Red: The Untold Story Read online

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s my brother. I should want to trade places with him. He would if it were me.”

  “But you’re afraid to live in that world, because being like that is…” I didn’t want to say it.

  “Ugly,” he said, ashamed.

  That wasn’t the word I’d use. “Only if you look at the ugly side, but look at how pretty his smile is, Alex. And how much he loves being out here with you.” I nodded at George, who was seeing those strange birds in the sky where there were none, at least… not in this world. “Just like how I didn’t see his brilliance behind the outside of him, you forget the beauty in the ugliness of his condition.”

  “That’s why we make the story worlds, and they’re infinite, Red—so are we when we live inside of them. But we can’t stay there forever. We have to come back here to the ugly place, and I cry sometimes because of it.”

  I put my hand on his arm, wishing I could suck out all of his pain through my palm. “This isn’t an ugly place, Alex. It’s all about perspective, you see, because… for me, this world with you, and with my new friend George, is the most magical place on earth.”

  He slowly looked up to meet my eyes, his face soft as if slightly confused. “Better than your wolf world?”

  “Way better,” I said with a big smile. “I know there are ugly moments. I had them with my dad when he was sick. But, after knowing you for just one day, you taught me that there are magical moments in all the ugly ones too. You just have to keep your eye out for them. They’re sneaky, remember.”

  Alex’s lip moved on one side until it pulled his whole face into a cute smile, and where I once saw something plain and dorky, I now saw something strange and unsettling. I felt my heart do a little flip, and I wanted to smile a different smile, but I smiled a friendly one instead and told him we should get back to George and Sacha.

  Part Two: Chapter Three

  The World You Live In and How to Change It

  I never got to tell Alex about the Selection. I mean, there wasn’t much to tell, I decided, considering we hadn’t heard anything yet. Then again, maybe I didn’t tell him because I couldn’t also admit that meeting him had made me second-guess the choice to offer myself. Last night I was alone and desperately sad after having spent the evening at the bonfire with a bunch of old friends that had slowly become new strangers to me, but then I learned that there’s beauty in sadness and that, underneath it all, magical worlds and new friends existed. Doors hadn’t actually closed on me as I’d thought; they had closed for me, so that new ones could open. Without that sadness last night, I would never have been on that swing. I would never have met Alex. I would never have known I could like a human so much, and I would never have been able to view the human side of me with kinder eyes. I hated her last night. I wanted to cut her out. But now I saw the awe in what I once thought was ugly.

  How could a boy so ordinary and plain make me rethink the way I saw myself in just one day?

  I knew how, and I smiled to myself, repeating the words I’d said last night: “A remarkable boy named Alex Plain.”

  “April.” Mom popped her head in my room, and the snowy walls and sleigh bed washed away from my imagination, sinking me back into the ugly world.

  “Yes.” I sat up, ready for bad news, but her face said it all. I sprung up and flew into her arms. “He chose me! They called? He chose me?”

  “He did.” She hugged me fiercely, both of us jumping up and down. “The first payment was sent through ten minutes ago, and once you accept the proposal, he’ll transfer the rest. April.” She held me out by my arms. “We can take down the For Sale sign!”

  My skin crawled with happy bumps. “How do I accept the proposal? Do we call them or—”

  “Theowulf will come to see you tomorrow. You’ll sign some papers and he’ll give you the Ravenswood family ring. From then on, everyone will know you’re the next alpha female.”

  “Do you think my friends will start talking to me again?”

  “Most likely.” She laughed. “But I don’t know why you’d want them to.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because…” Mom sighed. I could see she was searching for a way to impart her wisdom to the ‘apparently’ inexperienced mind of a teenager. “Sweetie, if they couldn’t love you after finding out you’re a half-blood, why should they get to love you now? Nothing has changed—”

  “I guess…”

  “They abandoned you because you didn’t fit their mold,” she added. “You’re still a half-wolf—”

  “I guess,” I said in a flat tone.

