Werewolves in Their Youth Read Online Free Page A

realized that she hadn’t closed the door yet, and when I looked at her again her eyes were scanning my face, darting very quickly back and forth, the way they did when she thought I might have a fever.
    “Paul,” she said, “how was school today?”
    “Fine.”
    “How’s your asthma?”
    “Good.”
    She took her hands off the lip of the hatch and crouched down in front of me. Her face, I saw, was still buried under the thick layer of beige frosting that she applied to it every morning.
    “Paul,” she said. “What’s the matter, honey?”
    “Nothing,” I said, turning from her unrecognizable face. “I’ll be right back.” I started away from her.
    “Paul—“ She took hold of my arm.
    “I have to go to the bath room!” I said, twisting free of her. “You look ugly,” I added as I ran back into the house.
    I went to the telephone and dialed my father’s number at work. The departmental secretary said that he was down the hall. I said that I would wait. I carried the phone over to the couch, where I had thrown my parka, and took my daily box of Yodels from its hiding place inside the torn orange lining. By the time my father took me off hold I had eaten three of them. This didn’t require all that much time, to be honest.
    “Dr. Kovel,” said my father as he came clattering onto the line.
    “Dad?”
    “Paul. Where are you?”
    “Dad, I’m at home. Guess what, Dad? I got expelled from school today.”
    “What? What’s this?”
    “Yeah, um, I got really mad, and I thought I was a werewolf, and I, um, I bit this girl, you know—Virginia Pease? On the neck. I didn’t break the skin, though,” I added. “And so they expelled me. Can you come over?”
    “Paul, I’m at work.”
    “I know.”
    “What is all this?” His breath blew heavy through the line and made an irritated rattle in the receiver at my ear. “All right, listen, I’ll be there as soon as I can get away, eh?” Now his voice grew thick, as though on the other end of the line, while he held the receiver in the middle of his blank little office in Rockville, Maryland, his face had gone red with embarrassment. “Is your mother there?”
    I told him to hold on, and went back out to the garage.
    “Mom,” I said, “Dad’s on the phone.” I said these words in a voice so normal and cheerful that it hurt my heart to hear them. “He wants to talk to you.” I smiled the conspiratorial little smile I had so often seen her use on her clients as she hinted that the seller just might be willing to come down. “I think he wants to apologize.”
    “Did you call him?”
    “Oh, uh, yeah. Yes. I had to,” I said, remembering my story. “Because I got expelled from school. I have to go to Special School now. Starting tomorrow, probably.”
    My mother put down the hoe she had been trying to squeeze into the back of her car and went, rather unwillingly, I thought, to the phone. Before she stepped into the house she looked back at me with a doubtful smile. I looked away. I stood there, behind her car, gazing in at all my father’s belongings. My mother had said that she planned to take them over to his lawyer’s office, but I didn’t believe her. I believed that she meant to take them to the dump. I hesitated for an instant, then reached in for my father’s laboratory notebook. He had always been more than willing to show me parts of it, whenever I asked him to; and naturally I had taken many furtive looks at its innermost pages when he wasn’t around. But I had never really comprehended its contents, nor the tenor of the experiments he’d been performing down there in our basement over the years, although I had a general sense of disappointment about them, as I did about his whole interest, professional and vocational, in the chemistry of mildews and molds. Yet even if there was nothing of interest in his notes—a likelihood that I still could not fully accept—I nonetheless felt a sudden urge to possess the notebook itself.