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I licked my lips, Lily Holburn–style, deer-like, innocent as anything. I said, "Mr. Grierson, would you mind driving me home?"
Before we left Whitewood High, Mr. Grierson went back inside for a wet paper towel to wrap around the stems of the carnations. Then he set the bouquet in my arms, cautiously, as if it were some kind of bracken baby. As we drove the twenty-six miles from Whitewood to my parents' house, we watched a storm blow ice in monstrous crusts off the limbs of trees—so that was part of it, too, the slow-motion sense of catastrophe. Mr. Grierson's defrosting fan didn't work very well, and I swiped at the windshield with my jacket's dirty cuff.
"This where we turn?" he asked, as he drove down Still Lake Road. He was pulling little bits of skin from his lips with his incisors. Even in the near dark, I could see a crack in his lip, bloody but not yet bleeding. That pleased me for some reason. It felt like something I had done to him myself—with my wolf presentation, with my pine needles.
The turnoff to my parents' road was unplowed, as usual. Mr. Grierson pulled to a stop at the intersection and we both leaned forward to peer out the windshield and up the steep, dark hill. When I glanced at him across the car, his throat looked as wide and soft as a belly exposed, so I stretched out and kissed him there. Quickly, quickly.
He flinched.
"This way then?" he said, pulling up the zipper of his coat and tucking his neck back in his collar. Up on the hill sat my parents' lit cabin, and I could tell he had fixed his attention there because it was the first thing in sight. "Um, that's that excult place, isn't it? I heard some strange stuff about them. They neighbors of yours?"
He was only making small talk of course—still I gripped my carnations. I felt myself split open, like kindling. "They keep to themselves."
"Yeah?" His mind was somewhere else.
Sleet popped against the windshield, but I couldn't see it because the glass was getting all fogged up again.
"Let's get you home," he said, cranking the gearshift and turning the wheel, and I could sense how tired he was of being responsible for me.
"I can walk from here," I told him.
I thought if I slammed the door hard enough, Mr. Grierson might come after me. That's what it's like to be fourteen. I thought if I took a few running steps off the road into the snow that maybe he'd follow me—to assuage his guilt, to make sure I got home all right, to push his chalky history hands under my jacket, whatever. I headed for the lake instead of going uphill. I darted out onto the ice in the prickly sleet, but when I looked back, his car with its brights was turning around, doing a meticulous U-turn in the trees.
The Grierson scandal broke a few months after I started high school the next fall. I overheard the gossip while I was pouring someone's coffee, working as a part-time waitress at the diner in town. He had been accused of pedophilia and sex crimes at his previous school and was promptly fired at ours—a stack of dirty pictures had been confiscated from some former apartment of his in California. That day after work, I took my tips to the bar down the street and bought my first full pack of cigarettes from the machine in the vestibule. I knew from the few I'd stolen at home not to inhale fully when lighting up. But as I ducked into the wet bushes behind the parking lot, my eyes started watering and I coughed, an ugly fury thumping at my heart. More than anything else I felt deceived. I felt I'd perceived some seed in Mr. Grierson's nature, and that he'd lied to me, profoundly, by ignoring what I did to him in his car, pretending to be better than he was. A regular teacher. I thought about Mr. Grierson zipping his wide, warm neck back inside his jacket collar. I thought of his rank scent when I got close, as if he'd sweated through his clothes and dried out in the winter air. I thought about all that, and what I felt for him, finally, was an uncomfortable rush of pity. It seemed unfair to me that people couldn't be something else just by working at it hard, by saying it over and over.
Excerpted from History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund. Copyright © 2017 by Emily Fridlund. Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Monthly Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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