Memoirs of a Girl Wolf by Xandra Lawrence Page A

outside on the stoop near the cafeteria doors with my back against the brick wall. I conveniently had a perfect view of Reign who, after I told him I wanted to eat alone, had continued sitting in the courtyard at the cement table by himself. I wasn’t the only loner in school after all. We spent most of the lunch hour stealing glances at one another. I was too proud to admit that I wanted to sit with him. I just wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t twelve or my mother.
    On that rainy Tuesday, it continued to rain through lunch, but I still sat outside. I was dry on the stoop by the cafeteria doors, but surrounding the stoop were shallow muddy puddles. The rain wasn’t awful, but the chill was. I kept my icy, cold hands stuffed in the pockets of my wool pea coat. Every now and then I would quickly pick up my sandwich and take a bite, drop it back in my lap and warm my hands up in my pockets before trying to eat again.
    About half way through lunch Reign came through the door holding tightly onto his brown paper bag. He came to a stop beside me on the edge of the stoop and looked, narrowing his eyes, at the wet scene before him. There was no way he could eat at his table with it raining.
    He looked down at me and frowned and then sat slowly against the wall opposite me.
    Unlike me, he had on big, brown work gloves and a gray cap that covered his ears. I was jealous instantly of his warmth.
    “Don’t worry I won’t talk to you,” he said.
    He sounded, for the first time ever, upset with me. I deserved it. I hadn’t been welcoming at all no matter how nice he tried being to me. It was immature of me to dump my bad mood on him, so I had a bit of a change of heart.
    “That’s okay,” I said.
    He was silent as he pulled his lunch out of the brown bag: an orange, a sandwich, and a hostess cupcake. He started with the cupcake and when he bit into a little whip cream was left on his top lip. I stifled a laugh. He looked really cute in his cap and rosy cheeks and his obliviousness to the whip cream on his lip.
    “Did you have a quiz today?” I asked.
    He looked up at me. “I haven’t had English yet. Seventh period.”
    “Me too,” I said.
    Then we were silent again and the only noise we could hear was the patter of rain drops falling from the dark clouds above.
    “Where’d you get that picture?” he asked.
    I blinked at him. That was an odd question. Why did he care? Besides, I didn’t really want to tell him. I didn’t even know why I still hung on to the photo.
    “It’s a picture of my aunt,” I lied.
    And he knew. He tilted his head at me and smiled. “Really, how’d you get it?”
    “I told you,” I said.
    “You’re lying.”
    His tone was cold, and the warmth in his eyes disappeared, but only for a flicker of a second. His dark eyes lit up a little again and he smiled.
    “You have something,” I said, wiping my own upper lip so he’d catch on.
    He laughed as he dragged his thumb across his mouth.
    “I got it from a house,” I said. “An abandoned house.”
    “Do you hang out in abandoned houses a lot?” he asked.
    “No,” I snapped then sighed. “I live next door or across the pond from it. My friends—or a group of us went and explored a month ago and I found the picture.”
    “You live in that log cabin?” he asked, perking up a little.
    I nodded slowly and waited for him to explain how he knew where I lived.
    “I’m moving into that house across from you.”
    So it was his dog the other day and the man with the beard and orange hat, I realized, was his dad.
    He was smiling more at me now that he figured out we were going to be neighbors. I looked away from him at the closed doors because it was always hard for me to not return his smile with my own. I didn’t want him to know that I liked him and that I was excited to know he’d be so close.
    “It’s haunted,” I said.
    He laughed. “It is?”
    “Yeah, there was a skeleton in it.”
    “Nah,” he said, still laughing. “It