When the symptoms first set in, it had taken her three months, three full moons, and one nervous confrontation in a coffee shop to realize that she was, in fact, a werewolf. In retrospect, she wondered why it took her so long to figure it out. But after all, who expects to contract lycanthropy overnight with no apparent cause, no warning, and no idea that such a thing is possible? Certainly not her.

The first time she wakes in the woods at dawn, she assumes it is a drunken mistake. She notices first the smell of petrichor and the damp earth beneath her cheek. Then the brisk breeze raising gooseflesh on her skin, then the bed of pine needles pricking at her legs and arms, then the loam crusting her bare feet. Lastly, the warbling light of pre-dawn.

When she opens her eyes to reveal the drooping boughs of pines, the grey light filtering through the clouded sky is much too intense. Her stomach roils with nausea. She closes her eyes. Memories of the night crawl sluggishly back. Tears. Edibles. The new album she got on vinyl. A bottle of vodka from the corner store and the sting of her recent breakup. All else is a blur.

When did she go outside? Where is she?

An attempt to prop herself up is met only by swift dizziness and screaming muscles. Her pulse thrums in each one of her joints. She falls back against the dirt and listens.

Birds chirp above her head. Over their racket, there’s the telltale sound of the interstate. If she can hear that, she must not have wandered too far from her apartment. That, at least, is good.

Gritting her teeth and steeling herself, she heaves herself up on an elbow, ignoring the swirl of nausea and the black spots threatening at the edge of her vision.

Damn. She’s had some bad hangovers before, but this definitely takes the cake. How much did she drink?

As her vision clears and the world stops spinning, the scene that meets her turns her stomach over afresh.

Her feet are covered in mud, a thin lattice of scratches snake up her legs, the soles of her feet are bleeding. Her hands, too, covered in dirt, her nails ragged and bloody. The oversized T-shirt she’d put on after work is filthy and torn.

A shiver scrapes down her spine.

My God, she only had a couple edibles, it’s not like she tripped on acid—what happened last night?

As she squints at her surroundings, the landmarks of the local park announce themselves. She’s less than a mile from home.

Time to get on with it, then.

She slides herself over to the trunk of a nearby tree and uses it to pull herself unsteadily to her feet. Her legs shake beneath her. She takes a staggering step. Her joints throb. Her head pounds. Slowly, she emerges from the copse of trees. The streetlamps are off on the adjacent road; it is still early morning.

A fresh appreciation for her situation washes over her. She stands shaking in the chill, wearing nothing but her underpants and an overlarge T-shirt, no shoes, no bra, covered in mud and scratches, and recovering from perhaps the worst and most unintentional bender of her life. By all that is good and holy, she prays she can remain unobserved on her walk home.

She begins, slipping down side streets, creeping on sore feet over the uneven pavement, catching her breath at street corners, leaning against walls to fight off waves of vertigo, forging on despite the nausea.

As she turns the corner toward the bottom floor of the townhouse that constitutes her apartment, her breath catches. The door hangs open, weak light from within spilling down the stairs.

“Shit,” she murmurs and climbs the stairs as fast as her legs allow.

The inside of her apartment is in disarray. The coat tree near the door is tipped over, contents scattered. The coffee table, too, lies on its side, Chinese takeout containers and bottle of vodka strewn across the carpet. The cushions, removed from the couch, have been flung, seemingly at random.

“Holy shit,” she breathes. Has she been robbed?

She glances toward the TV, but it is still there along with her gaming console. A disquieting feeling tiptoes up her spine—is a potential intruder still inside?

She reaches a hand reflexively to a nonexistent pocket for her phone, but she touches only skin. Of course she doesn’t have it. It’s somewhere in this mess. She can see the majority of her apartment from where she stands, but still, she creeps on wary steps to the kitchen and grabs a knife from the drawer. With it in hand, she slinks to her bedroom, throws open the door—

Her bedroom is more or less the same as she left it: laptop still on the bed, charging; overflowing laundry basket still perched next to her bookshelf. No ax murderer waiting to spring out of the closet. She moves to the bathroom, braces herself before yanking open the shower curtain, knife raised, jumping in anticipation of seeing someone who isn’t there.

Her arm droops with fatigue. She puts the knife back in the kitchen. She locks the front door.

She doesn’t own much worth stealing, but everything that has some value, her jewelry, electronics, purse—all of it’s accounted for. Either someone entered her house and wrecked it just for fun or . . . or she did that.

Holy hell—what had been in those edibles?

Her brief walk home has drained her; her legs quiver and bile licks at the back of her throat.

