The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett(36)

“I heard you had an adventure yesterday,” Connor said casually.

I replaced the couch cushions. “Do you and Rush sit around and talk about me all the time or what?”

Connor shrugged. “It just came up.”

It was stupid of me to tell Rush about looking for Lizzie in the first place. But I’d been too excited to keep it to myself, and my brother was the first person I saw. Not a mistake I’d make again.

I got on my hands and knees and looked under the coffee table. Nothing.

“Find anything?” Connor asked.

“No. My keys aren’t here.”

“I mean in the woods.”

“Oh.” I sat back on my heels, scanned the room for anywhere I hadn’t checked. “No, nothing there either.”

“So what’s Lorenzo Calvetti like?”

“It’s Enzo. He’s pretty cool,” I said.

“He seems weird.”

I looked at Connor and frowned. “What? No, he doesn’t.”

“You don’t think it’s weird for some dude in his midtwenties to go hunting for his were-girlfriend with some random teenager?” Connor asked.

“No. What I think is weird is that sometime in the last twenty-four hours, my car keys ceased to exist. And the term wouldn’t be were-girlfriend. That doesn’t make sense.”

Connor laughed. “But werewolves are totally sensible, right?”

“Why are you even here right now? Where’s my brother?”

As if I summoned him, Rush bounded down the stairs. “Ready to go?”

“Yep.” Connor stood up.

“Isn’t anyone concerned that my keys are missing?”

Rush rolled his eyes. “They’re on the kitchen counter.”

“Really?”

“That’s where you put them down.”

Connor laughed. “Good job, Thorny.”

I went into the kitchen, and sure enough, there they were. I grabbed them, then went back into the living room to tell Connor that no, I didn’t think Enzo was weird for thinking his girlfriend could be a werewolf, but he and Rush were already gone.

? ? ?

The truth about working at the Sunshine Café was that they didn’t need a waitress to fill Lizzie’s spot, because mostly no one ate there. I never said that to Mr. Walczak, since I didn’t want to look for a new job, and it meant I could do whatever I wanted during my shifts. Besides, it was way better than the mini golf place.

That night, I was reading The Werewolf Book, which was basically an encyclopedia of everything that had to do with werewolves, and taking notes. I sat at the lunch counter a few stools down from Vernon, who also never seemed to mind how boring the café was.

“You know what’s interesting about werewolves?” I asked.

Vernon made a sound that could have been “Huh?” but didn’t look up from his crossword puzzle.

“It wasn’t until pretty recently that people started questioning their existence. Before that, werewolves were just accepted as part of life.”

Vernon didn’t respond.

“Almost every culture has some kind of shape-shifter myth,” I went on. “Take Native Americans, for example. They didn’t have werewolves exactly, but they believed in skinwalkers, which is pretty close.”

I assumed Vernon’s continued silence meant he was fascinated by my wealth of werewolf information and that I should keep talking.

“There’s actually a psychological disorder called clinical lycanthropy. Have you heard of it? It’s when people believe they’re werewolves and do crazy stuff on the full moon.”

For a second, I considered that maybe Lizzie wasn’t a werewolf but had gone into the woods because she believed she was one. Believed it so much that being a werewolf became real to her in her heart and in her head. Rather than a werewolf roaming the Ohio River Valley, it was just crazy Lizzie.

I dismissed the idea as interesting, but it didn’t really fit.

“There are all these methods for killing a werewolf,” I told Vernon. “But no one seems to care much about saving them. Occasionally, people in medieval Europe attempted to keep werewolves alive but only to perform these weird surgeries and exorcisms, so the end result was usually death anyway.”

Vernon finally raised his head. “Ya wanna see a werewoof, ya should looky at my Pap Pap. Drunk blood on the first of every month.”

I was sure Vernon’s grandpa, or Pap Pap, did not drink blood. I also didn’t necessarily think that would have made him a werewolf. But I figured when I reached Vernon’s age, I’d probably appreciate someone humoring me.

I smiled. “What happened to him?”

“Nazis.” Vernon went back to his crossword puzzle and wrote an answer with his shaky, old-man hand. I waited until I was sure he didn’t have more to say, then went back to my book.

There was a German legend that said you could cure a werewolf by saying its name three times.

I could picture myself out in the forest. A branch would snap behind me. I’d know something was there. I’d turn around slowly, and there she’d be. Crouched down, ready to strike, coiled as tightly as a rattlesnake. Her fur would be white and gray. She’d start to stalk toward me, and I’d look her right in the eye and say, “Lizzie Lovett, Lizzie Lovett, Lizzie Lovett.” Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe, probably, I would shut my eyes and wait to be bitten.