“What do you mean?” Felix redirected his path, taking an extra-wide step to stomp an especially crunchy leaf. Ada shrugged, distantly watching as two kids across the street hosed down an unhappy-looking dog.
“I mean,” she looked at him. “You’re definitely better than you used to be ...” Felix shook his head as he lunged for another leaf.
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about. No one can even tell.” Ada looked over as Felix watched the dog make a gallant attempt to escape the tyranny of the hose’s stream.
“Why are you all worked up about this? I thought you liked-” Something in the boy’s body language caused her to drop the subject.
“It’s a bit cold for that, isn’t it?” Ada asked, watching the dog shake off beads of water. Felix shrugged in response.
“Not really.” They kept walking.
By complete coincidence, this conversation and the dog’s unfortunate bath both occurred on the six-year anniversary of the day that they had recovered the boy. It was in all of the papers at the time, or at least, all of the ones that appreciated the value of cashing in on local oddities. Headlines that October were ablaze with words like “Miraculous Discovery” and “Total Aberration of Nature.”
The facts, which were foggy to begin with and had gotten no less so over the course of six years’ retelling, were these: that a boy had been found in or around a wolves’ den, completely naked and with no understanding of English. Whether it was the hunters who discovered the den first or the boy who wandered out to find the hunters, the results were the same:
- One, that the den was abandoned long before anyone got there, the wolves having vacated for reasons unknown to parts unknown, and,
- Two, that the county of Caruso had gained a new resident.
The boy was adopted by one of the hunters, who admitted to close friends that the decision was half motivated by altruism and half by sheer curiosity. He remarked, on the drive home from the hospital, how completely silent the boy was. It wasn’t just that he didn’t speak; he barely moved, and somehow that stillness was able to convey more loneliness and confusion, despair, than any words the hunter had ever heard strung together.
The boy’s childhood was, of course, characterized by a string of little controversies the same way a normal child’s would be marked by lost teeth or inches on a door frame. There were calls for psychological testing, fears that the boy would be a danger to the public if he were allowed outside, and, once he’d received a few years of private tutoring and was to be enrolled in the fifth grade, there was an uproar that the “Wolf-Boy of Caruso County” would bite one of his classmates-to-be.
The hunter treated the criticism and scorn the same way he had been handling every challenge in his 40-some years of life; what he couldn’t change or fix, he ignored completely. He taught the boy to do the same. Not that the boy was predisposed to care much anyway; in his years since being introduced to the idea of humanity, he had learned the following lessons:
- One, that most of the humans he'd met so far almost never worried about what they were going to eat or how they were going to survive, and because of this they had a lot of time on their hands to get upset about things that weren’t related to food at all,
- Two, that you could tell when humans were upset because their voices got higher-pitched, and they reacted poorly if you just stared at them while they did this,
- Three, that humans were far more territorial than wolves, to the point that they seemed to constantly be making things up to claim as their own so that they could get upset and high-pitched when someone else touched it, and
- Four, that humans were afraid of everything.
So, the uproar, shouting, picketing, and prejudice didn’t really bother him that much. Every time he was spoken to about the upcoming school year, often by desperate-looking people with microphones, he made sure to assert that he had been specifically instructed not to rip anyone’s throats out. He liked to say this not only because it was the truth but also because he enjoyed how people seemed to tense up a little more each time he repeated it.
Preparations were made at Caruso Elementary to assure that their special new student would get a proper education. A special assembly for students, teachers, and parents advised strongly against any employment of the phrase “Wolf-Boy of Caruso County” and tried to reiterate that the boy had never bitten, scratched, or ripped anyone’s throats out, regardless of how often he seemed to talk about doing so.
Contrary to everyone’s expectations, the first day of school went fine for all of Caruso’s tiniest inhabitants. It wasn’t until day two that a couple of the bigger, crueler, less-burdened-with-empathy children had gained enough confidence to truly commit to making the new addition feel unwelcome.
According to the only witness to the scene other than the concerned parties, a second-grader who had been illegally spending math period on the monkey bars, the events went as follows:
- One, that the boys formed a circle around their target,
- Two, that the boys all picked up fistfuls of gravel from the play yard’s floor, and, after a moment’s hesitation and a careful and deliberate guarding of their own throats, began hurling rocks at their victim,
- Three, that the boys found themselves quickly and effectively prevented from proceeding by one Ada Carver, a girl one class older and several inches taller than the bullies.
Because the monkey bar boy stands as sole witness to this, it is left for the reader to determine the veracity of the next portion of the boy’s statement: that young Ada did nothing but direct a handful of words, spoken in a low, sharp hiss to each of the boys in turn before the boys, as one, turned and ran back to the relative safety of the schoolyard. She then turned to the victim, helped him to his feet and, apparently wordlessly, the two walked off together to go see who could dig the better hole in the school’s front lawn.
