Strange Creatures Read online

  For the first time, I was really, truly jealous of my older brother. There had been days before when I’d envied him, sure, when I wanted to share the things that made his life different and good and blessed. But that night I kind of wanted to murder him. We might have been the same in so many ways, but to other people, we never would be.

  Because to them—to Mom, to Dad, to our rabbi, to our teachers—Jamie was the only one who mattered at all.

  That summer, the checks started rolling in for Jamie’s bar mitzvah. Dad insisted Jamie deposit each one, then sat with him to write thank-you cards. Mom just rolled her eyes.

  “A few thousand dollars isn’t going to make a dent in his college fund,” she said one spring morning, when the porch doors were open and the warm air laced fragrant and sweet through our house. “He should be allowed to buy something fun. Jamie, what do you want?”

  My brother tightened his fist over the ballpoint pen. Dad had given in and started calling him “James” like he’d asked, though even he misspoke sometimes. Mom flatly refused to give up the name she’d called him since he was a baby.

  I didn’t call him anything. Not anymore. I sat at the breakfast table silently, watching this all play out. I’d learned to move carefully around Jamie’s anger, avoiding it. Even now, I braced myself.

  “A drum kit,” he answered at last. “I want to play the drums.”

  I wrinkled my brow. It made no sense. As far as I knew, Jamie didn’t care at all about music, no matter what the cantor at synagogue said about his voice. He cared about sports, and Neal Harriman, and the things that Dad told him to care about. Homework or whatever. And sure, maybe Jamie cared about digging around in Nina Westervelt’s pants. But he didn’t care about the drums.

  Moments like these made it clear that he was really a stranger now. I studied his face, the way he stared down our father, and I wondered who he was.

  Mom fished around in her purse for a checkbook. “A drummer?” she mused, bending down to write him a check. “Girls like drummers. I bet Nina will be into that.”

  Jamie started blushing. I pushed my food around on my plate and contemplated vomiting up my eggs. But before I could, Dad rose from the table and looked my brother straight in the eye. “The basement isn’t soundproof.”

  There was a terrible vein of tension that ran between them. It was the same old argument between them, always, and usually Jamie gave in to him. Usually he bent and went out for Little League, or took up jogging. But not today. Today, I could feel Jamie’s frustration bubbling off him. I put down my fork, bracing for that moment of impact. Meanwhile, my brother sat up in his chair. His voice squeaked.

  “We can put it in the garage.”

  “No . . .” Dad shook his head, slowly but firmly. “The neighbors will complain.”

  “It’s my money!” Jamie screamed. Eli threw his hands over his ears. I sat there, feeling my hands tremble, staring at my plate.

  Mom was just standing there, too, her pen frozen over the check, looking between Dad and Jamie like she didn’t know what to do. We were all holding our breath together, waiting for it. And sure enough, Jamie picked up Dad’s half-empty coffee cup and hurled it at the floor.

  We all cringed, a familial cringe, a collective cringe. Coffee and creamer and ceramic shards went everywhere, on the fringe of Mom’s vintage tablecloth and into the planter in the corner and even across the Italian tile in our kitchen. I just sat there, staring down at a flint of glazed blue clay. That was Dad’s favorite mug, and it was ruined now. Ruined forever.

  Dad lost it, in a way he never had before. He marched right up to Mom and snatched the check out of her hand. Then he tore it into a dozen pieces and let them float down around him.

  But even when my father was livid, red-faced with rage, he spoke carefully.

  “I’m certainly not going to reward that behavior,” he said.

  Jamie’s eyes were big and boyish, black holes in the pale light of our dining room. He blinked tears away. He didn’t storm off, not this time. I could feel how hard it was, how painful. Moving stiffly, as though every single millimeter of motion made his body ache, he sat back down in his chair, picked up his pen, and started writing.

  “I’ll get the broom,” Mom said softly. When she passed me on the way to the kitchen, she gave my shoulder a squeeze. I knew that what she really wanted to do was to hug Jamie, but Jamie was busy, his head bent, his eyes downcast. If a few drops of tears dotted his thank-you card to Great-Aunt Dinah, her vision would be too bad for her to notice.

  11

  IT WAS A HARE, ITS coat blue velvet and scattered with gold. The creature was kicking violently, trying to shake its foot free of the trap. It was almost as tall as the Nameless Boy himself.

