Of Scars and Stardust Read online

  All of a sudden, there was a warm hand—a human hand—on my back and Danny was saying, “What’s your problem?”

  I opened an eye and looked at him. He stared back with a question mark in his eyes. He didn’t see them. He didn’t hear them. His arm slid around my shoulder so that his fingers grazed my chest. And then he was pressing his chapped lips against my neck and all I could think about was how it could be possible that he didn’t hear the howls bellowing over the traffic.

  I slid out from under his arm and said, “Do you hear that? You have to hear that, right?”

  But he just kept staring, mouth still hanging open, eyes still half-lidded. For a second he looked like he might be listening, but he just pinched his lips together. “You’re crazy.” Then his hand was on my wrist and he was pulling me inside. “Come on, let’s go to my room.”

  “No.” I jerked my wrist free. I was scared enough now that my heart jolted to life, and it pounded furiously in my chest. I grabbed my purse off the couch and headed for the door. “I have to go home, like right now.”

  Danny trailed behind me, and I thought he might offer to walk me home since I was shaking so bad. But he just leaned against the door and said, “Call me when you stop being such a freak.” And then he slammed it in my face.

  When I stepped into the sparrow-lined ceiling of the elevator, it looked different than it had an hour ago. The patches of clouds peeking out from behind wings looked dim and thirsty, like they’d just dumped out all of their rain and still wanted more. And the hot lights above made patterns of rainbows in the mirrors, and I couldn’t help but think that if Ella were here, she would have been right: maybe thunderclouds and rainbows do belong on elevator ceilings.

  Manhattan still looked the same: crisp and symmetrical and full of gray. Even the sky looked like it was full of cement. But somehow that was different, too: not because of what it was made of, but because of what I knew was hidden inside.

  When I first moved to New York, I’d thought that concrete was safe. Way safer than open sky and cornfields. I’d thought that Ella’s note only applied to Amble. But the wolves had found me here anyway: in paintings draped in Aunt Sharon’s gallery, stretched across book covers and T-shirts in tiny shops in SoHo, in my dreams. I couldn’t get rid of the scratchy feeling in my stomach that told me they remembered me, that they hadn’t forgotten. That Ella’s almost-death was because I’d laughed at them and poked at them and told Rae they weren’t real. They would let me forget about them for a little while—a week, maybe two—and then they’d send me the whisper of a shadow or the scream of a nightmare. They were watching me, warning me all the way from Amble, telling me to never come back or they’d take care of me.

  My shrink called this a “phobia.”

  He said I had an irrational fear of something that couldn’t exist. He’d pretty much spent the past two years trying to convince me that wolves who liked cherry-flavored things and periwinkle cloth didn’t exist. He occasionally still pulled out the wolf migration maps and dog-eared National Geographics to use as “proof” whenever my words skirted around what I’d seen in the city. I’d gotten used to smiling and agreeing that I’m crazy.

  But I’m not.

  Ella’s note was proof of that.

  A car horn blasted in my ear and I jumped to the other end of the crosswalk just before I got soaked by the drainage water pooling near the curb. I shook my head and cleared the fog. I was ten feet from the steps to the subway, and I’d managed to cross a busy street without even flinching.

  And I still had the thirteen-minute ride home to think about Ella.

  All I thought about on the ride was that Ella was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a liar.

  At least she wasn’t a liar back then. I didn’t know what she was now.

  The subway hissed to a stop and suddenly everything snapped back to normal. The buildings weren’t hunched over and the Christmas lights in the windows didn’t flicker. It was like there’d been a storm that had bent the city to its will, and then it disappeared so that the traffic lights and the skyscrapers could heal. The storm left from behind my eyes, too, and everything inside was clear again.

  I watched my boots as they clicked on the sidewalk. These heels were dangerous, and definitely needed supervision to avoid an awkward collision with the pavement. The grooves blurred as they swept under me, and I could tell by the broken, uneven panels that I was just a few feet from home.

  I was about to step over a jagged crack down the middle of a slab of sidewalk when something dark and smeared caught my eye.

  I stopped and stared at it for a long time before my brain registered what I was looking at.

  A paw print.

  A really big, bloody paw print staining the cement.

  My hand shook as I reached down to touch the sidewalk. I brushed my finger over the print. A dash of red colored my skin.

  I stood up and quickly glanced around, hoping that somebody, anybody, was around. But as if by magic, the street was empty. The first time I’d ever seen a deserted street in New York. While I’d almost come to expect threatening howls and stalking shadows over the past two years, this was something else entirely.

  There was nothing left to do but run.

  I held my arms in front of me for balance as my heels echoed frantically around the empty street. I watched them fly under me on every other sidewalk panel: more paw prints.

  I hadn’t prayed since the last night I’d sat by Ella’s bedside at the hospital, before I had to leave. But as the paw prints burned a trail in front of me, I said this prayer:

  Dear God,

  If you still listen to me, I need you to make these paw prints go to the building across the street, or do a U-turn and head back toward the subway, or, better yet, disappear.

  I stopped in front of my apartment building, closed my eyes, and held my breath for as long as I could.

  I opened my eyes.