The monkey bar boy’s witness testimony serves as the last documented instance anyone from school could recall seeing Ada and the boy apart. The two spent the rest of the year forming a somewhat reticent and more than a bit intimidating company; to the casual observer most of the pair’s time was spent glaring at things and throwing other things at different things. The two kept to themselves for the majority of the time, and public sentiment was more or less in favor of them not making themselves a problem for anyone else.
They faced more than a little scrutiny when it appeared that the boy had taught Ada how to speak with him in growls; the issue was raised with the girl’s parents but when they responded with nothing but overwhelming joy that Ada’s attention had been supplanted from her seemingly unquenchable desire to see each and every one of her possessions lit on fire, there was nothing left to be done other than to request that the two use their inside growls. One day in class, during roll call, Ada halted the teacher midway through the D’s- “he’d like to be called Samson now, actually,” she declared, and the teacher amended his list with a nod. The rest of Caruso did the same, with seemingly no transition time at all. The boy, now called “Samson,” had explained to her that having one name forever didn’t make a lot of sense to him. As a wolf, he’d explained, his name had changed often, to reflect his growth or change or even the change of the pack as a whole. This was one of the few details the boy had ever divulged about his life Before and so Ada made sure to pay close attention and ask, every once and a while, if he wasn’t ready for a new name yet. Over the next four years the boy went from Samson to Charles to Turnip (which Ada detested) to Rick (which Ada had chosen herself) and, finally and most recently, to Felix.
Ada’s parents quickly got used to Felix’s, well, prowling was the verb most aptly used here, around their home. They also got used to serving an extra portion of bacon, extra rare, at Sunday morning breakfast. Upon knocking on Ada’s door to say good night, they got used to hearing a distinct conversation immediately cease, and, upon opening the door, they grew accustomed to ignoring the suspiciously Felix-shaped lump that had formed under Ada’s blankets. Felix’s adoptive father just kept growing accustomed to growing accustomed, having always assumed that Felix’s childhood was never going to be average in any way.
One of the least average things about Felix, in fact, was Ada. At age ten they were climbing everything in sight, sharpening sticks in case of a battle scenario, and going on long-winded ghost hunts. At age fourteen they were still going on ghost hunts, only now they had access to much better flashlights, which was quite useful in searching for spirits. They kept a catalogue, on a little composition pad hidden up in a tree, of all of their experiences with ghosts.
It looked like this:
July 2nd, 19__: Winnow’s Stream. Called out for the ghost of Sally (last name unknown), who supposedly sank her car in it years ago. Lots of wind. No visual ghostliness.
August 15th, 19__: Abandoned Mental Asylum. Said “fresh meat” five times fast, in accordance with legend. Rick said he “felt a presence” but I didn’t feel anything. Come back with more flashlights.
Ada remembered the day they watched the dog get hosed down in particular because it was the day before Felix skipped school for the first time ever and, far more importantly, missed a crucial ghost hunt. Walking home from school the next day, the day of Felix’s absence, she tried to remember anything she could from the day before that would explain this anomaly. She had a lot of time to do so; being deprived as she was of the source of eighty percent of her social interaction left her with an abundance of time to form theories. He definitely wasn’t sick. Never had Felix ever been sick in the entire time she’d known him. He could stay out in cold weather twice as long as Ada could without catching so much as a sniffle. It was one of the numerous things Ada envied of her companion.
She thought back on the previous day; she and Felix had all the same classes this term, and she tried to remember anything out of the ordinary that happened. They had caught someone telling one of the new students about the “Wolf-Boy,” but this always put Felix in a good mood, as it gave him the chance to bare his fangs and incite a little shudder, one of the few wolfy pleasures he still allowed himself. She thought back, through interactions with the students and teachers, what they had for lunch, what new projects they had been assigned...
She stopped walking for a second. That was it. Of course that was it. She continued the course she had already been subconsciously walking, to Felix’s house, but doubled her pace.
The hunter saw her coming down the street and quietly moved to unlock the door for his anticipated visitor. A few seconds later, Ada burst through the door and trudged up the stairs. The hunter heard the trudging cease, then resume as it descended back down the stairs. “Where’s Felix?”
The hunter looked up from the dish he was washing. “Went out to the woods, I think.” He rubbed at a particularly difficult speck. “He used the window, though, so he was trying to be discreet, I think.” He dried the bowl and put it up, glancing back at Ada as he did so. “Oh, and he took his run-away bag.”