  “A Winter Watcher’s familiar,” Boy said softly. The creature looked at him with terror in its eyes. “What are you doing here?”

  The hare sniffed the air, then kicked its legs again. That’s when boy sprang on it. He held on tight, his muscles resisting the creature’s bucking motions. He held a poison-doused cloth over its mouth. At last, the creature collapsed on the ground beneath him. Boy was breathing hard when it was finally subdued.

  Everyone came to Jamie’s bar mitzvah. Gram and Poppy and Grandma and all four aunts and uncles and about two hundred other relatives, acquaintances, and students from Jamie’s class. The synagogue was packed full of snickering, snuffling teenagers who whispered through the rabbi’s speech and cheered when Jamie stepped up to the bimah. I knew he was popular, but I’d never really known how beloved. I felt almost affronted when I saw Nina’s expression as Jamie read, her beady eyes warm and full of adoration.

  The theme for the reception was rock ’n’ roll. The banquet hall was draped with silver garlands made up of musical notes. There were miniature electric guitars in every centerpiece. The theme had been Mom’s idea, a few weeks after the fight over the drums. Jamie didn’t look too excited about it, even as he helped Mom tie up little baggies of personalized sunglasses and guitar picks, but he didn’t fight her on it, either. As I sat there at one of the family tables, I wasn’t sure Jamie cared at all about his bar mitzvah, the reception, the guests, any of it.

  But then during the reception, after we were all done dancing the hora and the electric slide, something happened.

  The band slowed the music down a little. Dad asked me to dance. Reluctantly, feeling silly in my stiff party dress of blue silk and taffeta, I went to the dance floor with him. I felt seen for a split second; truthfully, it was a nice feeling. But then my attention was drawn away again, to Jamie. I watched him cross the room out of the corner of my eye, feeling starved for some glimpse at my brother, now supposedly a man. He was all sweaty, rings of dampness visible through his blue dress shirt. Even his lip, lightly hazed with the first hint of a mustache, was beaded with sweat. He was headed for a table, and as I danced with Dad, I watched Jamie hold out his hand. He’s going to dance with Nina, I thought.

  But the girl who rose from her chair to dance with him wasn’t Nina. In fact, I didn’t recognize her at all.

  That wasn’t that weird. Jamie had just started eighth grade. Our lives were circles in a Venn diagram that overlapped less and less. My life was the same as it ever was, the woods alone and Miranda and the same old school and the same old story.

  But the girl who danced with Jamie was a stranger to me. And she was beautiful. Her hair was a long curtain of black velvet down her back, soft with flyaways. She was pale skinned, but with bronzey undertones. Her eyes were a pair of inky drops, a little too big for her face. Her mouth was just a bit too broad, too. But it worked. She was charming somehow, not despite her imperfections but because of them. She was dressed in all black—black pantyhose and a knee-length black skirt and a black blouse that was kind of clingy. I found it almost impossible to look away from her, so I didn’t.

  At a glance, she could have been Jewish. In a way, she looked more Jewish than I did. But there was something different about her from th
e other dark-haired girls at synagogue. When she danced with Jamie, her wide, made-up lips parted, showing the edges of gapped teeth, and something happened in my stomach, a wild kind of flip-flop.

  I stepped on Dad’s foot. He laughed, thinking I’d meant to tease him, and gave my body a spin. I tried to catch a glimpse of Jamie’s face, but the entire room was a blur, the world inside me a frantic jumble, too. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as she drifted back toward her table. There was a man sitting there. In a way, they looked so similar. Same gapped teeth. Same dimples. But in a way, they looked so different, too. She was a dark-haired shadow of him, and her skin was smooth and burnished where his was freckled. He must have been her father, but he wasn’t one of the men who went to Friday-night services or the guys Dad had invited over for dinner from work.

  What’s happening? I thought. Who is she?

  On the way to school that Monday, after Jamie had departed for his separate, popular life at the back of the bus and me for my lesser, smaller life at the front, Nina wedged herself beside me and Miranda. I had the window seat; my eyes were cast to the woods we passed, imagining Winter Watchers climbing through the leafless trees. But Miranda was stuck in the middle, and she whined as Nina sat on her coat.

