“It was.”
I lay back on the bed and crossed my arms behind my head. The night before, I’d had sex right there. The sheets were back on, so I guess Enzo had washed them.
He hesitated, then lay down next to me, mirroring my position but still distant. He made sure not to get close enough that we would touch. There was no risk of one of us breathing too deeply and our skin briefly coming into contact.
“Should we talk about things?” Enzo asked.
“Which things?”
“Us. Last night. All of it.”
“No,” I said. I rolled onto my side, facing Enzo. He looked over at me. “There’s nothing to say. Let’s just, I don’t know, be.”
“Yeah, OK. We can do that.”
And then we were good. Enzo rolled onto his side too, and we stayed like that, talking for a long time about stuff that didn’t matter, like the cartoons we loved the most when we were kids and the best flavor of ice cream and if there was any chance of astrology being real.
I relaxed. It made me think of when we went to the abandoned house in the woods and how, for a little while, we were just hanging out, making up a story, and nothing else mattered. Maybe that’s what it would be like if Enzo and I actually dated. Not all of the angst or unhappiness. Just us enjoying each other’s company, being friends.
“Tell me something fascinating,” I said when there was a lull in conversation.
“About what?”
“Anything.”
I watched Enzo think. He had that faraway look in his eyes that he got when he was concentrating. He hadn’t cut his hair since I’d met him. I wanted to reach over and run my fingers through it. When he spoke, I let my eyes drift to his mouth, watched his lips form the words.
“There was this psychologist in the sixties who thought he could cure people with delusions by making them confront paradoxes. So he found these three guys who all believed they were Jesus Christ and had them meet, thinking it would snap them out of it.”
“What happened?” I wasn’t thinking of Enzo’s lips anymore. When he told one of his stories, it was impossible to think of anything else.
“They each came up with complex explanations for how the other guys couldn’t be the real Jesus. The psychologist wrote a book about it, documenting the whole experiment. But in the end, none of the men had been cured. They held on to their beliefs.”
“Good for them,” I said. “Tell me another one.”
Enzo laughed. “I’m not an encyclopedia, you know.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but Enzo’s phone rang. He groaned.
“Let it ring,” I said. “No, never mind. Get it. It might be the towing place.”
Enzo got out of bed and crossed to the kitchen. I immediately wanted him to come back. The bed was cold without him in it.
I rolled onto my back and closed my eyes, listening to Enzo in the background saying hello and yes, it was Lorenzo Calvetti. It wasn’t anyone calling about my car. They would have asked for me. I couldn’t really hear the rest of what he was saying, but it was weird. In all the time I’d spent at Enzo’s apartment, he hadn’t gotten any other calls.
Faintly, I heard him put his phone back on the counter, his feet on the floor as he made his way back to me. I opened my eyes.
Enzo stood at the edge of the bed. Something was wrong. His face was an unnatural shade of whitish green that made him look like wax. His eyes seemed too small and too dark. His mouth was open, as if it had come unhinged and he’d forgotten how to close it.
I sat up. “What’s wrong?”
For a second, he didn’t speak. “It’s Lizzie. They found her.”
Chapter 31
The Lost Girl
Lizzie Lovett did not go into the woods to turn into a werewolf. She went into the woods to die.
There was no shape-shifting involved. Hers was a much simpler story than that. Afterward, everyone nodded and said of course, of course, as if they’d known what happened all along. But they didn’t. How could they have known? Their guesses were as good as mine. Girls like Lizzie are not supposed to die.
I couldn’t make the news more real, no matter how many times I repeated it to myself. Lizzie Lovett was dead. Lizzie Lovett was dead. Lizzie was dead, dead, dead.
She was not a werewolf. She wasn’t hunting or stalking or pouncing. She wasn’t developing a taste for blood or raw flesh. She wasn’t using her powerful wolf jaw to crack bones. Lizzie wasn’t howling at the full moon. She wasn’t searching for a pack. She wasn’t lost or scared or trying to come to terms with her new identity. Lizzie was dead. That’s it. The end. Move along, nothing to see here. Certainly no werewolves. Just another dead girl.
When Enzo first told me what happened, I didn’t understand. I kept asking what he was talking about until he grabbed my shoulders and shook me and shouted, “She’s dead. Don’t you get it?”