Ada crunched quickly down the path behind Felix’s house, driving up a trail of leaves in her wake. The path had theoretically been, at one point in time, meant for bike travel, but it had become so overgrown that neither Ada nor Felix had ever seen another person on it, biked or otherwise. It had been one of the first spots in town the two had appropriated for their own uses. Ada had proposed it, having anticipated that forests and isolation would be two things that would make Felix feel at home, though neither of them acknowledged this as the primary motivation. She had been right, of course. She almost always was when it came to Felix. He was better in the woods, more alive. The first time she had ever seen him smile was after they spent an hour chasing squirrels through the underbrush their first fall together. The second time was when they had spent all night out there, sprawled against a fallen oak tree, making up new constellations out of the stars. That had been Ada’s favorite smile, that one, because it was the one that hadn’t faded when they were subsequently dragged back to their houses by their respective parent figures. That was the smile that Ada, if she tried hard enough, could almost always see, buried somewhere in Felix’s features.
She was worried that she wouldn’t be able to see it now.
She kept trudging, aware that the light was quickly slipping away through the trees. She knew where to look, though. It wasn’t hard. Ada herself, in times of stress or trouble, headed for high ground: tall rocks or high, branchy trees where you could see all around you. Felix, though, he tried to dig into the earth. Bury himself, safe in the ground. Felix made dens.
He was eating an apple in a little encampment surrounded by rocks when Ada found him. Well, he was trying to. He had sealed it in one of those plastic bags, for freshness, but he couldn’t quite manage to unseal it again. He had just punctured it with one of his teeth, ripping the bag open and victoriously taking a chomp out of the apple, when he saw Ada. Embarrassed, he pretended to reseal the bag like a civilized human being and put it carefully back in his run-away bag. Ada walked over to him and produced a bag of Goldfish from her own backpack.
“Can I sit?”
Felix nodded. Ada opened the bag with her teeth, so emphatically that more than a few of the crackers ended up on the ground, and sat down next to him, chewing loudly.
“It was the project, wasn’t it.” She said this, rather than asking it, and didn’t seem to overly anticipate a response of any kind. She proffered the damaged bag to Felix, and he took a couple of fish for himself.
“I said I was from Norway, for it,” Ada told the Goldfish, matter-of-factly. “Half from Norway, half from Azerbaijan.”
“You don’t even know where Azerbaijan is.”
“Do so. It borders Armenia, on the Caspian Sea. And they’ve got a superstition that you should never, ever leave scissors open or it’ll bring misery and death upon your household.” She munched another Goldfish vengefully.
“You’re not from Azerbaijan.”
“You don’t know that. Nobody knows that. Even my parents don’t know where I came from.”
Felix turned back to his apple.
Ada continued her conversation with the fish. “I consider it a strength.” Felix rustled beside her.
“I want to go back.”
Ada raised her eyebrows at him.
“I want to try and go back.”
Ada pursed her lips. “Back...” She nodded.
“My dad won’t tell me where it is. No one will.”
Ada nodded. “But... they won’t be there. You know that, right? They said they all left. You were alone, when...”
“I know, but...” As was typical at this point in a conversation, Felix’s command of human language failed him and Ada felt, rather than heard, a little growl escape him.
“Let’s go, then.” Felix looked up at her as she continued. “How many wolf’s dens could there possibly be in Caruso?”
Felix always forgot to bring a flashlight. Always. And, either as a direct reaction to this or because of some more general prerogative on the universe’s side that each duo should have one of each type of person, Ada always brought a spare. Always.
Their search was made immediately easier by nature of Caruso’s geographic makeup; the area was sort of cordoned off by a large inlet that flowed from the sea, or possibly to it, which meant that there was really only one direction to go through the woods. Felix led the way. Ada knew for a fact he had never been to this area, or at least had never returned to this area, because she had never been here herself. Still, he seemed to be noticeably familiar with his surroundings, guiding her carefully around bumpy rocks, over fallen trees, and occasionally diverting course to avoid an ornery woodland creature. He grew quieter, too, as they continued. Even quieter than usual. Ada sensed that at the same time he was also becoming more. More present, more there. His eyes were brighter, his gestures larger. Ada even saw the smile she had feared would be missing. She tried, as she hopped onto some toadstools to release the explosion of sporous powder she knew they contained, not to think about what would happen when they finally got there. If they got there. Ada was jarred from her inspection of the toadstool puff (which was extremely satisfactory, in both breadth and color) when Felix froze in his steps just ahead of her. She looked around. They were in a little clearing, a glen just big enough to let the new moonlight through. A little bit ahead of where Felix had stopped there was a slope, dotted with dark, smooth rocks, which led down to a little valley and a stream.
