Music of the Night by Suzy McKee Charnas Page B

plus, I was terrified of catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I had a pretty good idea of what I would see, and I didn’t want to see it.
    Besides, I had to pee, and I couldn’t face trying to deal with the toilet in the state I was in. So I eased the bedroom door open with my shoulder and nearly fell down the stairs trying to work them with four legs and thinking about it, instead of letting my body just do it. I put my hands on the front door to open it, but my hands weren’t hands, they were paws with long knobby toes covered with fur, and the toes had thick black claws sticking out of the ends of them.
    The pit of my stomach sort of exploded with horror, and I yelled. It came out this wavery wooo noise that echoed eerily in my skull bones. Upstairs, Hilda goes, “Jack, what was that?” I bolted for the basement as I heard Dad hit the floor of their bedroom.
    The basement door slips its latch all the time, so I just shoved it open and down I went, doing better on the stairs this time because I was too scared to think. I spent the rest of the night down there, moaning to myself (which meant whining through my nose, really) and trotting around rubbing against the walls trying to rub off this crazy shape I had, or just moving around because I couldn’t sit still. The place was thick with stinks and these slow-swirling currents of hot and cold air. I couldn’t handle all the input. As for having to pee, in the end I managed to sort of hike my butt up over the edge of the slop-sink by Dad’s workbench and let go in there. The only problem was that I couldn’t turn the taps on to rinse out the smell because of my paws.
    Then about 3:00A.M. I woke up from a doze curled up in a bare place on the floor where the spiders weren’t so likely to walk, and I couldn’t see a thing or smell anything either, so I knew I was okay again even before I checked and found fingers on my hands instead of claws. I zipped upstairs and stood under the shower so long that Hilda yelled at me for using up the hot water when she had a load of wash to do that morning. I was only trying to steam some of the stiffness out of my muscles, but I couldn’t tell her that.
    It was real weird to just dress and go to school after a night like that. One good thing, I had stopped bleeding after only one day, which Hilda said wasn’t so strange for the first time. So it had to be the huge greenish bruise on my face from Billy’s punch that everybody was staring at. That and the usual thing, of course. Well, why not? They didn’t know I’d spent the night as a wolf. So Fat Joey grabbed my book bag in the hallway outside science class and tossed it to some kid from Eight-B. I had to run after them to get it back, which of course was set up so the boys could cheer the jouncing of my boobs under my shirt.
    I was so mad I almost caught Fat Joey, except I was afraid if I grabbed him, maybe he would sock me like Billy had.
    Dad had told me, “Don’t let it get you, kid; all boys are jerks at that age.”
    Hilda had been saying all summer, “Look, it doesn’t do any good to walk around all hunched up with your arms crossed; you should just throw your shoulders back and walk like a proud person who’s pleased that she’s growing up. You’re just a little early, that’s all, and I bet the other girls are secretly envious of you, with their cute little training bras, for Chrissake, as if there was something that needed to be trained .”
    It’s okay for her, she’s not in school, she doesn’t remember what it’s like. So I quit running and walked after Joey until the bell rang, and then I got my book bag back from the bushes outside where he threw it. I was crying a little, and I ducked into the Girls’ Room. Stacey Buhl was in there doing her lipstick like usual and wouldn’t talk to me like usual, but Rita came bustling in and said somebody should off that dumb dork Joey, except, of course, it was really Billy that put him up to it. Like