  Mom cocked her head. “I know you loved them, but I don’t think you truly understand that they’re not good friends, April. What happened to you this past year has been tough enough on its own, and your friends were supposed to support you, not turn their back on you.”

  She had a point. “But I miss them, Mom. I miss fitting in.”

  Mom sighed. “I know. It’s hard losing people after loving them all your life.”

  In her voice I heard her telling that to herself, seeing Dad where her eyes landed on the empty space across my room.

  “Everything’s going to be all right now, Mom.” I touched her elbow, bringing her back to the ugly gray world. “I’ll accept that proposal tomorrow, and our whole world will get better.”

  She smiled at me, and I smiled back, and we stood there like that for a while, seeing the new beauty rising in our own ugly world.

  ***

  Sacha took me on a detour to Joe’s Ice-cream Shack, and at first I just thought she wanted to visit Alex at work, but when she sat at the counter, wagging an expectant tail, I knew she had other plans. Those plans becoming apparent as I watched Alex serve the kid before us.

  “One chocolate scoop in a waffle cone, and…” He narrowed an appraising eye at the dog beside the boy and picked up another cone. “I’m gonna guess it’s vanilla, right?”

  “I only have enough for one.” The boy laid his money out on the counter.

  Alex winked. “Dogs eat free here. But don’t tell my manager.”

  The boy nodded, smiling hugely as he took his free ice-cream and left with his canine companion jumping eagerly at his side.

  “So that’s why Sacha demanded that we come here,” I said.

  Alex was caught off-guard for a second when he saw me, obviously not having noticed me here before. “Uh, yeah… she’s a candyfloss-sorbet kinda dog.”

  “Right,” I said, taking the cone after he served it up for her.

  “What about you?” He leaned on the counter, his ridiculous curls sticking out from under the Joe’s Ice-cream Shack visor. “What kind of girl are you?”

  “Not the ice-cream kind,” I said. “Never been a fan.”

  “Well…” He checked his watch. “I’m on break now. Are you a fan of shakes?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Chocolate?”

  “You read my mind.”

  “Okay.” He smiled with a breathy laugh. “Get a table outside, I’ll meet you in a sec.”

  Sacha, imitating the previous dog and jumping up on my leg as I tried to walk, made it take longer to get outside. So long, in fact, that I lost the last umbrella-covered table to a group of kids about my age. One of them looked at the disappointment on my face as I stopped an inch away from grabbing the chair.

  “Did you want this table?” he said.

  Sacha jumped up and stole the ice-cream from my hands, distracting me as I sized up the two human girls with him—ordinary girls with plain ponytails and clothes that didn’t stand out too much—wondering if I should just tell them no. Tell them I was planning to sit on the wall.

  “You can sit with us,” they offered. “You go to our school, right? You’re Red?”

  “Yeah,” I said, kind of nervous.

  “You’re a grade above us,” the guy offered. Then he offered his hand, and my eyes went up his thick arm to the school baseball team jacket, the buzz cut, an
d a winning smile. “I’m Ben.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “And this is Amy and Denise.”

  The girls nodded their greeting. It was odd, and maybe I’d spent so long hanging out with wolves that I became accustomed to the inflated ego, but these girls didn’t have an ounce of pretentiousness about them. They weren’t sizing me up or judging me. They weren’t scowling at my dorky jeans and red sweater. In fact, they were wearing the same kinds of things I was. It was refreshing.

  “Hey, Alex!” Ben said suddenly, moving in to hug Alex around his milkshakes.

  “Hey guys.” Alex put the shakes on the table and pulled two chairs over from the vacating table behind us. He sat down, and so I sat down too. “So you all met Red.”

  They nodded.

  “We hang out with Alex at school,” Amy said. “He told one of the girls in his grade to stop picking on us and we’ve been friends ever since.”

  I looked at Alex.

  “She’s not in my grade; she’s in yours,” he said. “Luca—one of the girls from your group, right?”