  And a trail of prints, still slick with blood, crawled into the cracked front door of my apartment building.

  eight

  Rae had always said that the wolves started out as regular, boring wolves that stalked rabbits and crept across the Midwest in packs. But when they crossed the Michigan border into Ohio, something changed. The woods melted away to flat plains and jagged cornfields, and the wolves got hungry. Rae said they killed a girl in Elton, a toddler who’d slipped into a cornfield while her parents drank too many margaritas on their back deck. She had a cherry sucker in her mouth. The wolves never went back to being regular wolves as they traveled across the country, Rae said. Not after they got a taste of blood and skin and cherries.

  Then, after the toddler, there was Sarah Dunnard, taken right from the cornfield edging her backyard. And then there was Ella.

  And maybe next it would be me.

  Ever since I’d left Amble and the wolves had started to appear in New York, I’d been careful not to keep anything cherry-flavored on me. So I threaded my shaking fingers through my pockets, searching for a missed cough drop or lip balm. I gasped as I suddenly remembered Danny’s cherry-laced lips, pressed against the skin beneath my chin.

  I closed my eyes. They couldn’t possibly have smelled that tiny burst of cherry through the sewers and smog of the city.

  When I opened my eyes, there were two more paw prints on the steps leading to the elevator. And then a mess of blood pooled in the cracks between the tiles.

  There was another one as soon as I stepped off the elevator, onto the twelfth floor.

  And one smack in the middle of the flowered doormat, splattered against the lilies like an awkward, sticky rose.

  I held my breath as I dug in my purse for my keys. My mind pinwheeled, searching for anything to make this not real.

  “The door isn’t open,” I breathed as I shoved the key into the lock. “Claire, if there were wolves here, the door wou
ldn’t be closed, okay? Stop being stupid.”

  I shoved open the door and slammed it closed behind me.

  The hallway was drenched in shadows so thick I felt like I was choking on them. I snapped on the light and they disappeared, just like the paw prints did when I’d pushed them out into the evening.

  Aunt Sharon still wasn’t home.

  She’d had an opening at the gallery tonight, which meant she’d be home hours later, tipsy on champagne and the strap of her dress drooping below her shoulder. I thought about calling Danny and inviting him over, just so I wouldn’t have to be alone. But then I remembered the way he’d curled his nose up at me, like he’d just smelled something rotten, right before he slammed the door in my face. I couldn’t do it.

  But it didn’t matter anyway. As I glanced around the flowered rugs (Aunt Sharon had a thing for flowers, probably because there weren’t any in New York), I saw that there wasn’t a single print. Even on the empty rectangle where a rug usually sat, the floor shone clean under the hall light.

  My shoulders relaxed, and I think I took my first real breath since I’d left Danny’s apartment.

  I shoved my boots into the rack in the closet and slid across the floor in my socks like I was nine and back in Amble again. Ella and I used to have dance parties in our socks every Sunday morning before church. I’d surf across the hardwood in pink striped socks, and Ella would follow in slippers dotted with purple narwhals.

  I laughed as I stepped into my room, remembering. Ella went through a phase when she was about eight where everything needed to have a narwhal on it. She’d begged Mom for narwhal slippers for Christmas, and when Mom obviously couldn’t find them (because, really, who wants narwhal slippers), she special-ordered narwhal fabric online to make Ella slippers. When Ella figured out that narwhals were actually real, and not a cross between a unicorn and a beluga whale, you would have thought someone told her the sun wasn’t going to come out again.

  I flicked on my light and headed to my dresser. I dug through the top drawer, which was full of tiny trinkets and old keys that used to belong to something important but I couldn’t remember what.

  There it was, crammed in the back corner: a small, worn shoebox filled with pieces of who Ella used to be. I opened it and dug through the beaded jewelry and lavender stationery until I found the crumpled photo I was looking for. Ella was positively beaming in her full-body narwhal costume, a glittery paper horn poking the ceiling fan above her. I let my eyes glance down at her throat, her mouth. Her pink lips that used to stretch across her teeth, the dimples in her cheeks that didn’t exist anymore. The little depression on her neck that was ripped out.

  The last time I saw Ella, before Mom and Dad shoved me out of Amble, she’d looked like a stitched-up doll of herself, jagged lines criss-crossing her lips. I never got to see the stitches come out and her twisted little mouth move again. I never got to hear her words again.

  So I let myself look at who she was before, just for a second. I pressed my fingertip to her smile and smiled for her. Even with her lips hidden and shadowed, she was still magic.

  I bent down to get my sweatpants when something caught my eye. I dropped onto my knees and poked my head under the bed.

  Ella’s periwinkle bird stared back at me, unblinking.

  I cupped it in my hand like a fragile thing that might break if I breathed too hard. The tips of its wings were frayed, and little strings dangled around its body like party streamers.

  And there was blood.

  At least, I thought it was blood. I was pretty sure. A dark spot had soaked through the yarn, right through the chest. I pulled the bird between my fingers and the spot stretched wider, revealing a burgundy center that still looked fresh.

  I threw it down and scrambled to my feet.

  Something like a half-scream ripped through me.