“Is-” Ada fell silent when Felix reached one hand back and touched her wrist, lightly. His whole body had gotten, not stiff exactly, but breathtakingly still. He looked back at her, his eyes reflecting the moonlight in a way that Ada wouldn’t have thought possible. Slowly, and very carefully, Ada shifted to move up next to Felix. The two of them stared, silently, down the slope. Ada looked back at Felix and he nodded. He turned off his flashlight and she did the same, taking them both and stowing them in her backpack. The two of them advanced slowly down the hill. Once at the bottom, Ada realized that, a little down the stream, there was a quiet outcropping in the hill, dug into the rock right by the river. Ada attempted to fall back to give Felix some space, but a little tug at her wrist told her to stay close, and she complied.
The cave was empty. Well, mostly. The rocky floor was lightly dusted with leaves and pine needles that had been driven in by the wind; that and a few weeds that had somehow managed to grow in little cracks in the stone floor were all that the cave had in the way of contents. The two of them stood in the middle and rotated, slowly, to look it all over. Finally, Felix sat down on the floor and Ada followed. Ada could feel one of those growls again, almost soundlessly emanating from Felix.
“I thought ...” more growls, and then silence. Felix curled into himself even more, slowly turning himself into a ball. Ada drew her knees up to her chest and just sat. She felt, very strongly, that this was exactly what she was there to do. Just sit. A drop of water fell to the ground somewhere in the cave.
Later, when the moon had fallen a little, Ada and Felix wordlessly left the cave as they had found it. They turned and began to walk back up the slope.
It was Ada that saw them first. First one pair of eyes at the edge of the clearing, then a few pairs, then many. She touched Felix’s wrist, exactly as he had done to her earlier. Almost immediately he moved, making sure that he was between Ada and the pack. Ada would think back on this moment often as the first time she had felt real fear. Well, technically she would identify that moment as the next one, when one of the creatures, large, scarred, and greying around the muzzle, took three tentative steps into the clearing toward them. Ada’s touch on Felix’s wrist became more of a grip. The wind swirled a few leaves around. No one moved. And then...
Felix nodded, just slightly, and the wolf seemed to do the same. Felix, keeping Ada behind him still, turned away and the two continued up the hill. Ada looked back only once, and could see the eyes still, just on the edge of the clearing. Watching.
For a while there was silence, punctuated only by that ever-present shuffling of leaves, and, later, the telltale crunch of gravel that signified they were approaching civilization again. Ada thought about touching Felix’s wrist again, but thought better of it.
“W-what did they want,” she spoke to the ground, again leaving room for the eventuality that Felix would never answer.
“What makes you think they wanted anything?”
Ada shrugged. The gravel crunched on.
“I think my flashlight’s about to die. Do you have any extra batteries?”
“No, but we can just share mine.”
Eventually, they neared the fork in the paved road where they traditionally split ways, when Felix would head left for his home and Ada would turn right for hers. As they approached, Ada tried to think of something definitive to say, to ceremoniously close this strange encounter. But the words wouldn’t come, because, Ada realized, it wasn’t time for that yet. Felix headed left and Ada did too. They climbed the large magnolia tree that grew next to Felix’s house and made the short, simple jump to the roof. Ada didn’t think of doing these things; her body had done them so many times that she was conscious of them only very rarely, the way you seldom think of drawing breath. They sat on the eave of the roof, Felix on the left, Ada on the right. This, again, was tradition, though it was entirely possible that neither party was aware that it was. They looked at the moon, low in the sky, and Ada became aware that it had to be no earlier than three or four in the morning, but was also aware that this knowledge made no difference. They sat.
Somewhere, a dog barked, and Ada imagined that it was the one they had seen getting bathed on the street the day before.
“They wanted me to come with them, I think.” Felix spoke to his knees. Ada listened. “And I...” He scratched his head just behind his ear. “I don’t know.”
“Did you want to go?”
“I don’t belong there.” His head had, at this point, drawn so far toward his knees that his voice rose from somewhere near the middle of him. “I don’t belong anywhere.”
They watched the moon set, and, some amount of time later, they watched the sky turn pink. Birds started chirping and the street started moving again, pinpricks of light as cars passed becoming more and more frequent.
“Are you going to go to school today?”
Ada shook her head. “Nah, I don’t think I will be.”
“Me neither.”
“You know that creepy abandoned Shell station we saw last week?”
“Yeah.”
“Turns out there’s some sort of monster that’s supposed to live there and scare people off. A little green one.”
“Really?”
And, bathed in the soft light of a new adventure, the two began planning their day.
And somewhere else, in a slightly different universe, a boy who had made the other decision ran and barked and played with his four-legged family, happy to have left behind a world he didn’t particularly like or understand. But in this one, that boy had at least one thing that made him suspect he did belong somewhere.