  “Hey! Watch it!” she cried.

  “I’m not here to talk to you,” said Nina. “I’m here to talk to Annie.”

  I turned. Nina and I had hardly spoken a word to each other since that day in the woods, more than two years ago now. “What?” I asked. I spoke to her like I always did, without any patience.

  But then I saw how her lips parted and her eyebrows knitted up, how sad she looked when I spoke to her harshly. “James told me he doesn’t want to hang out with me anymore. He’s dating the girl with the weird name. Vidya. Since this summer, apparently.”

  Nina’s news was like a punch to the gut. Dating? Like, a girlfriend? Since this summer?! But I didn’t want her to know how bothered I was. My feelings were none of her business. Jamie was none of her business. We’d said Vows, pledged loyalty to one another above all else, and even if everything else had changed between us, that hadn’t. I had to keep it under control. I couldn’t tell her anything, not with my eyes, my face—much less my words.

  “Sorry,” I said quickly. It felt like there was a fist wedged in my throat. Vidya, I thought, wrapping my tongue around the new name. Not a Jewish name. Indian? And she was Jamie’s girlfriend?

  “I only went to his stupid Jew party because I thought he wanted to dance with me.”

  “Gosh, Nina,” Miranda said, her voice thick with sarcasm. “That must have been really, really hard.”

  “Well.” Nina turned her head the other way, across the aisle to where some sixth-grade girls were giggling over a magazine. “You tell him that I don’t care. Calvin Harriman asked me out, and I’m going to say yes.”

  I snorted. This was easier for me to talk about. I could look calm, even though my mind was still churning over this news about Jamie. “Isn’t Calvin Harriman like seventeen?”

  “So?”

  “That’s creepy. What would a seventeen-year-old boy want with you?”

  Nina was still looking the other way. But I could see the coy, curling edge of her smile.

  “I’m not going to explain it to you. You wouldn’t understand, Annie.”

  That’s when Miranda shuffled her hips in place, first swinging left, then right, hard. Nina sailed out of the seat and fell in the aisle on her butt. The girls across the way snickered. The bus driver glanced at her in his rearview mirror, then waggled his finger.

  “Back in your seat,” he said.

  “G-d,” said Nina. “Whatever.”

  She stood up and headed toward the back of the bus. Miranda looked at me, forcing a laugh. “Can you believe your brother is dating that girl Nina was talking about?” she asked.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t train the horror from my expression. “I can’t believe he’s dating anyone.”

  It was true. In my mind, no matter the gossip, he was always doomed to be the big brother who had told me to look away from the other kids’ graffiti. Who was disgusted by it all, like I was. Once, we’d been Feral Children. Still innocent. Now he’d left me behind. Waltzing off with some girl who hid her eyes behind a curtain of smooth hair. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.

  Miranda studied me, her face long and serious. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  I shrugged a little, tightening my coat around me. Jamie had an actual girlfriend. A girlfriend whose name I hadn’t even known. He hadn’t told me about it. I’d had to hear about it from Nina.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I lied, and pretended to go back to looking for Winter Watchers in the garbage-strewn woods.

  12

  HE HEFTED THE HARE OVER his shoulders and started up the side of the mountain. The breeze whistled through its night-dark coat. Once again, the Boy waited.

  It wasn’t long before he saw the feathers draw near. There was only one figure that shadowed the mountains, only one harpy left. So much for Annit’s plan to have him massacre a whole flock, Boy thought with a snort. But it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to kill anyone—not this harpy, or any other.

  She didn’t see him there. She fixed her claws onto the heavy hare body and began to lift flagging wings through the air. Her rise was clumsy into the morning. She was focused on her meat, her prize. She didn’t see Boy approach.

  I wasn’t fine. I wasn’t fine at all, and Jamie wasn’t, either, and I was the only one who knew it. Oh, I think Dad suspected when Jamie said he didn’t want to go running anymore. And maybe Mom knew, too, though she pushed the thought out of her mind through Hanukkah and Christmas and New Year’s while Jamie sulked and stared at his new cell phone and the rest of us tried to drum up some kind of fake holiday cheer. If the grown-ups knew, they ignored it and gave Jamie his space, which was something he needed now, supposedly, since he’d turned thirteen and become a creature with new Laws, foreign and strange. I was the only one whose stomach hardened into an angry stone when I saw the bruises on my older brother’s neck, purple blossoms like irises, or how he clamped his lips tight when Dad asked us how school was going over dinner.

