Bite Me

“Dianne Anghel, is there something wrong at home that’s bothering you? Your grades are still good, but your behavior has slipped so abruptly. I’m worried.”

Hah. I could just see myself sitting down and solemnly saying this to the principal, “Yeah, in fact, there is. You see, my mom’s a werewolf and my dad’s a vampire. Which wouldn’t be so much of an issue, except everyone thinks they’re weird for other reasons and won’t stop ragging me about it. Worst of all, my social status has managed to plunge to a negative rating, and I might have some no-longer-latent shape-shifting abilities. Other than that, no, there’s nothing wrong at all, ma’am, and I’m sorry I slapped Tammy. I wish I’d bitten her.”

Kapkhun kha, mah -
for not making me go to bed while I scribbled the last chapter of this book in the wee hours of a jet-lagged morning. X
ie xie wo de baba -
for not being insulted when the counselor looked at you, worried, and said, “But in her story the father is a
vampire!”
Thank you to Jesse, for spotting what could have been an embarrassing error, and of course hugs for Sally, the ever-supportive handler.

The principal’s office is a dark and forbidding place to the average student–but I’m not exactly average. It’s a place of tiresome familiarity to the misbehaving student–but I’m not exactly a behaviour problem either. And to an academic goody-goody it’s a place where he or she receives a medal, a hug, and a pat on the back–but I didn’t think that was why I was here.

Ms. Trevalt clasped her hands together and projected the classic more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger-I’m-here-to-help-you persona. “Dianne Anghel, is there something wrong at home that’s bothering you? Your grades are still good, but your behaviour has slipped so abruptly. I’m worried.”

Hah. I could just see myself sitting down and solemnly saying this to the principal, “Yeah, in fact, there is. You see, my mom’s a werewolf and my dad’s a vampire. Which wouldn’t be so much of an issue, except everyone thinks they’re weird for other reasons and won’t stop ragging me about it. Worst of all, my social status has managed to plunge to a negative rating, and I might have some no-longer-latent shape-shifting abilities. Other than that, no, there’s nothing wrong at all, ma’am, and I’m sorry I slapped Tammy. I wish I’d bitten her.”

Instead, I replied, meekly as a nun, “There’s a couple of things, but I think you should hear them directly from a parent. I’m not sure if I’m authorized to give the information.”

Ms. Trevalt sighed. “All right. At least could you tell me why you had to start a fight? There’s no record of you ever being aggressive to your classmates before.”

“It’s a long story, Ms. Trevalt. The short version is that she insulted my family.” My reason sounded puny even to myself. I could never tell the whole story.

You see, Tammy was one of those creatures who take it upon themselves to either generate or spread as much dirt on every high school kid as possible. The rumor about my dad, floating around the malicious among us, was that he was an unemployed alcoholic, possibly a druggie. Seriously! I suppose it’s better for us that people don’t realize the reason he stays home is that he is nocturnal by necessity, though he did manage a normal schedule in his senior year of college. He never quite recovered from that. It’s also best if they don’t know that he’s been seen sneaking out into alleys at night to make dubious purchases and taking a lot of swigs out of his own bottle because he lives off blood. I still wish they wouldn’t bad-mouth him. He does have a job; he’s a writer. Occasionally he teaches night school classes when he can get them or any other work from the limited career options available to a bloodsucking English major. A lot of my classmates didn’t believe me, though, since he uses pseudonyms. Mom and Dad live here and won’t let me tell anyone the name of school where they met because their secret was revealed there, and it’s still a campus legend. Even a smidgen of fame is out of the question.

I’d been having a bad day, and I just had it up to here with the BBQs (Blonde Bimbo or a less polite alternative Queens) as my friends and I called them. I had some scratches on my hands from last night, which was full moon. Dad does most of the chaining-up, but he was weak from hunger that time and I helped out. There’s no slaughterhouse nearby and sometimes he runs low on food. This time we didn’t close Mom-wolf’s cage fast enough and she managed to scratch me, though not bite, thank God. When she found out that morning she decided it was too close and she didn’t want me within fifty feet of her in that form ever again.

But I digress. The incident happened when I was at my locker just after eating lunch. I had the massive misfortune of being assigned the locker right next to Tammy’s, just because her last name starts with ‘A’ as well. She stopped polishing her nails, looked down at me, saw the scratches, and said with incredibly fake sympathy, “Oh, you poor child, did your parents abuse you again?”

“So what, did your daddy introduce you to heroin? I wouldn’t be surprised. A friend said she saw him buying something in secret at night from this Mexican guy.”

“That’s a filthy lie.”
Tammy paused. “What did you just say?”
“I said that was a filthy lie.” I zipped my bag up as ferociously as I

could, and stood up. “Just because your parents must’ve been sluts–at least, to judge how you turned out–doesn’t mean you can go around dissing mine.” Strong words, I know, but I had endured this type of thing umpteen jillion times already.

