On the morning of the History Odyssey tournament, I sawed a branch from the old pine behind our house. Needles poured in little whik-whik propellers onto the snow. I took the casino bus to Whitewood after school, lugging my wolf poster and branch past the old people from the retirement home, who frowned at me but didn’t say anything. In the Whitewood High School auditorium, I propped the branch against the lectern to create the crucial atmosphere. I played a tape of howling wolves on repeat. Though my mouth was dry when I began my speech, I didn’t have to use my notes and I didn’t rock back and forth like the boy who went before me. I was focused, calm. I pointed to diagrams of pups in different displays of submission, and quoting from a book I said, “But the term alpha—evolved to describe captive animals—is still misleading. An alpha animal may be alpha only at certain times for a specific reason.” Those words always made me feel I was drinking something cool and sweet, something forbidden. I thought of the black bitch at the Nature Center, fixed in her posture of doggy friendliness, and I recited that part of my speech over again, slowly this time, like it was an amendment to the Constitution.
Afterward, one of the judges poked his pencil in the air. “But—I have to intervene here. There’s something you haven’t explained very well. What do wolves have to do with human history?”
It was then that I saw Mr. Grierson by the door. He had his jacket in his arms like he’d just come in, and I watched as he caught the eye of the judge and shrugged. It was the subtlest shift of his shoulders, as if to say, What can you do with kids? What can you do with these teenage girls? I took a deep breath and glared at both of them. “Wolves have nothing at all to do with humans, actually. If they can help it, they avoid them.”
They gave me the Originality Prize, which was a bouquet of carnations dyed green for Saint Patrick’s Day. Afterward, Mr. Grierson wanted to know if we should load the pine branch in his car with the poster to drive back to school. I was depressed and shook my head. The winner, a seventh-grade girl in a pantsuit, was getting her picture taken with her watercolor rendering of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald. I buttoned my coat, then followed Mr. Grierson as he dragged the drooping branch out a side exit. He javelined it upright into a grainy bank of snow. “It’s like A Charlie Brown Christmas,” he said, laughing. “I want to hang tinsel from it. It’s cute.”
He bent down to brush stray needles from his slacks, and on impulse I thrust out a hand and brushed as well—swish, swish—against his thigh. He stepped back, did a little shake of his pants, laughed awkwardly. Men can be so ungainly when it comes to sex. I learned that later. But at the time, what I’d done didn’t feel sexual. Let me be clear about that. It felt like grooming. Or like coaxing a dog to you, watching its hackles rise and fall, and then you have a pet.
I licked my lips, Lily Holburn–style, deer-like, innocent as anything. I said, “Mr. Grierson, would you mind driving me home?”
Before we left Whitewood High, Mr. Grierson went back inside for a wet paper towel to wrap around the stems of the carnations. Then he set the bouquet in my arms, cautiously, as if it were some kind of bracken baby. As we drove the twenty-six miles from Whitewood to my parents’ house, we watched a storm blow ice in monstrous crusts off the limbs of trees—so that was part of it, too, the slow-motion sense of catastrophe. Mr. Grierson’s defrosting fan didn’t work very well, and I swiped at the windshield with my jacket’s dirty cuff.
“This where we turn?” he asked, as he drove down Still Lake Road. He was pulling little bits of skin from his lips with his incisors. Even in the near dark, I could see a crack in his lip, bloody but not yet bleeding. That pleased me for some reason. It felt like something I had done to him myself—with my wolf presentation, with my pine needles.
The turnoff to my parents’ road was unplowed, as usual. Mr. Grierson pulled to a stop at the intersection and we both leaned forward to peer out the windshield and up the steep, dark hill. When I glanced at him across the car, his throat looked as wide and soft as a belly exposed, so I stretched out and kissed him there. Quickly, quickly.
He flinched.
“This way then?” he said, pulling up the zipper of his coat and tucking his neck back in his collar. Up on the hill sat my parents’ lit cabin, and I could tell he had fixed his attention there because it was the first thing in sight. “Um, that’s that excult place, isn’t it? I heard some strange stuff about them. They neighbors of yours?”
He was only making small talk of course—still I gripped my carnations. I felt myself split open, like kindling. “They keep to themselves.”
“Yeah?” His mind was somewhere else.
Sleet popped against the windshield, but I couldn’t see it because the glass was getting all fogged up again.
“Let’s get you home,” he said, cranking the gearshift and turning the wheel, and I could sense how tired he was of being responsible for me.
“I can walk from here,” I told him.
I thought if I slammed the door hard enough, Mr. Grierson might come after me. That’s what it’s like to be fourteen. I thought if I took a few running steps off the road into the snow that maybe he’d follow me—to assuage his guilt, to make sure I got home all right, to push his chalky history hands under my jacket, whatever. I headed for the lake instead of going uphill. I darted out onto the ice in the prickly sleet, but when I looked back, his car with its brights was turning around, doing a meticulous U-turn in the trees.