  I rolled my eyes. Yep. She could be a real beast at times—especially to humans. “I’m sorry about Luca,” I offered. “She’s just…”

  “Not nice,” Alex said for me, using a better choice of words than I would have.

  The girls laughed.

  “So what about you, Red?” Ben asked. “You seem to be the new outcast around school. I’ve seen you sitting alone at lunch a lot.”

  “Yeah.” I wriggled awkwardly. “I guess I got to see their true colors recently.”

  “You always do eventually,” Denise said. “We keep to ourselves now, mostly. And Ben.”

  “I’m one of the nice jerks apparently,” Ben added with a big grin.

  I laughed, looking beside me at Alex. He looked better now without the stupid hat, leaning back in his chair in such a way that would see him land hard on the floor if he wasn’t careful. Sacha rested her ice-cream face in his lap, receiving a gentle stroke on the head as the conversation went on. But I was lost in thought on this waif of a boy, unremarkable as he seemed, and how he had the courage to stand up to Luca. After all, she was a wolf, and humans usually feared her. Even without wolf blood, she was something to be feared.

  “What’s up?” Alex said to me quietly, leaning in as if I maybe had something to say.

  I realized then that I was staring. “You’re braver than you look, Alex Plain.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Luca—telling her off.”

  “Why? She doesn’t scare me. I’m older than her.”

  I smiled, laughing once through my nose. “She scares me sometimes.”

  “You just come find me then.” He pushed one fist into an open palm. “I’ll set her straight.”

  “You’d hit her?”

  “No.” His eyes popped wide. “I’d give her a stern talking to. The fist was just a prop to make me look tough.”

  I laughed hard. “Right. Well, I’m sure a stern talking to would set her straight all right.”

  “It would.” Alex leaned back again and took his milkshake with him. “No one messes with my friends, Red. No matter how high and mighty they might think they are. Everyone can be knocked down a peg when you don’t care what they think of you.”

  “And how does not caring help?”

  “Because then you can stand above it all—like you’re on a building and they’re not. You see it all for what it is,” he explained, and the others listened too. “If they have a problem with you, whether you believe it or not, it is because they feel threatened by you in some way.”

  “Threatened?” Denise said. “Why would Luca be threatened by us?”

  Alex shrugged. “Maybe you remind her of something she hates about herself, who knows? But if you stand back from it all for a moment, you can see it, and you can use it against them.”

  The others broke into a conversation about what Luca might hate in herself, and I leaned over to whisper to Alex, shaking my head in disbelief. “How did you learn that?”

  Alex shrugged, sipping his shake. “My dad taught me.”

  “Wow.” I picked up my shake. “Your dad is pretty darn smart, Alex.”

  “Yeah, well, madness gives rise to a certain kind of intelligence,” he said, keeping his voice low and between us. “He might not be the best at balancing checks, but ask him for advice and you’ll never look at your problems the same way again.”

  I smiled, because Alex was for me what his dad was for him—all that wisdom of Plain’s had been passed on, shaping his youthful mind, which in turn spread a wealth of insight over the rest of the world. I knew then how rare and how, excuse the cliché, but how special Alex was, and how much this world needed more Alex Plains.

  “Good idea,” Amy said to Ben, nodding. She looked nervously at us then shrunk a bit and leaned in to Denise. “You ask them.”

  Ben laughed, clearly not as timid as the girls. “So we’re going to a movie tonight. You guys wanna come?”

  Alex looked at me, and I looked at him, both of us seeing if the other wanted to. Then we nodded at the same time.

  “Sounds good,” I said. It would be nice to hang out with people other than wolves. I’d never had a human friend before I met Alex, but it seemed I was wrong about humans; werewolves weren’t better than humans, and humans weren’t stupid and weak. They were actually pretty cool when you gave them a fair chance.

