims the tops of her thighs, strong and muscled from the bite and running and locking her legs around things; and the inside of her left elbow and the heavy, obvious curve of her breast, and then her exposed collarbone and the ball of her shoulder, which are sun-dappled and golden and no longer look like the bruised surface of the moon; and then her mouth.
Boyd says, “You don’t have to feel guilty about them.”
He’s catalogued so many parts of Erica in the past minute that she’s dizzy with the possibilities. “About what?” she breathes.
“Your family,” he says. “They love you. It’s okay that you have them and we don’t.”
“I,” Erica croaks helplessly, “what?”
“My parents aren’t really around and Isaac’s are both dead; we have the pack because we don’t have anyone else. But you don’t have to choose, Erica. You can have both.”
As if to underline this important thematic concept, Erica’s mother breathes out in her sleep, a steady, huffed, “Naaaahh,” and it layers over Boyd’s heart and his breathing and both are faster than usual, because this is important to Boyd, for some indecipherable reason: this is a thing Boyd needs Erica to understand.
Maybe, most importantly, it’s something that Boyd understands that Erica needs. “I,” Erica repeats, and she thinks, Did I do that? But she doesn’t even need a slideshow of her greatest hits of the past five months to know that she has, in fact, been doing exactly that: becoming Isaac’s new mom and licking her lips obnoxiously to make Stiles jealous enough that he’ll finally make a move on Derek and trying to point out to Scott that he doesn’t need to pine over Allison when Isaac is right there, staring at him with stupid moon-calf eyes. Erica has been crafting a new family and ignoring her old one because always crackling at the back of her mind has been the awareness that, for Boyd and Isaac, the pack is everything.
“I was right about Mimir, I think,” Erica says finally, and it’s not the most embarrassing thing she could’ve chosen to blurt out, but it’s certainly not a spectacularly smooth statement, either.
“What?” Boyd asks. His attention is so sharp that Erica doesn’t feel any pain when it slides into her body; like Excalibur, it slips seamlessly into stone and she grips it tight within herself.
“It’s not important,” Erica tells him. The words are very easy, when she has him locked inside already: “So, are you going to kiss me at some point or are you just going to stand there like Scott and look dumb?”
On look, Boyd lifts Erica with big, searing hands and palms her upper thighs as he presses her into the bookshelf against the wall that her room shares with Ben’s-children’s classics and young adult, including the entire Harry Potter series in both English and Spanish-and follows with his tongue where before had been only his words, the ones spoken and unspoken. He traces them to the back of Erica’s mouth and he bites, to give them permanence.
Erica scrapes her nails through the thin shell of his hair and bites back, until the blood trickles across her tongue and she can taste an aura, in waves of shivers that coast down from her head to her toes, and she hears ozone crackle in her ears and she rides it clear through to the other side, where Boyd’s hands ground her against the shelves and the cold spines of the collected books of Narnia slip under her hair. She tastes blood, and then she tastes Boyd: lake water and graphite, steady as Yggdrasil itself.