History of Wolves(45)

He shook his head but played along. “What do they eat?”

“White-tailed deer. Also worms and blueberries.”

“Keep it coming, Girl Scout. Keep stuffing it all back down in the unconscious.”

“And dogs! There was this little town in Alaska, Middleofnowheresville—”

“Isn’t that where you’re from?” He raised his eyebrows.

“And they came at night and got someone’s Lab. Just chomp. Then the next night, it was a couple of huskies, who never even made a sound. The final blow was someone’s pretty coonhound, one of those long-snouted things, a winner of dog shows. She was eaten right off her chain, just her collar left behind and, you know, her jawbone and tail.”

“Jawbone and Tail. An album title.”

“Wolves eat most of the bones, usually. That’s a Girl Scout tip.”

“So what happened in Nowheresville?” He was leaning in closer to me now, was murmuring into my neck. “Who saved the rest of the dogs?”

“No!” I pushed him back. “Who saved the wolves? They were all shot.”


The fall I started middle school, my mom stopped calling me CEO and started calling me the Teenager. This was because I was always stealing magazines from the secretary’s office at school, reading People or Us or Glamour. I read about procedures for blow-drying your hair so it looked like a tornado had come to town, and I studied tips for slicking down bangs so they looked wet. I never had any interest in trying these looks. What I liked seeing was something so mysterious broken down into steps, pieced together in charts and tables. Or, if there weren’t any new magazines in the office, I got books from the library on ice age paleontology and the history of electricity. I coveted diagrams of hairstyles or skeletons, ink drawings of angles and equations I didn’t understand. My mother didn’t see me reading these things because I wasn’t doing anything she found interesting. Instead she’d be setting out jars for jam—or copying a quote on a pink index card—and when she’d glance up, she’d look right through me. I didn’t watch TV until I lived in Minneapolis with Ann, but when I did I recognized the feeling: to look at somebody who can’t look back.

Occasionally, she’d see me reading and peer at the book over my shoulder. “Is that for homework?” she’d ask, shaking her head in amazement. I knew she wanted me to do well in school, but she wanted me to succeed the way she had—by disdaining the whole process. It bothered her to think I was trying. “Oh, you’re becoming such a little professor, aren’t you? We should get you one of those gowns.” She was glancing down at a drawing of a velociraptor in my book, its bones labeled with arrows. She seemed one part surprised, maybe even pleased, but two parts disparaging and contemptuous.

“Don’t give me that look!” she’d laugh.

I was twelve. My whole life I’d been unintentionally giving her looks she didn’t like.

“You’d be impressive in one of those gowns, like a pope.” She widened her eyes at me. “I’m kidding! Listen, I’m not saying there’s no system at all. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that there’s an order on a higher level than school, and it’s worth paying attention to the relative elevation of things. God, man, bureaucracy, worksheets.” She sighed. “When they say at school, do this worksheet, and the next one and on and on, you need to see, it’s really important that you see, those aren’t steps that go on up higher. It’s just a fake kind of higher. Does that make sense?”


“What’s this!” she asked me once, when she found a People magazine on the table, left open to an article about Princess Diana. I was fascinated by her sadness for a while, by how, pretty as she was, she could not keep it to herself. I read about her little boys, her husband’s affairs, her eating disorder, her lipstick pairings, her stockings, her high heels. I found an article after her divorce in which she’d made a list of her morning routine, which included: Think Positively Even If You Have Bad Dreams. That seemed both pitiful and brave to me, poignant. My mother, however, turned the slick People pages in complete puzzlement, saying, “Did you read this whole article? I don’t understand you. What is there in that thing to read?”


Once, near the beginning of seventh grade, I went to the bathroom and Sarah the Ice Skater was there with another girl, combing sparkly gel into her hair. It was Lily Holburn, who looked stricken. Her slick black hair came to a point like a stake behind her back. “Oh, the Freak,” Sarah said when she saw me, but she seemed interested rather than disgusted, searching my face for a sign of the popped bubble. There wasn’t any, except—maybe—the spot on my cheek that was less deeply tanned.

Lily squeezed one eye shut, a line of gel leaking down her forehead.

“Hey,” I said, warily.

I knew Sarah was to be respected. I’d heard she had already landed a double axel, one footed, fully rotated, and I believed it. Her body was like a pulled wet branch, her taut muscles holding some weird snap that seemed mechanical and a little dangerous. Everyone assumed that triples hung in her future, that they followed her magically wherever she went, dangled just out of her reach. Triple Salchow, triple loop, triple flip, triple lutz. That meant Upper Great Lakes, Midwesterns, Nationals, Worlds.

Lily, on the other hand, was not what people considered athletic. Still, Sarah had befriended her in the months after her mother died and convinced her and two other mediumpretty girls, both blondes, to join synchronized skating. It wasn’t charity, Sarah’s interest. Though Lily wasn’t called Indian anymore, no one was calling her retarded the way they once did either.