  ***

  We lay in the wet grass with our heads touching, feet in opposite directions, making shapes out of clouds in the sky. Alex was a master at finding the abstract in the ordinary. He’d had a lot of practice, and he could see so many more familiar things in what I only saw as whirls and puffs. That wasn’t the only thing he could do. In the week that we’d been friends so far, Alex had taught me how to make a Slinky do an amazing crawl down three flights of stairs, taken me to story worlds that no book ever had, taught me about the stars in the sky at night, and even counseled me on losing my dad. He was the only person I’d ever been able to talk to so openly about it. I was grateful to him for that because, last night, for the first time since Dad died, I didn’t cry when I kissed his picture goodnight. Alex was quickly shaping up to be one of the most interesting people I’d ever met, and maybe even the bestest friend I ever had. Even better than Zoe Farthing in kindergarten, who I believed at one time was actually my long-lost sister. She moved away in first grade, and I never saw her again, but I still always thought about her. Alex would be a friend like that, I could tell.

  “One week,” Alex said woefully.

  “What is? How long we’ve been friends?”

  “No. Okay, yes, that’s right too. But I meant we have one week until we go back to school.”

  “Don’t remind me.” I groaned to myself. But, in truth, I was kind of looking forward to seeing how my pack treated me now. What was isolation, lunches spent under the bleachers each day, and paired class projects done by myself, might possibly become newfound popularity now that I was stamped and approved by the alpha himself.

  “Why do you think we’ve always had two weeks’ holidays for Thanksgiving?” Alex said, as though he wasn’t talking to me, his voice soft, thoughtful. “My cousin Geoff says he gets a week.”

  “It’s because of the wolves,” I informed him. “The town mayor is one of our Elders, and what’s your Thanksgiving is at the same time of year as an important ritual holiday for us.”

  “What holiday?”

  “It’s kind of a lot like how you all give thanks, I guess, but we take time to thank Carne, the wolf god, and his son Luther. We call it the time of Offering.”

  “Do you offer human sacrifice?”

  I laughed. “No. But we do offer our daughters as wives to the alpha or, if it’s not the year of Selection, we offer fruits and other nourishing foods—things that sustain. I know some families offer sheep and cows, others money, and back in the old days, virgin women offered their blood for him to drink.�
�

  “Yummy,” he said, dragging the word out.

  “Yeah. Kinda gross.” I pictured Luther gulping blood from a gold chalice, the liquid spilling down his throat and coloring his shirt. If he wasn’t so good-looking, I might be grossed out. “I’m glad I wasn’t born then.”

  “So is he a vampire?”

  “No, but he believed that drinking the blood of virgin wolves gave him more power and strength.”

  “Did it?”

  “No idea.”

  “Well, blood aside, it sounds like a fun reason to take two weeks off school.”

  “It is fun. Kind of like Christmas, but without a fat guy in a red suit.”

  “Do you get presents?”

  “No, only the alpha does. But we all gather to enjoy a feast and bring our offerings. And Luther asks us to take a few weeks to rest and enjoy the fruits of our own labor.”

  “Labor?”

  “It stems from the days of farming, you know, when people worked hard for food. We used to rest and enjoy family and friends, share with them what we’d sowed before the harsh and isolating winter.”

  “Speaking of harsh and isolating,” Alex said, “I should probably go home soon. I have so much to organize before school goes back.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, I have about, uh…” he coughed into his hand as he said, “three assignments to finish.”

  “Shocking.”

  “I know.”

  “See, I did all mine the first day,” I bragged, or maybe teased.

  “Well, aren’t you just the golden student?”

  “No, I’m just smart. My dad called it ‘hurry up and wait’, which means it’s better to get it done early and have all that free time than to be rushing at the last minute and have to do a substandard job.”

  “Your dad was pretty smart.”

  “He gets it from me,” I said proudly.

  Alex laughed, and I thought about how smart George is and how he must have gotten that from Plain. Alex was smart, too; I’d seen small glimmers of it in our conversations, but it always felt sometimes like he dumbed things down for some reason. Not for my sake, either. More like he was ashamed of being so smart.