“Maybe I’m not as strong as you guys when I’m human,” Gretchen said, “but after you bite me, I won’t be human anymore, will I? It’s not going to matter. You know Mom and Dad always worry too much.”
Tricia scrunched up her face, thinking it over.
After what felt like an eternity, she nodded.
“Okay. Deal.”
Even as nervous as Gretchen was, she couldn’t stop herself from breaking into the widest smile of her life.
This was it. Everything about her that had always been wrong was about to be fixed.
Tricia slipped into her sleek lynx form and climbed up the arm Gretchen offered her.
When she sank her teeth into Gretchen’s shoulder, it was like dozens of red-hot needles had suddenly slammed through her skin. The pain was beyond anything she ever could have imagined. It felt like her whole body was turning inside-out, like every fiber of her being and drop of her blood was trying to revolt against what she was doing to it.
Gretchen screamed, and Tricia landed on the floor and shifted back immediately.
“Gretchen! Gretchen, what’s wrong?”
All Gretchen could do was hold her shoulder and sob as the pain only seemed to get worse.
She’d never seen her little sister look so scared, and whatever tiny part of her brain could even still think started hating herself right then and there for having put poor, gullible Tricia in this position. She reached out and grabbed her sister’s hand.
“It’s okay,” she managed to say. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I’m going to go get Mom and Dad,” Tricia said. Her wide eyes were filling up with tears. “Gretchen, you’re bleeding so much.”
“No, please.” She felt her hand slipping on Tricia’s, but she fought to hold on. “Please. Just give it a chance. It hurts, but I know I can do it. I know it’ll work.”
She was still repeating that five minutes later, when she finally passed out.
*
Tricia’s bite left a horrible scar.
The whole experience had landed Gretchen in bed for two weeks, with a shifter doctor and nurse almost constantly at her side. She’d needed IVs and blood transfusions—human blood transfusions. She had lost so much weight that none of her clothes fit anymore.
Her shoulder wouldn’t stop throbbing, and she still sometimes threw up unexpectedly, like her body was trying to reject the last of whatever poison she’d managed to force inside of it.
Tricia couldn’t look at her without crying. Her parents had hugged her, grounded her, and then hugged her again, stroking her hair and telling her to never ever do anything like that ever again.
And Gretchen had promised she wouldn’t. She knew better now.
When she tried to be more than she was supposed to be, other people got hurt. She cost her family money and trouble, and she made everyone sad. It wasn’t worth it. She didn’t want to be the kind of selfish monster who would destroy everyone else around her to get what she wanted.
Lying in her bed, with a thick wad of gauze still on her shoulder, Gretchen had reinvented herself.
She wasn’t Gretchen the Dud. She wasn’t Gretchen the Mistake. She was going to be Gretchen the Babysitter, Gretchen the Responsible: the girl who took care of other people and never worried about herself. She was going to be Cool Gretchen, the girl who could shrug off all her worries instead of bothering other people with them. From now on, nothing was going to bother her ever again—or if it did, she was going to keep it to herself, bottled so far down inside her heart that even she would someday forget that it was there.
But I’m still here, said the familiar voice. I promise, you’re not crazy. You really are feeling something—
Gretchen ruthlessly turned her back on the voice. She imagined building up a wall in her head, cutting the voice off from the rest of her mind.
No, she wasn’t crazy. Because she didn’t hear voices, nope, definitely not. She didn’t hear an inner animal that she now knew she definitely didn’t have.
Her family was right: that was all just an overactive imagination and wishful thinking.
She was as human as anyone could possibly be, and if any part of her felt differently, she would run away from it until it left her alone. Because she couldn’t keep doing this. She couldn’t keep hurting other people and breaking her own heart.
She was human, and that was all she would ever be.
And nobody needed to worry about her. Nobody at all.