History of Wolves

Here’s the thing about Mr. Grierson. I’d seen how he crouched down next to Lily’s desk. I’d seen how he said, “You’re doing fine,” and put his hand very carefully, like a paperweight, on her spine. How he lifted his fingertips and gave her a little pat.

On the morning of the History Odyssey tournament, I sawed a branch from the old pine behind our house.

She looked up into the air, then very slowly wiped her palms on her canvas pockets.

Nights, I went out in mukluks, a ski mask, and my father’s down jacket, which was redolent with his scents, with tobacco and mildew and bitter coffee.

Because my parents didn’t own a car, this is how I got home when I missed the bus.

By the time I got home, it was dark.

Before, she’d always emphasized how young they’d been then, how ignorant and misguided. But she hadn’t been young she told me now. She was thirty-three, long past her high school and college years. Everything she did, she did when she should have known better.

So many people, even now, admire privation. They think it sharpens you, the way beauty does, into something that might hurt them. They calculate their own strengths against it, unconsciously, preparing to pity you or fight.

Surely, they said to me later, surely by then you sensed something was off?

Maybe. Maybe there is a way to climb above everything, some special ladder or insight, some optical vantage point that allows a clear, unobstructed view of things. Maybe this way of seeing comes naturally to some people, and good for them if it does. But I remember it all, even now, as if two mutually exclusive things happened. First it goes the way the prosecutors described it—nausea, headache, coma, etcetera—and then it comes back to me the way it actually was with Patra and Paul—tall ships, car ride home, Good King Wenceslas, bed. Though they end the same way, these are not the same story. Maybe if I’d been someone else I’d see it differently. But isn’t that the crux of the problem? Wouldn’t we all act differently if we were someone else?

was one of those teachers who set up hidden traps. Like all teachers, he wanted me caught, but he wanted to lead me there first; he wanted me to go on my own accord; he wanted me to feel like I’d made the discovery myself, that I hadn’t been lured in.