“I mean,” she looked at him. “You’re definitely better than you used to be ...” Felix shook his head as he lunged for another leaf.
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about. No one can even tell.” Ada looked over as Felix watched the dog make a gallant attempt to escape the tyranny of the hose’s stream.
“Why are you all worked up about this? I thought you liked-” Something in the boy’s body language caused her to drop the subject.
“It’s a bit cold for that, isn’t it?” Ada asked, watching the dog shake off beads of water. Felix shrugged in response.
“Not really.” They kept walking.
By complete coincidence, this conversation and the dog’s unfortunate bath both occurred on the six-year anniversary of the day that they had recovered the boy. It was in all of the papers at the time, or at least, all of the ones that appreciated the value of cashing in on local oddities. Headlines that October were ablaze with words like “Miraculous Discovery” and “Total Aberration of Nature.”
The facts, which were foggy to begin with and had gotten no less so over the course of six years’ retelling, were these: that a boy had been found in or around a wolves’ den, completely naked and with no understanding of English. Whether it was the hunters who discovered the den first or the boy who wandered out to find the hunters, the results were the same:
- One, that the den was abandoned long before anyone got there, the wolves having vacated for reasons unknown to parts unknown, and,
- Two, that the county of Caruso had gained a new resident.
The boy was adopted by one of the hunters, who admitted to close friends that the decision was half motivated by altruism and half by sheer curiosity. He remarked, on the drive home from the hospital, how completely silent the boy was. It wasn’t just that he didn’t speak; he barely moved, and somehow that stillness was able to convey more loneliness and confusion, despair, than any words the hunter had ever heard strung together.
The boy’s childhood was, of course, characterized by a string of little controversies the same way a normal child’s would be marked by lost teeth or inches on a door frame. There were calls for psychological testing, fears that the boy would be a danger to the public if he were allowed outside, and, once he’d received a few years of private tutoring and was to be enrolled in the fifth grade, there was an uproar that the “Wolf-Boy of Caruso County” would bite one of his classmates-to-be.
The hunter treated the criticism and scorn the same way he had been handling every challenge in his 40-some years of life; what he couldn’t change or fix, he ignored completely. He taught the boy to do the same. Not that the boy was predisposed to care much anyway; in his years since being introduced to the idea of humanity, he had learned the following lessons:
- One, that most of the humans he'd met so far almost never worried about what they were going to eat or how they were going to survive, and because of this they had a lot of time on their hands to get upset about things that weren’t related to food at all,
- Two, that you could tell when humans were upset because their voices got higher-pitched, and they reacted poorly if you just stared at them while they did this,
- Three, that humans were far more territorial than wolves, to the point that they seemed to constantly be making things up to claim as their own so that they could get upset and high-pitched when someone else touched it, and
- Four, that humans were afraid of everything.
So, the uproar, shouting, picketing, and prejudice didn’t really bother him that much. Every time he was spoken to about the upcoming school year, often by desperate-looking people with microphones, he made sure to assert that he had been specifically instructed not to rip anyone’s throats out. He liked to say this not only because it was the truth but also because he enjoyed how people seemed to tense up a little more each time he repeated it.
Preparations were made at Caruso Elementary to assure that their special new student would get a proper education. A special assembly for students, teachers, and parents advised strongly against any employment of the phrase “Wolf-Boy of Caruso County” and tried to reiterate that the boy had never bitten, scratched, or ripped anyone’s throats out, regardless of how often he seemed to talk about doing so.
Contrary to everyone’s expectations, the first day of school went fine for all of Caruso’s tiniest inhabitants. It wasn’t until day two that a couple of the bigger, crueler, less-burdened-with-empathy children had gained enough confidence to truly commit to making the new addition feel unwelcome.
According to the only witness to the scene other than the concerned parties, a second-grader who had been illegally spending math period on the monkey bars, the events went as follows:
- One, that the boys formed a circle around their target,
- Two, that the boys all picked up fistfuls of gravel from the play yard’s floor, and, after a moment’s hesitation and a careful and deliberate guarding of their own throats, began hurling rocks at their victim,
- Three, that the boys found themselves quickly and effectively prevented from proceeding by one Ada Carver, a girl one class older and several inches taller than the bullies.
Because the monkey bar boy stands as sole witness to this, it is left for the reader to determine the veracity of the next portion of the boy’s statement: that young Ada did nothing but direct a handful of words, spoken in a low, sharp hiss to each of the boys in turn before the boys, as one, turned and ran back to the relative safety of the schoolyard. She then turned to the victim, helped him to his feet and, apparently wordlessly, the two walked off together to go see who could dig the better hole in the school’s front lawn.
