“No,” said Berthe. She was grateful, suddenly, that he put her back up. It pulled her away from the edge of screaming, senseless terror. “I went out camping in the woods, and I was bitten by something that I thought was a wild dog. Last night was the full moon. And I’ve seen horror movies before. I think I know what’s going on.”
She did not know until he just kept looking at her, gaze level and undisturbed, that she had wanted him to come up with another explanation. She’d wanted him to tell her she was crazy.
“What I don’t know,” she said, hearing her voice go high and unpleasant, “is how you knew.”
He didn’t say a word.
She plunged on. “I mean, do you make a habit of staring like a freak at girls and then, if they seem ill, dragging them into your bedroom on the off chance they’re . . .”
“I can tell,” he said. “I could smell you.”
She felt a flash of shame stronger than terror, so ferocious and so unreasonable—that she could care how she smelled, with all this—it made her furious with herself and him.
“And how could you—what were you—” Embarrassment as well as rage throttled her. She could not believe she could not even ask him something important about her own body.
“You’ll be able to do it as well,” he said. “Smell things other people can’t smell. See things other people can’t see. Do things other people can’t do.”
“Will I be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound?” asked Berthe. Her mouth tasted sour, and her words were all coming out sour, too. She could not seem to care.
She went over to the window and began to fiddle with the pull on the blind so she wouldn’t have to keep looking at him.
“Medium-sized buildings,” he said. “Crouch first. Don’t go for a skyscraper. I’d describe that as o’erarching ambition.”
Berthe twisted the pull around her wrist, plastic beads digging into her flesh hard. She could not believe he was trying to make a joke.
“So you’re—” she said, and could not find the words in her sour, dust-dry mouth. She tugged hard at the blind. “You’re like me?”
The blind tumbled down with a rattle and a bang, the plastic cord suddenly slack around her wrist and sudden sunlight flooding in, making her blink.
Her ears filled with the sound of the boy hissing, a cat’s noise from a boy’s throat. She saw him move fast, backing away from the sudden sunlight and into a different dark corner.
There was a hand held up, protecting his face, but she could still see his bared inhuman teeth.
“No,” he whispered. “I’m not like you.”
This last revelation was too much, the world of strangeness expanding too far. Berthe could not bear another second in this little house.
She turned and ran, as she’d wanted to before, out into the sunlight where he could not follow her, and she told herself that it would not happen again.
She kept telling herself that. She sneaked in through her bedroom window and pretended she had got in late and slept in her own bed that night, tucked in innocent and harmless under her sheets.
She told herself that when she lied to her friends that she was all better now, she told herself that when she refused to go on the next camping trip, even though she had always signed up to go on every trip before. She told herself that, lying in her safe bed, under her safe sheets, with the windows open so she could see the moon had not become bright and dangerous yet.
She could hear her parents having whispered fights all the way across the house, and even though they were ordinary fights that left no trace of bitterness behind, she had never known they had those fights before. She didn’t want to know now. She could hear Natalie and Leela murmuring secrets meant to exclude her, and even though she knew she’d done the same thing with both of them, that every pair of friends had secrets between just the two of them, actually hearing it hurt.
That she was able to hear all these things hurt worse. The scar on the inside of her elbow was a silver crescent moon, shining and smooth on her skin, but the moon was long past crescent.
She could not get away from the world or herself. The night and her body lay in wait to betray her.
She stopped telling herself that it would not happen again, because she could not bear to think about it at all.
But she remembered, as well as the fear and pain, what the boy at the coffee shop had said.
You don’t want to hurt anyone, do you?
She walked across town as the sun died, on the night of the next full moon, and knocked on a gray door.
The boy from the coffee shop let her in.
It happened again.
Berthe came downstairs in another pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt that read BEING PESSIMISTIC WOULDN’T WORK ANYWAY. She was not tempted to run out the door this time. She had spent a month running already.
The boy was standing in the same shadowed corner he had stood in the last time. Berthe noticed he had fixed the blind.
He had loomed large in her mind, the moment of hissing and teeth overwriting everything else, but he looked very much like he had in the coffee shop, dark hair swept back in a particular, deliberate way, wearing fingerless gloves of all things. The room looked exactly the same as well, down to the cup of tea and the cookie on the table.
“Thank you,” said Berthe. She felt she had to, even though she didn’t know how to mean it.
“You’re welcome,” he said quietly. He gestured toward the table. “Do you want a cup of tea?”
“Yes,” Berthe said. “All right.”
She walked toward the table and sat down in the chair. “Can I—”
“I do not drink . . . tea,” said the boy, and smirked to himself before his face smoothed out, serious and pale. “I don’t eat. It’s for you.”
It made her feel strange, to realize that he had gone out and bought tea and cookies for her last month, laid them out thinking she might be hungry.
She took a sip of the tea. It was cooling, but she saw the strips of sunlight on the kitchen counter and knew he could not have made it later. The whole room had sneaky pieces of sunlight in it.
The heavy shutters and door upstairs clearly formed his refuge, and she had exiled him from it.
“Thanks,” she said again, and meant it a little this time. “The tea’s good. Is there a cure?”
“It isn’t a sickness,” said the boy. “It’s who you are now.”
“So that would be a no.”
He was silent, though his attention stayed fixed on her. Now that Berthe was looking back at him, she saw why he might wear glasses: they helped hide his eyes’ strange brightness and the way they tracked movement, more alert than a human’s would.
Or maybe he needed glasses. Could a creature like him need glasses?
“You knew what I was,” Berthe said, utterly unable to talk about him smelling her. “You recognized it. So you must have met other people like me.”
“I knew one. She was kind to me,” said the boy. “But she can’t help you. I’m sorry. She’s dead now.”
“What did she die of?” Berthe heard her voice shake, felt her lips tremble, and put the cookie to her lips to hide it.
“She killed herself,” said the boy softly. He added, “I’m sorry,” again.
“I’m the one who should be sorry,” Berthe said, swallowing desolation and a mouthful of cookie so dry it scraped her throat. “She was your friend.”
Killed herself, Berthe thought despairingly. Because she hurt somebody, or because she could not live being like Berthe was now a moment longer? She didn’t know, and the woman could not tell her now. She could not tell Berthe anything.
“What about the—the person who bit me in the woods?” Berthe asked desperately. “They must be like me. Couldn’t we find them? Couldn’t you smell them?”