  I started to run out of my bedroom, a scream still stuck in my throat, but paused in the hallway. Images flicked through my head: the bloody bird staring up at me, followed by Ella’s bloody face. My insides churned and black spots danced in front of my eyes, but I turned back into the room. I held my breath as I opened my dresser drawer and pulled out the shoebox. The note was still there, tucked carefully beneath the other pieces of Ella. I took it out and threw myself onto my bed.

  I would have bolted, run through the streets of Manhattan screaming, but there was nowhere to go. Nowhere was safe from the wolves, not even my city or my room or my own head. I curled into a ball on the mattress, clutching Ella’s note in my hand, praying the words would seep into my bloodstream and pump into my brain and remind me that this was real, that they were real. That I wasn’t crazy.

  I pressed my forehead into my knees and cried until my jeans were splotchy and cold, waiting for the words to sink in.

  nine

  I would have stayed there, clutching that note, all week if Aunt Sharon hadn’t stumbled into my bedroom.

  She came home around dawn, giggly and hopped up on wine and pâté. I heard her humming around the kitchen for a while, searching for a bottle opener. After about three minutes of digging through drawers, the light from my room must have caught her eye, because she found me still curled up against the mattress, shaking.

  “It could have been a raccoon,” she said, rubbing my back. “Or anything, really. There are all sorts of animals running around those alleys.”

  Of course. I’d heard this before, back in Amble. The rabid raccoon as an excuse for Ella’s attack. Apparently people liked to blame the unexplainable on raccoons.

  I scooped up Ella’s bird from the floor and poked my finger at the spot of blood on its heart. “Yeah, maybe.”

  Aunt Sharon stared at me for a second longer than was comfortable for either of us. She gave me that look most people give me when they find out about my story. Which is why no one in New York knew it except for her, and only because she had to.

  “Oh honey, come here.” She pulled me into a tight hug and I could smell the bitterness of red wine still on her breath. “I don’t know what kind of paw prints you saw, but they don’t belong to a wolf. You don’t need to be scared.”

  “Okay.” I stared at the scuffed tips of her heels as she kissed my forehead.

  She let me go and rubbed my shoulder, still watching me with those sad eyes. “It’s probably a good thing you have an appointment with Dr. Barges later today.”

  I groaned. I’d forgotten it was Thursday, and Thursdays were the days I went to my shrink’s delicate glass office and spoke in words sharp enough to shatter it. Even after two years together, Dr. Barges had never quite grown on me.

  I had to do something quick. The idea of spending another hour of my time staring at the back of Dr. Barges’s clipboard made me shudder. “But it’s my birthday!” I said. “Can’t I go a different day, maybe sometime next week?”

  Aunt Sharon stopped in the doorway and I knew she was thinking of how to force me into it. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll walk you down to his office and do some shopping while you’re there. Then we can meet up at that fabric shop you like and have a big fancy dinner for your birthday, okay?” She smiled sweetly. “Sound like a good plan?”

  Yeah, a great plan—for her. I couldn’t find any loopholes. Totally trapped. “Fine,” I mumbled, staring at the floor.

  “Don’t worry, Claire. I have big plans for your birthday.” She winked. “Now why don’t you try to get some sleep, honey. Okay?”

  I waited until her bedroom door clicked shut before I nestled back down and pulled the blanket over my eyes.

  I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep, but the corals and pinks of the sky and the puffy clouds that looked like they were lit from within comforted me. Because at least when everything was washed with daylight, I could see better. I could see them, if I could ever catch them.

  I figured Dr. Barges would sign me up for a crazy home if he could m
ake a case for it.

  At first it used to bother me that someone who was supposed to know the difference between crazy people and sane people thought I was a freak. But then I learned how to say just enough to keep him up at night wondering if I just had an overactive imagination or if I would sneak into his apartment in the middle of the night and cut his face off with a steak knife.

  I liked to keep it this way.

  When I entered his office, he was eating a tuna sandwich at his desk. I plopped into the chair in the farthest corner of the room. The whole place stunk.

  “So, tell me about these paw prints,” he said, wiping his mouth with his hand.

  I swiveled the chair so that it faced the Manhattan skyline. “They were all over the sidewalk and the steps to the apartment. They were bloody.” I closed my eyes.

  “Mmm.” I could almost see him nodding his head while he picked at the lettuce in his teeth. “That’s very interesting. How did you feel when you saw them?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Awesome.”

  I expected him to give me some crap about how I would never be able to get to the root of my “phobia” if I couldn’t be serious with my emotions; the usual. I tilted my head back so that my face caught a watery ray of sun and waited. He shuffled his sandwich wrapper and sighed. Papers rustled, his desk chair groaned, and I knew without opening my eyes that he was standing behind me with my file between his fingertips.

  “I think it would be a good idea to take a look at these again,” he said, dropping the manila folder into my lap.

  I flipped it open, even though I’d already seen what was tucked in here a million times: a map white-washed at the creases, a couple of photocopied articles smothered in yellow highlighter. This is what I liked to call my “mock file.” This is what Dr. Barges tried to pass off as my patient history when I knew there had to be another file here somewhere, one that spelled out my crazy on three-ply copies.