The monkey bar boy’s witness testimony serves as the last documented instance anyone from school could recall seeing Ada and the boy apart. The two spent the rest of the year forming a somewhat reticent and more than a bit intimidating company; to the casual observer most of the pair’s time was spent glaring at things and throwing other things at different things. The two kept to themselves for the majority of the time, and public sentiment was more or less in favor of them not making themselves a problem for anyone else.
They faced more than a little scrutiny when it appeared that the boy had taught Ada how to speak with him in growls; the issue was raised with the girl’s parents but when they responded with nothing but overwhelming joy that Ada’s attention had been supplanted from her seemingly unquenchable desire to see each and every one of her possessions lit on fire, there was nothing left to be done other than to request that the two use their inside growls. One day in class, during roll call, Ada halted the teacher midway through the D’s- “he’d like to be called Samson now, actually,” she declared, and the teacher amended his list with a nod. The rest of Caruso did the same, with seemingly no transition time at all. The boy, now called “Samson,” had explained to her that having one name forever didn’t make a lot of sense to him. As a wolf, he’d explained, his name had changed often, to reflect his growth or change or even the change of the pack as a whole. This was one of the few details the boy had ever divulged about his life Before and so Ada made sure to pay close attention and ask, every once and a while, if he wasn’t ready for a new name yet. Over the next four years the boy went from Samson to Charles to Turnip (which Ada detested) to Rick (which Ada had chosen herself) and, finally and most recently, to Felix.
Ada’s parents quickly got used to Felix’s, well, prowling was the verb most aptly used here, around their home. They also got used to serving an extra portion of bacon, extra rare, at Sunday morning breakfast. Upon knocking on Ada’s door to say good night, they got used to hearing a distinct conversation immediately cease, and, upon opening the door, they grew accustomed to ignoring the suspiciously Felix-shaped lump that had formed under Ada’s blankets. Felix’s adoptive father just kept growing accustomed to growing accustomed, having always assumed that Felix’s childhood was never going to be average in any way.
One of the least average things about Felix, in fact, was Ada. At age ten they were climbing everything in sight, sharpening sticks in case of a battle scenario, and going on long-winded ghost hunts. At age fourteen they were still going on ghost hunts, only now they had access to much better flashlights, which was quite useful in searching for spirits. They kept a catalogue, on a little composition pad hidden up in a tree, of all of their experiences with ghosts.
It looked like this:
July 2nd, 19__: Winnow’s Stream. Called out for the ghost of Sally (last name unknown), who supposedly sank her car in it years ago. Lots of wind. No visual ghostliness.
August 15th, 19__: Abandoned Mental Asylum. Said “fresh meat” five times fast, in accordance with legend. Rick said he “felt a presence” but I didn’t feel anything. Come back with more flashlights.
Ada remembered the day they watched the dog get hosed down in particular because it was the day before Felix skipped school for the first time ever and, far more importantly, missed a crucial ghost hunt. Walking home from school the next day, the day of Felix’s absence, she tried to remember anything she could from the day before that would explain this anomaly. She had a lot of time to do so; being deprived as she was of the source of eighty percent of her social interaction left her with an abundance of time to form theories. He definitely wasn’t sick. Never had Felix ever been sick in the entire time she’d known him. He could stay out in cold weather twice as long as Ada could without catching so much as a sniffle. It was one of the numerous things Ada envied of her companion.
She thought back on the previous day; she and Felix had all the same classes this term, and she tried to remember anything out of the ordinary that happened. They had caught someone telling one of the new students about the “Wolf-Boy,” but this always put Felix in a good mood, as it gave him the chance to bare his fangs and incite a little shudder, one of the few wolfy pleasures he still allowed himself. She thought back, through interactions with the students and teachers, what they had for lunch, what new projects they had been assigned...
She stopped walking for a second. That was it. Of course that was it. She continued the course she had already been subconsciously walking, to Felix’s house, but doubled her pace.
The hunter saw her coming down the street and quietly moved to unlock the door for his anticipated visitor. A few seconds later, Ada burst through the door and trudged up the stairs. The hunter heard the trudging cease, then resume as it descended back down the stairs. “Where’s Felix?”
The hunter looked up from the dish he was washing. “Went out to the woods, I think.” He rubbed at a particularly difficult speck. “He used the window, though, so he was trying to be discreet, I think.” He dried the bowl and put it up, glancing back at Ada as he did so. “Oh, and he took his run-away bag.”