Sensing an argument, a group began to coalesce around us, made up of many of the teens who were part of the BBQ posse.
“Ah!” Tammy gasped in that short, squeaky, and tooth-pullingly annoying valley-girl way. “You take that back, freak.”
This was getting nasty, and I didn’t want to get in trouble. “I don’t have time for this,” I said, turning to go. Unfortunately Tammy’s latest boyfriend (who had occupied that lauded position for about two weeks now, longer than many) blocked the way. He was on the football team and worked out. I didn’t stand a chance of breaking through.
“Apologize to Tammy,” he ordered.
I turned back. “So you can’t talk to me without a crowd of your friends around, huh?”
“At least I have friends.” She was staring at me. I stared back.
“Raow! Catfight! Catfight!” called out a class clown from the rear.
“Enough, Rodney,” I said. “Tammy, I don’t want to hurt you.”
“So are you going to run to your mommy? She must have to protect you a lot, since everyone here is mean and your dad is even worse and hasn’t even got a job…”
That tore it. Before I had time to think, I swung back my right arm and slammed it across Tammy’s perfect face. She screamed and staggered back, clutching her cheek. The girls in the group ran over to comfort and protect her while the guys stepped back. I wondered why they were so shocked–this sort of thing happened every other day in the halls. Then I looked at my hand and realized why.
The hand that I had slapped/scratched her with wasn’t my hand any more. Neither were my nails exactly nails. In its place, I had a blue-gray wolf’s paw. The claws were bloody.
“Dianne? Dianne?” The principal’s voice broke me out of my reverie. “What? I’m sorry. I was thinking.”
“So I see. Why are you staring at your hands?”
They both looked perfectly normal, except for a little red crust under the right fingernails. “No reason.”
Poor Ms. Trevalt, to whom I bore no ill will, sighed again. “You made the Honor Roll last quarter, Dianne, and you won an award for the most creative Science Fair presentation. I really don’t know what’s gotten into you. You will have to get detention. From the stitches Tamara will need, you may deserve suspension and counseling, but since you had a clean record before now, we’ll be lenient.”
I sat up. “Counseling? Don’t worry about that being too harsh. I think I need help, Ms. Trevalt. Maybe I could tell the counselor what I can’t tell you. . .”
“But the underclassmen counselor is your mother.” She was puzzled. Mom wasn’t known for being easy when it came to student violence.
“Yes, I know. Please, I need to talk to her. I have Mind Extension now, so I’m just missing an elective.”
“All right. I hope if I see you again it will be for something different.”
I nodded and headed for Mom’s office, which was just a few doors down the empty corridor. I knocked our special knock, which went to the rhythm of, “don’t-like-it-then” slowly, and then two quick taps for our family motto: “Bite me.”
The door opened. I’ve compared pictures of Mom from her college days with how she looks today, and she hasn’t changed much, except for a few wrinkles and a couple of extra pounds she never managed to lose after I made my debut. Overall, still reasonably nice-looking. I resembled Dad more though, or at least how he appeared pre-undead.
“Honey, are you in trouble?” she asked me, putting her computer on standby.
I sank into a chair and watched the goldfish on her desk swim around.
“Yes, a bit. . .”
“Someone was talking about your father, weren’t they?” My mother looked tired, understandable in a counselor working in a high school riddled with issues. She joked to me once that she felt a special empathy for teens who felt like freaks, since she was one already. The only evidence of that was a large poster on the wall that declared, “You’ll Never Hear the Wolves Cry if You Don’t Save Them.”
I made an attempt to defend myself. “Yes, they were. And shouldn’t I do something about it? They have no right.”
“No, they don’t, but we still have to keep a low profile. I know it’s hard.”
“Keep a low profile?” I laughed grimly. “Then I blew it.” I told the whole story with decent calm.
Concern steadily increased on Mom’s face. “Oh no. I was afraid this might happen.”
“What might happen? Have you been keeping something from me? I feel like a teen out of the X-Men movies.”
She didn’t seem offended. “I didn’t think it would show up, Di. It never happened to the Davidsons or to the Wolfmans either, except for one case.” These were her and her paternal grandmother’s maiden names. “It’s very difficult for werewolves to find an understanding spouse, as you know.”
“No surprise there.”
“In fact, I’m the first lycan mother in the family records for nearly a century. The last time there was one–her name was Phoebe Wolfman— the children could turn into wolves. They weren’t werewolves in the strict sense, since nothing happened to them at full moon. They had much more control than werewolves do. When they transformed, they could change just the parts of their bodies that they wished. So today, when you wanted to make a devastating hit, your nails turned into claws, and your muscles into a kind of human-wolf hybrid. We didn’t want to tell you about something that might never happen anyway and could only scare you.” She paused. “I don’t think Tammy’s going to insult you anytime soon, if that’s a comfort.”
There was a long silence. I was struck dumb for about two minutes, and then I whispered, “But how?”
I heard genuine apology in her voice. “There’s no proof of this, but the theory is that when an expectant mother changes into her other form, the child inside her changes as well, since a baby is still part of a pregnant woman’s body. If that’s true, you shape-shifted nine times before you were born. Your mind doesn’t remember how you did it, but your body must.”
At this point it seemed best to view the world from between my fingers. I kept my face covered with my hands as I talked. “No, no, no. Not another secret. This family has way too many. I don’t want to have something to hide about myself as well. Why is this happening to me?”
Of course I would have to say that, when everyone knows the Fates can’t resist adding more and more on when you’ve got enough problems already.