we get the wolves out of the woods.” He turned to look at me. “One of us has to lead them out.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
• GRACE •
It felt like camp when I woke up in the morning.
When I was thirteen, my grandmother had paid for me to go to summer camp for two weeks. Camp Blue Sky for Girls. I’d loved it — two weeks with every moment planned out, every day accounted for, ready-made purpose printed out on colored 8.5” × 11” fliers poked in our cubby holes each morning. It was the opposite of life with my parents, who laughed at the idea of schedules. It was fantastic and the first time I realized that there might be other right ways to happiness than the one prescribed by my parents. But the thing about camp was that it wasn’t home. My toothbrush was grubby from being poked into the small pocket of my backpack by a mother who forgot to buy plastic baggies before I left. The bunk bed crushed my shoulder uncomfortably when I tried to sleep. Dinner was good but salty and just a little too far away from lunch, and unlike at home, I couldn’t just go to the kitchen and get some pretzels. It was fun and different and just that tiny bit wrong that made it disconcerting.
So here I was at Beck’s house, in Sam’s bedroom. It wasn’t properly home — home still conjured up the memory of pillows that smelled like my shampoo, and my beat-up old copies of John Buchan novels that I’d gotten from a library sale so they were doubly dear, and the running-water-shaving-sound of my father getting ready for work, and the radio speaking to itself in low, earnest tones in the study, and the endlessly comfortable logic of my own routine. Did that home even exist for me anymore?
Sitting up in Sam’s bed, I was sleep-stupid and surprised to find him lying beside me, rolled up to the wall with his fingers splayed against it. I couldn’t remember a morning I’d ever woken up before him, and feeling a bit neurotic, I watched him until I saw his chest rise and fall under his ratty T-shirt.
I climbed out of the bed, expecting him to wake up at any moment, half hoping he would, half hoping he wouldn’t, but he remained in his crooked little sleeping pose, looking like he’d been tossed onto the bed.
I had that toxic combination of not enough sleep and too much wakefulness pumping through me, so it took me longer than I would’ve thought to make it out to the hallway and then another moment to remember where the bathroom was, and when I got there, I had no hairbrush and no toothbrush and the only thing I could find to wear was one of Sam’s T-shirts with a logo on it from a band I didn’t recognize. So I used his toothbrush, telling myself with every stroke across my teeth that this was no grosser than kissing him, and almost believing it. I found his hairbrush next to a disreputable-looking razor and used one but not the other.
I looked in the mirror. It felt like I was living life on the wrong side of it. Time passing didn’t mean anything here. I said, “I want to tell Rachel I’m alive.”
It didn’t sound unreasonable, until I started thinking about how it could go wrong.
I checked back in the bedroom — Sam was still sleeping — and headed downstairs. Part of me wanted him to be awake, but the other part of me liked this quiet feeling of being both alone and not lonely. It reminded me of all the times I’d sat reading or doing homework with Sam in the same room. Together but silent, two moons in companionable orbit.
Downstairs, I found Cole sprawled on the couch, sleeping with one arm stretched above his head. Remembering that there was a coffeepot in the basement, I tiptoed down the hall and crept down the stairs.
The basement was a cozy but somewhat disorienting place — draftless and windowless, all the light coming from lamps, making it impossible to tell the time. It was strange to be back in the basement, and I felt a weird, misplaced sense of sadness. The last time I’d been down here had been after the car crash, talking with Beck after Sam had shifted into a wolf. I’d thought he was gone forever. Now it was Beck who was lost.