Ada crunched quickly down the path behind Felix’s house, driving up a trail of leaves in her wake. The path had theoretically been, at one point in time, meant for bike travel, but it had become so overgrown that neither Ada nor Felix had ever seen another person on it, biked or otherwise. It had been one of the first spots in town the two had appropriated for their own uses. Ada had proposed it, having anticipated that forests and isolation would be two things that would make Felix feel at home, though neither of them acknowledged this as the primary motivation. She had been right, of course. She almost always was when it came to Felix. He was better in the woods, more alive. The first time she had ever seen him smile was after they spent an hour chasing squirrels through the underbrush their first fall together. The second time was when they had spent all night out there, sprawled against a fallen oak tree, making up new constellations out of the stars. That had been Ada’s favorite smile, that one, because it was the one that hadn’t faded when they were subsequently dragged back to their houses by their respective parent figures. That was the smile that Ada, if she tried hard enough, could almost always see, buried somewhere in Felix’s features.
She was worried that she wouldn’t be able to see it now.
She kept trudging, aware that the light was quickly slipping away through the trees. She knew where to look, though. It wasn’t hard. Ada herself, in times of stress or trouble, headed for high ground: tall rocks or high, branchy trees where you could see all around you. Felix, though, he tried to dig into the earth. Bury himself, safe in the ground. Felix made dens.
He was eating an apple in a little encampment surrounded by rocks when Ada found him. Well, he was trying to. He had sealed it in one of those plastic bags, for freshness, but he couldn’t quite manage to unseal it again. He had just punctured it with one of his teeth, ripping the bag open and victoriously taking a chomp out of the apple, when he saw Ada. Embarrassed, he pretended to reseal the bag like a civilized human being and put it carefully back in his run-away bag. Ada walked over to him and produced a bag of Goldfish from her own backpack.
“Can I sit?”
Felix nodded. Ada opened the bag with her teeth, so emphatically that more than a few of the crackers ended up on the ground, and sat down next to him, chewing loudly.
“It was the project, wasn’t it.” She said this, rather than asking it, and didn’t seem to overly anticipate a response of any kind. She proffered the damaged bag to Felix, and he took a couple of fish for himself.
“I said I was from Norway, for it,” Ada told the Goldfish, matter-of-factly. “Half from Norway, half from Azerbaijan.”
“You don’t even know where Azerbaijan is.”
“Do so. It borders Armenia, on the Caspian Sea. And they’ve got a superstition that you should never, ever leave scissors open or it’ll bring misery and death upon your household.” She munched another Goldfish vengefully.
“You’re not from Azerbaijan.”
“You don’t know that. Nobody knows that. Even my parents don’t know where I came from.”
Felix turned back to his apple.
Ada continued her conversation with the fish. “I consider it a strength.” Felix rustled beside her.
“I want to go back.”
Ada raised her eyebrows at him.
“I want to try and go back.”
Ada pursed her lips. “Back...” She nodded.
“My dad won’t tell me where it is. No one will.”
Ada nodded. “But... they won’t be there. You know that, right? They said they all left. You were alone, when...”
“I know, but...” As was typical at this point in a conversation, Felix’s command of human language failed him and Ada felt, rather than heard, a little growl escape him.
“Let’s go, then.” Felix looked up at her as she continued. “How many wolf’s dens could there possibly be in Caruso?”
Felix always forgot to bring a flashlight. Always. And, either as a direct reaction to this or because of some more general prerogative on the universe’s side that each duo should have one of each type of person, Ada always brought a spare. Always.
Their search was made immediately easier by nature of Caruso’s geographic makeup; the area was sort of cordoned off by a large inlet that flowed from the sea, or possibly to it, which meant that there was really only one direction to go through the woods. Felix led the way. Ada knew for a fact he had never been to this area, or at least had never returned to this area, because she had never been here herself. Still, he seemed to be noticeably familiar with his surroundings, guiding her carefully around bumpy rocks, over fallen trees, and occasionally diverting course to avoid an ornery woodland creature. He grew quieter, too, as they continued. Even quieter than usual. Ada sensed that at the same time he was also becoming more. More present, more there. His eyes were brighter, his gestures larger. Ada even saw the smile she had feared would be missing. She tried, as she hopped onto some toadstools to release the explosion of sporous powder she knew they contained, not to think about what would happen when they finally got there. If they got there. Ada was jarred from her inspection of the toadstool puff (which was extremely satisfactory, in both breadth and color) when Felix froze in his steps just ahead of her. She looked around. They were in a little clearing, a glen just big enough to let the new moonlight through. A little bit ahead of where Felix had stopped there was a slope, dotted with dark, smooth rocks, which led down to a little valley and a stream.
