WOLVES DON'T TALK

Chapter 2. WOLVES DON'T TALK

Those eyes scared the stuffing out of me.

"Hello. Hello. Is someone there?" I called out, desperately hoping my voice would frighten them away. No one answered. I shouted again. The eyes blinked and blinked again, turning on and off, flickering like the sparks hanging in the air over a camp fire. Then they disappeared altogether and I heard a swishing sound and trembled as a wet object pressed against my cheek. My heart clenched in my chest.

"What do you want?" I screamed, rising to my feet and trying frantically to back away from what I couldn't see.

Then someone or SOMETHING answered.

"Who are you?" a suave, smooth, and somewhat familiar voice replied. The orange eyes resumed glaring at me. "Are you good to eat?" they asked.

"I'm a girl," I gasped. "I'm lost," I added, vaguely hoping to arouse some sympathy from whatever ..

"So, you're a human," it replied.

"Are you human?" my voice shook as I spoke. I knew I shouldn't ask but when you're scared, you don't tend to make sense.

"No, I'm a wolf," it replied.

My heart skipped a beat, a joyful beat. Brock had come back for me and now stood just inches away, teasing me.

"Brock Baldwin, you stop this right now!" I shouted. "You're sick."

"What? I don't know what you mean," the voice said. And it did sound familiar, but not like Brock's. Actually, he had blue eyes not orange ones, a very minor detail just then.

"You're stupid and it's not going to work. Wolves don't talk, Brock!" I shouted.

"No, I don't suppose we do," the voice replied. The orange eyes fixed on me; their sharp glare pierced straight through my anger. My whole body started to shake. My knees bent unwillingly and I collapsed onto the nest of dried out redwood droppings I'd gathered earlier.

"Wolves don't talk," I repeated.

Then another odd thing happened: I fell asleep, right there under that huge old tree and I dreamed about Mac Richards. He was perched on the edge of his seat next to me in Ms. Byrd's science class for gifted kids. His shaggy black hair looked pretty dirty, as usual, and stuck to his head, also as usual. Unexplainable spots streaked across his thick glasses and his shirttail hung out of his pants, a common problem for Mac with his skinny waist. A big splotch of ketchup stretched across his collar. Worst of all, he grinned at me with that stupid sick smile of his, a classic look indeed, a combination of flashing white teeth (the only thing ever clean about Mac) and drool seeping out of the corner of his mouth.

However, all of his charms were wasted on me just then because Ms. Byrd was giving me the old third degree.

"Why, why, why? Why are you telling me this, Ms. Pimentel?" she screeched.

She had flaming orange hair that stuck out all over her head and a huge witchy nose that covered more than its share of her face. When she wore green eye shadow, which was most of the time, she looked like a parrot. She hollered like one, too.

"You should know this, Carmen," she said and her whole body began to shake as she pointed her wretched finger at my blond head.

(Okay, I admit it: I am blond, but not the golden light color. It's more of a dish-water yellow brown and chopped off in a blunt cut barely longer than the tip of my chin. None of that long blond hair trash for me. My eyes are brown. My face and head are pretty round, about like a cantaloupe, and I'm short and skinny. I dont wear glasses yet but suspect they are coming on. Who cares anyway; I'm a regular kid, as good as the next one.)

"We've been studying this for over a week now," the parrot persisted. "The word is defoliant," she said, relaxing her finger and glaring at me as she spoke, like I was the stupidest person ever born.

Then she swished around and presented her backside to the class and her front to the blackboard at the end of the room and scratched the wretched word in yellow chalk across it.

"Defoliants kill vegetation. One of the most famous examples is Agent Orange, which was named after the orange rings painted on the barrels the U.S. military stored it in," she said, spinning back around to face the class, waving her now chalky hand at us. "They used it in the Vietnam war," she droned on, but I didn't hear her.

I didn't want to know about defoliants or any of the other lousy stuff they were always trying to jam into our gifted heads. The only good thing about it, as far as I was concerned, was not learning it. I figured staying stupid was a good way to get sent back with the rest of the normal people.

Ms. Byrd finally shut her mouth and shrugged her shoulders and smiled at me, like she knew I'd stopped listening.

"It won't work," she said, marching over to me and then whispering in my ear. "You're not getting out of here so easy."

Mac leaned in my direction as soon as she walked off.

"I'll help you, Car," he offered in a cracking voice that fluctuated between the squeaky kid he was and a deeper adult baritone.

He still managed to sound superior and truly infuriating to me. I hated him and I hated being called Car. Mainly, because Mac was the only person who called me that and he was disgusting.

"That's a wonderful idea, Mac," Ms. Byrd squawked. She'd overheard. I swear that woman had ears in her behind. "I'll call both your parents and see if we can arrange for Mac to tutor you after school." She actually seemed to crow as she said it.

I cringed. My whole wretched life passed before my eyes. My reputation had just been shot for good and forever. I'd never be popular again. Mac Richards, the king nerd of all time, the worst know-it-all, the most ignored creep in the eighth grade (probably in the whole world) had seen to that.

That was a nightmare, indeed. The dream scared me so bad, I shuddered in my sleep.

"Are you alright?" a voice asked in the dark.

"What's it to you, Mac Richards!" I snapped back and dreamed on, watching the two of us in full technicolor resting our rear ends on a set of rusty metal chairs at his house and staring at a pile of books on their kitchen table.

Macs little brother, Sim, circled around us in his wheelchair, shoving the contents of a bowl of ice cream in his mouth with one hand and pushing on one of the chair's wheels with the other. He tried to squeak out answers to the questions we attempted to solve as we worked, but never got anything right. Sim wasn't smart like his brother and everyone stayed away from him; not because his legs didn't work but because he slobbered a lot.

The entire Richards family seemed weird. Mac's father shook most of the time. His hands trembled so hard, he could barely lift a cup of coffee. He hadn't had a regular job in forever. Their grandfather lived with them. He wandered around the house and up and down their neighborhood streets, wearing the same old worn out army fatigues every day and muttering to himself as he walked. I don't know anything about their mother; I'd never seen her. And Mac . Well, Mac was smart and different. Very different from every other kid in the world.

"Earth science is great, Car. It's one of my favorite subjects," he told me. Then he grinned that stupid love-sick grin of his at me and I shuddered and shook and woke up.

"The princess arises with the dawn," a familiar sounding voice said as I opened my eyes and stared into another set of smiling teeth.