Chapter Text
They have bonfires every summer. It’s not safe to have them at home because there’s no room and the trees would catch fire, so they all drive to the lake in their big cars packed with foldup chairs and towels and happy, laughing cubs with popsicle-stained smiles.
They spend the day playing in the sand on the beach-that-isn’t-a-beach and cool off in the water when the sun burns too bright. They race each other to the dock and have diving contests, score each other’s jumps on biggest splash and most creative.
Derek is small, one of the youngest, so he isn’t fast and he doesn’t know how to dive. If he stays out for too long he can’t keep his head above the water, and he’s always the monkey in the middle when they play, but he doesn’t care much, doesn’t come in until Mama growls from the bank and only then because he can’t disobey.
When their legs turn to jelly, the other kids drag themselves onto the sand and lie beached on their towels until the sky changes color. Derek usual falls asleep just when the sun is dipping below the tree line. He wakes up to the sound of wood being snapped in half, to the crackle and pop of the fire as it eats through the kindle, lightning quick.
Derek likes the fire because it’s like a living thing that moves and talks, and if you stare at it long enough, it fills you with a kind of satisfaction and you think, look at this, I helped make this.
At school they learn that wolves are monsters that eat little girls with grandmothers, and that humans are the most evolved, better than animals because they stand on two legs and use tools. But at home Mama calls them her mighty wolf pack, and he’s too little to shift, but the others howl when the moon is full, so Derek doesn’t always know who he is. Maybe evolved, maybe a monster.
But every summer they go to the beach and Derek stares into the fire that’s so beautiful, and he thinks that he can’t be a monster because, look at this wonderful thing that he’s made.
The fire tells Derek that he’s fine the way he is, so he loves it.
(He hates fire because it’s like a living thing, uncontrollable and cruel. Then he used to get so close to the heat Mama had to yank him back. Now he skates around fire like a scared little pup afraid of being burnt.
At twenty-three, Derek knows that he is not a monster and wishes desperately that he were; maybe then he wouldn’t be so scared.)