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January 18 — Something… bit me last night. Never even saw what it was. I must have been too drunk to care. Yeah, you win, mom, I guess I do need to move back in with you and go back to those meetings. Fuck you. Should probably go to the hospital too. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
February 17 — God, this is humiliating. My second week back with my mom, and I woke up naked in the next yard over. Ilana’s yard. Just butt-ass naked, and covered in… dirt? Smellier than dirt. Took three showers today and I can still smell it.
March 19 — Okay. But so if. If. Hypothetically. If I was some kind of werewolf. What kind of damage am I doing out there? Shouldn’t I be trying to keep myself in? Shouldn’t I tell someone? Except if I do they’ll just say I’m using again. And I don’t think I was.
April 17 — Told Ilana I could use her help today, and could she hang out with me and make sure I don’t drink? We had a pretty nice time, but honestly I just wanted a witness to convince me I hadn’t snuck anything. Then I tied my ankle to the bed.
This morning, same deal, naked, scratched up, blah blah blah. Rope shredded. Made it back to my own bed, at least. No obvious signs of carnage, but there’s something between my teeth that tastes like… meat?
November 2 — The moon’s still waxing, barely halfway to full. I know the phase of the moon better than I know the day of the week these days. Right now, I’m safe.
Besides, the sun is high in the sky. It’s one of the last unexpected gorgeous days of a long, gorgeous summer. Sobriety is weird, but nice? And I’ve read the local paper front to back every day since April. No missing people around the full moons. No rise in missing pets. No unexplained wounds or corpses.
So fuck it. Even as a werewolf, life is pretty good.
Officially, I’m at the farmer’s market to get my mom some flowers, and not to flirt with the hot neighbor. But as soon as Ilana calls my name, I come trotting right over to her stall.
“Sit,” she says, invitingly, and I plop down at the closest table. She joins me, and tips a bag of Bison Snax in my direction. I grab a few and grin. They’re artisanal buffalo jerky, apparently, from a farm outside town. But I don’t know what else they put in them, because they are literally the most addictive thing I’ve put in my mouth, and I am an addict.
“Good to see you,” she says. The words feel like sunshine itself. “Hey, listen, business is slow, you want to hang out?”
I nod, feeling how absurdly eager I look and not even caring. She must know I have a crush. She must know already, so there’s no point hiding it.
“Great! Go get us some coffees?” She hands me a ten dollar bill and points to the stall, and off I go.
November 8 — Full moon tonight. We spent yesterday at the beach, playing frisbee in the fading autumn light. Now the weather’s turned dark and rainy. I hear Ilana call my name.
It takes me a few minutes to find her, even after I get my shoes on. She’s sitting on her own porch. “You’re getting good at that,” she laughs.
“Thanks.” I smile. It’s not as weird as it sounds. She can stand OK at the farmer’s market, but it hurts her real bad to walk — she mostly even uses a wheelchair the rest of the week. So of course I don’t mind “coming when called,” as we both jokingly call it. Or fetching coffees. Or being the one to chase after a mis-thrown frisbee. And if she’d rather yell than text… well, I do have good hearing.
“What’s up?”
She looks serious, like she’s groping for words.
“Listen, Cara. I know you don’t like to talk about it, but uh.” She blinks. “I know full moons are hard for you. And I just want to say… I really value what we have together. If you ever want to talk about it, you know I’m here for you, right?”
When you’re in recovery, you hear a lot of really vague messages of support. I had no idea what she was talking about, but it kind of didn’t matter. She thought we had something together. And there was no way in hell I was telling her I was a probably-not-man-eating-but-possibly-still-ferocious werewolf.
November 9 — I wake up in Ilana’s bed. I’m naked, like every full moon, and my hair has… leaves? Dry leaves in it. And Ilana is next to me, stroking my back.
“What the fuck?” *I yell, practically jumping away from her. And then, almost immediately, “What did I do?”* — and I pull the covers off of her like I’m going to check her for injuries.
“Girl.” She laughs the way she always laughs when she can’t help it — the way that says good lord, what a delightful mess. “Girl. Girl. Slow down. We did the same thing we always do.”
“We.” I said. “What did we do?”
She sits up in bed and considers me for a minute.
“What do you remember after a full moon?”
“Nothing.” I’m too confused to remember that I’m supposed to be lying about this werewolf shit. I just answer.
“Nothing nothing?”
“Yeah, nothing.”
“What do you think happens?”
I consider lying this time, but what sort of lie would even work here? “I, uh. Look, this sounds stupid. But I’m pretty sure I turn into a wolf, and I wake up with meat between my teeth. And I did some research, there don’t seem to be pets or people going missing on those nights, or livestock getting mutilated. So either I’m eating really small animals, like rats maybe? Which it turns out wolves sometimes eat? Or I’m getting into dumpsters, which would explain the smell, or I’m just wounding people, which…”
She cuts me off. “Cara. Baby. You aren’t a wolf, okay?”
Now I feel incredibly stupid. Like, of course I’m not. Why was I even babbling about that?
But she keeps going. “You’re a border collie. You’re the cutest fucking border collie, I wish you could meet you, you’re so cute.”
She pats my head, and I roll over onto my back to look up at her, vaguely becoming aware of how puppyish I must look.
“You don’t wound anyone. You come over here and we play fetch, and I call you a good girl and give you Bison Snax, are what you wake up with between your teeth. You really didn’t know?”
I shake my head. “So you’re staying up all night playing fetch with me to, like, keep the neighborhood safe?”
“I happen to have insomnia. And you’re fun. Puppy you. I mean, you you too. Go bring me my slippers and get in the shower.”
I already know where her slippers are, like some part of my brain that’s hidden from view has done this a lot. “Good girl,” she says when I bring them, and then turns me around, playfully pats my butt, and sends me off to get clean.
We eat breakfast, then spend a long time in the park playing fetch. Just pure undisguised fetch. No more pretending we’re playing an even-handed game of frisbee or catch. Just her tossing the tennis ball and me running after it, over and over until I’m tired. It’s the happiest hour of my life since I got sober. Maybe the happiest ever.
“Sit,” she says. I plop down next to her on a park bench. It’s bright but cold, and we wrap ourselves up in the blanket she brought. It smells a bit like her and a bit like dog, and I wonder if that dog is me. No. Fuck it. Not wonder. Hope. I hope that dog is me. How lucky I’d be if there was a blanket somewhere that smelled like both of us.
Now we’re back at the door to her house, and it’s like that scene in every romcom where the date’s over and someone has to decide whether to invite someone in.
“Did you know it was me you were teaching to play fetch?”
“I… figured it out.”
“Heh. You figured it out. What, when I showed up naked in your bed?”
“When your lazy ass suddenly got real good at fetching me coffees.”
“So is this a sex thing?”
“Like, when you’re a puppy? An actual puppy? God, no!”
“But the giving me commands? The sleeping in your bed?”
“Do you want it to be?”
I think about that for a while. Ilana doesn’t seem to mind. Maybe it’s okay if I don’t know the answer.
“Listen,” she says, “I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you about it. I thought you knew. I thought you remembered, afterward, and you weren’t bringing it up because you were… I don’t know, ashamed?”
I know it makes me the biggest dork in the universe, but my immediate response is “I could never be ashamed of you.”
“Good gir— Shit. Is that okay? Do I still get to call you that?”
I nod.
“Good,” she says, smiling. “Wait.”
I stand patiently, just outside the threshold, while she gets her boots and coat off and the chair folded up, thinking about what a good girl I am for waiting my turn.
“Okay!” she chirps.
I step inside.