Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(46)
“Jesus,” he says. “You are pushing all kinds of buttons.”
She wants to drive around. Someplace remote. He knows better but can’t stop himself. When she touches him on the shoulder or the hand, it’s like a jolt from a live wire. “I think I know a place,” he says.
He glances at his handheld to study a map of the town he hasn’t yet memorized. The app boots up and displays his last entry, Battle River Drive. He hesitates—too long; he can feel her eyes on him—before thumbing save and then views a map of Old Mountain and orients himself.
They trail a garbage truck on its way to the dump. A damp sheet of newspaper flutters out of it and splats onto his windshield, flattening there, the Sunday comics. Malerie screams with delight. The sun soaks through the paper and colors their bodies with squares of light. Patrick kicks on the wipers and the newspaper is gone and they are driving past the dump and hanging a left onto a chained-off driveway that leads to the abandoned lycan school. He takes the Jeep off road, to avoid the chained entry, and then chunks back onto the driveway, which opens into a weed-choked parking lot. Broken asphalt mutters beneath the tires.
Malerie smears ChapStick across her lips and pops them. “You know Max is straight edge, right?”
Patrick negotiates the Jeep through an old basketball court, the chain nets like rusted chandeliers, and then they are behind the school, out of view from the road. “He said kind of.”
“Yeah, kind of.” She snorts more than says this. “No drugs, no smoke, no booze.” He parks the Jeep and kills the ignition. “He doesn’t even let me do this.” She unbuckles her seat belt. His eyes dart to meet hers just as she drops her head to his lap.
There is a car coming toward him when he hits his blinker and gets ready to turn back onto the road—a Camry, as white as a polished bone. Behind the wheel he spots his mother. She has her cell phone pressed to her ear and doesn’t see him, he’s sure of it, distracted by her conversation.
He hesitates a moment before ignoring his blinker, heading in the opposite direction, pulling onto the road behind her, following as she heads out of town.
“What are you doing?” Malerie says.
“I want to check on something.”
His dashboard clock reads 88:88. Malerie hits it with the heel of her hand, then goes digging in her purse, withdrawing a hot pink Motorola Razr to check the time. “I need to get to work soon.” Three afternoons a week, she doles out pills at Walgreens as a pharmacy tech, and he agreed to drop her off.
“This will only take a minute.”
He keeps a hundred yards between her car and his. Another mile and his mother pulls off into the Juniper Creek development, as he guessed she would. He taps the brake and slows nearly to a stop.
“What?” Malerie says.
“Nothing.”
Chapter 17
MIRIAM CALLS HER WEAK. Her voice is not cruel so much as it is cold and precise. “You haven’t been sleeping enough. You haven’t been eating and exercising properly. You look scared of your own shadow.” If Claire is going to live with her—no, if Claire is going to live—she needs to toughen up.
They begin the day with muscle building. They do wide-arm and narrow-grip push-ups on the living room floor. They do dips balanced between the coffee table and couch. Crunches and cherry pickers and leg lifts and lunges and planks. They hurl a medicine ball back and forth as if blasting it from a cannon. Miriam holds up her hands and Claire punches them, one-two, one-two, fast jabs, knuckles smacking palms.
They make a grocery run and fill the cart. They drink protein shakes. They cook a half pound of bacon and scramble eggs in the grease coating the cast-iron pan. They eat beans, thick slices of cheese, summer sausage. Apples. Within five days Claire begins to fill out. She can’t see her ribs and she can feel the muscle and fat cording around her bones.
And all this while, usually when they’re eating or stretching between workouts, Miriam tells Claire about her parents.
They were part of a radical-line movement, what Miriam calls an underground conscience. This began in the sixties, when they enrolled at William Archer University and lycan political resistance was at its height.
The information is readily available. A quick Google search of their names would have revealed a long string of articles, but it has never occurred to Claire to look. It has never occurred to her that her parents were anything other than NPR-listening armchair philosophers. They talked often about the Struggle, which peaked a few decades ago, but now she sees they were directly part of it—leading May Day demonstrations, joining labor unions, organizing boycotts—their aim to end segregation in schools, segregation in the workplace, segregation in restaurants and bathrooms and pools and hotels and retail stores, and the continued U.S. occupation of the Lupine Republic.
They marched. They hurled rocks and eggs at police. They wrote letters to congressmen and shook signs from street corners. They staged full-moon frenzies in which they would transform en masse in a park or town square. They were arrested and posted bail and were arrested again. The Fourteenth Amendment passed with some concessions but not enough. Lycans could not work in education or medicine or law enforcement, could not serve in the military except in a designated frontline unit nicknamed the Dog Soldiers. Mandatory prescriptions and monthly blood tests remained in effect.