“Is-” Ada fell silent when Felix reached one hand back and touched her wrist, lightly. His whole body had gotten, not stiff exactly, but breathtakingly still. He looked back at her, his eyes reflecting the moonlight in a way that Ada wouldn’t have thought possible. Slowly, and very carefully, Ada shifted to move up next to Felix. The two of them stared, silently, down the slope. Ada looked back at Felix and he nodded. He turned off his flashlight and she did the same, taking them both and stowing them in her backpack. The two of them advanced slowly down the hill. Once at the bottom, Ada realized that, a little down the stream, there was a quiet outcropping in the hill, dug into the rock right by the river. Ada attempted to fall back to give Felix some space, but a little tug at her wrist told her to stay close, and she complied.
The cave was empty. Well, mostly. The rocky floor was lightly dusted with leaves and pine needles that had been driven in by the wind; that and a few weeds that had somehow managed to grow in little cracks in the stone floor were all that the cave had in the way of contents. The two of them stood in the middle and rotated, slowly, to look it all over. Finally, Felix sat down on the floor and Ada followed. Ada could feel one of those growls again, almost soundlessly emanating from Felix.
“I thought ...” more growls, and then silence. Felix curled into himself even more, slowly turning himself into a ball. Ada drew her knees up to her chest and just sat. She felt, very strongly, that this was exactly what she was there to do. Just sit. A drop of water fell to the ground somewhere in the cave.
Later, when the moon had fallen a little, Ada and Felix wordlessly left the cave as they had found it. They turned and began to walk back up the slope.
It was Ada that saw them first. First one pair of eyes at the edge of the clearing, then a few pairs, then many. She touched Felix’s wrist, exactly as he had done to her earlier. Almost immediately he moved, making sure that he was between Ada and the pack. Ada would think back on this moment often as the first time she had felt real fear. Well, technically she would identify that moment as the next one, when one of the creatures, large, scarred, and greying around the muzzle, took three tentative steps into the clearing toward them. Ada’s touch on Felix’s wrist became more of a grip. The wind swirled a few leaves around. No one moved. And then...
Felix nodded, just slightly, and the wolf seemed to do the same. Felix, keeping Ada behind him still, turned away and the two continued up the hill. Ada looked back only once, and could see the eyes still, just on the edge of the clearing. Watching.
For a while there was silence, punctuated only by that ever-present shuffling of leaves, and, later, the telltale crunch of gravel that signified they were approaching civilization again. Ada thought about touching Felix’s wrist again, but thought better of it.
“W-what did they want,” she spoke to the ground, again leaving room for the eventuality that Felix would never answer.
“What makes you think they wanted anything?”
Ada shrugged. The gravel crunched on.
“I think my flashlight’s about to die. Do you have any extra batteries?”
“No, but we can just share mine.”
Eventually, they neared the fork in the paved road where they traditionally split ways, when Felix would head left for his home and Ada would turn right for hers. As they approached, Ada tried to think of something definitive to say, to ceremoniously close this strange encounter. But the words wouldn’t come, because, Ada realized, it wasn’t time for that yet. Felix headed left and Ada did too. They climbed the large magnolia tree that grew next to Felix’s house and made the short, simple jump to the roof. Ada didn’t think of doing these things; her body had done them so many times that she was conscious of them only very rarely, the way you seldom think of drawing breath. They sat on the eave of the roof, Felix on the left, Ada on the right. This, again, was tradition, though it was entirely possible that neither party was aware that it was. They looked at the moon, low in the sky, and Ada became aware that it had to be no earlier than three or four in the morning, but was also aware that this knowledge made no difference. They sat.
Somewhere, a dog barked, and Ada imagined that it was the one they had seen getting bathed on the street the day before.
“They wanted me to come with them, I think.” Felix spoke to his knees. Ada listened. “And I...” He scratched his head just behind his ear. “I don’t know.”
“Did you want to go?”
“I don’t belong there.” His head had, at this point, drawn so far toward his knees that his voice rose from somewhere near the middle of him. “I don’t belong anywhere.”
They watched the moon set, and, some amount of time later, they watched the sky turn pink. Birds started chirping and the street started moving again, pinpricks of light as cars passed becoming more and more frequent.
“Are you going to go to school today?”
Ada shook her head. “Nah, I don’t think I will be.”
“Me neither.”
“You know that creepy abandoned Shell station we saw last week?”
“Yeah.”
“Turns out there’s some sort of monster that’s supposed to live there and scare people off. A little green one.”
“Really?”
And, bathed in the soft light of a new adventure, the two began planning their day.
And somewhere else, in a slightly different universe, a boy who had made the other decision ran and barked and played with his four-legged family, happy to have left behind a world he didn’t particularly like or understand. But in this one, that boy had at least one thing that made him suspect he did belong somewhere.
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