  I’d talk about the trouble I got into for doodling during history, or how Miranda had invited me to her uncle’s farm this coming summer. Dad lifted his eyebrows. Mom shrugged. Eli said he thought it would be fun, that maybe I’d get to feed the llamas, but then everyone turned their focus expectantly to Jamie, waiting to hear what he thought of my summer plans, or about his day, or, well, anything.

  “What?” he’d say, and roll his peas around his plate until Dad rose, sighed, and started clearing the dinner dishes.

  He’d begun to put walls up. Even when he was home, he wasn’t really present. The door to his room was shut, or he stared at his laptop or his phone. Even when he was home, I felt like half the soul I’d once been. We were divided now. Individuated. Alone.

  One thing that hadn’t changed was that he was still friends with Neal, and every Friday he still spent the night at Neal’s house even though both of them had dropped out of basketball. They took the bus home together on Friday evenings, which meant that there was a long stretch between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning that my brother’s shadow wouldn’t darken our hallways. Sometimes when Jamie wasn’t home, I’d sneak into his room late at night and shut the door behind me. The maps had all gone yellow on the walls, and now were joined by crude drawings of boys in animal pelts and dark-haired fairies who all looked like Vidya.

  Vidya. I’d only seen her that once, but her image was seared into my memory. Jamie sucked at drawing, but he’d somehow captured her anyway. There was Gumlean print under each image. I didn’t bother to decode it. I was too unmoored. Vidya, in Gumlea. That was worse than Nina. Okay, maybe not worse than Nina. But it unsettled me.

  But at the same time, seeing those drawings, I felt relief. Jamie hadn’t forgotten. He hadn’t left it completely. Somewhere, de
ep inside him, he still ruled the feral kingdom. Or maybe the feral kingdom still ruled him.

  I thought about Vidya more than I wanted to admit to myself. In class, when I was bored, doodling in the margins of my math notebook, I wondered how often they saw each other and where, whether it was only at school or at Neal’s house, too. I wondered what Jamie saw in her, why he’d chosen her to be special. There had been something digestible in the thought of Jamie and Nina, though it had disgusted me from the very start. Nina was known, part of the story of our lives. She hated me and I hated her, but I could handle that hate. Somehow, though, I couldn’t wrap my head around this girl. His girlfriend. I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel about her. I didn’t know why the thought of her made my stomach hurt.

  In the margins of my notebooks, in the middle of class, I tried to draw her from memory. Art that would do her justice, better than Jamie’s. I sketched that upturned nose. The broad lips. A gap between her teeth. Her fine hair, sticking to her lip gloss. I imagined her and Jamie together, doing the things I’d heard he’d done with Nina on the very same sofa in Neal’s parents’ basement. I drew fingers. Folds of cloth. Folds of skin. When I looked up, my blood pounding in my ears, I saw Nina staring at me from the other side of the room. I turned my notebook page, glowering at her, trying to pretend like I couldn’t feel the heat high on my cheeks. Looking away from her, I decided to tuck my thoughts away for later.

  Later. After the bus ride home and an empty walk through the woods, after my favorite episode of The X-Files, “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space.” After the silence of dinner and the taut sound of Dad almost—but not quite—fighting with Jamie from the threshold of his bedroom door, demanding to know about his homework. After I brushed my teeth and put on my pajamas and tucked myself into bed and didn’t kiss a single soul good night, I turned off the light and closed my eyes and thought my private thoughts. I imagined Jamie, peeling away layers of dark cotton. A sweater. A band T-shirt. A bra. Imagined his hesitation, his self-consciousness, his desire. Or was it my own desire? Once, our thoughts had been the same thoughts. Our fantasies the same fantasies. Fairies and mermaids. A shopkeep’s daughter we’d saved from a dragon, together. But I couldn’t be sure anymore. In Neal’s brother’s apartment, he’d moved past me, into foreign kingdoms. There were things I didn’t know about already, huge gaps of black time in his life that I couldn’t access. I needed to fill those spaces in. So I imagined what it would be like to be Jamie, moving against her. More of an animal than a prince, or even a Nameless Boy.