Not knowing what else to do, she takes a shower, rinsing the mud and blood from her legs, and, not even bothering to put on clothes, she collapses into bed, wrapped in a towel, and promptly sleeps like the dead. She’ll feel better when she wakes.

~~~

She doesn’t.

It takes days to settle into her own body again, for her brain to wade through layers of fog, for her joints to ease back into their sockets, for the fire in her bones to die. She makes a vow that no matter how distraught she is about a boy, she won’t work out her feelings like that again, clouding her mind with substances until she takes out her feelings on her furniture.

She manages to convince herself that what had happened really was a simple mistake. A night of madness, nothing more.

Until it happens again.

It starts with an apparent flu. A couple of days of aches and malaise and crippling fatigue and an intermittent fever that compels her to cancel her shift at the coffee shop and lie shivering in bed. She takes a (perhaps inadvisable) quantity of cold medicine and double dose of ibuprofen to ward off an impending headache. With limbs shaking and fever mounting, she falls into an uneasy sleep.

She wakes the next morning on the bathroom floor, wrapped in the shower curtain.

Head pounding, limbs leaden, mouth dry and throat aching, it takes her a moment to remember what’s happened. A wave of nausea sends her scooting toward the toilet to retch up a thin string of bile.

As she slumps against the wall, she wonders, abstractly, if she should call 911. How’s she supposed to know if she’s dying? She’s never done that before. She feels a step away from death now. She wishes fervently for her mom, who lives in a different state, or a roommate who could run to the store and buy her electrolytes or at least make sure she doesn’t croak leaning up against the toilet. But she is alone.

She’d had feverish dreams in the night, and distorted images come back to her now: running around her apartment, pounding on the doors, shattering plates, breaking furniture. There was a monster trapped in her bedroom, a monster trying to get out, to get her. She barred it in there even as it threatened to break the door off the hinges . . .

She normally only has these disjointed dreams when she takes too much Benadryl, though supposedly there’s a first time for everything. She was awfully doped up last night.

After some negotiating, she pulls herself to her feet with the aid of the sink.

When she exits the bathroom, she stops cold.

Her apartment is trashed.

Broken ceramic litters the kitchen floor. Stuffing from couch cushions dots the carpet like sparse and discolored snow. The door of her bedroom hangs crookedly on the hinges, the bottom of it riddled with deep gouges, wood frayed and splintering . . . as if something on the other side had been clawing to get out.

An overturned chair lies across the threshold of the living room, one of the legs broken off.

But the most disturbing thing—she can see the chain still pulled across the door, the deadbolt flipped to the “locked” position. Her front door, her only door, is locked from the inside.

Her hands shake and she leans against the wall and slides down, landing heavily on the floor. She looks at her fingernails—previously painted blue. Now the fingernail polish is shredded, her nail beds bloody.

She did this? How? Why? It’s almost like she became the monster from her dreams.

“Oh God, oh God,” she groans. Panic and dangerous, caustic thoughts threaten, but she pushes them away and swallows back more nausea. She tries to think back to last night, half fearful of what memories she’ll find—half fearful she’ll find none.

But a thick fog hangs over her thoughts, only snatches of her dream resurfacing.

Blackness rises from some hidden depth in her stomach and threatens to swallow her completely. She doesn’t feel safe. She wants to run. But if she goes, she has to bring herself with her. And that means that nowhere out there is safe either.

~~~

Even though her bout of the flu nearly exhausted all her sick time, she takes a sick day anyway. It’s slow, torturous progress cleaning up the mess, her limbs heavy and weak, her head still flooded by unpredictable waves of dizziness. It takes her an entire morning of intermittent cleaning to collect all the debris into trash bags. She doesn’t have the energy to put them outside in the dumpster.

After sleeping like the dead for most of the afternoon, evening finds her cocooned in her weighted blanket, heating pad beneath her ribs, trying to figure out what the hell to google.

Black out events, destructive tendencies garners psychiatric disorders that she doesn’t want to contemplate or horror stories about demon possession.

Temporary amnesia with flu reveals nothing besides some medical journals behind a paywall.

Nyquil side-effects reveals a WedMD page and a Reddit forum about “the hat man.”

There’s also a Tumblr blog from Moon-Man 28 that seems promising. At least the symptoms appear on first brush to correlate to her own, but the more she reads, the more it seems to be an elaborate role-play about werewolves or else some kind of mixed-media Teen Wolf fan fiction.

Well, so much for that.

Despite the shivers that still rock her body and the tension plucking each of her tendons in turn—it isn’t the pain that bothers her. No. It’s the terrible, gnawing fear:

Is this what it’s like to lose your mind?

She once again wishes there was someone there to assure her she’s not crazy. To tell her that what she’s feeling is reasonable. Someone to give her a hug.

Barring the hug, the only thing she can think to do is go to the doctor; hopefully they can find out what’s wrong with her and rule out the threat of insanity. She considers driving to the nearby urgent care—their website says they only have a half-hour wait. No. She wants a doctor she can see again if things somehow . . . get worse. She doesn’t want to think this will happen again— she prays it won’t, but she also assumed that last time.

Was last time—was that even the same thing? Or had it really been the weed and booze? Was last night caused by an overdose of over-the-counter meds or something else entirely?

She doesn’t know. But she wants to know. She needs to know. So after googling doctors in the area and working up the courage—she calls.

~~~

It’s a week and a half later when her appointment comes.

By then she feels almost normal. But she goes to the clinic anyway and sits in one of the hard plastic chairs and taps her pen against her chin as she looks down at the clipboard in front of her. There’s boxes for her to check off various symptoms. Should she check fever and malaise, even if she hasn’t had them since last week?

The song “Bad Moon on the Rise”by Creedence Clearwater Revival plays jauntily in the background, and she tries to ignore it as she scans the list of symptoms and attempts to figure out what the hell to check. Eventually she settles for checking the box next to “other” but leaves the line next to it empty. She’ll just have to explain when she sees the doctor. It’ll sound too crazy on paper.

It takes far too long for her to be led to an exam room in the back. She notices that she’s lost ten pounds since the last time she weighed herself. Which wouldn’t normally be alarming, if that hadn’t been last week. She says nothing.

When the nurse types vitals into the computer and asks her what brings her in today, she can’t make eye contact. It all comes out in a rush, her theories about the medication, the flu-like symptoms preceding. She leaves out the part about waking up in the park, or the violence she did to her apartment. She doesn’t want them to get the idea that she’s dangerous, unstable. She doesn’t want to end up in a psych ward after all of this.

So it’s possible the nurse gets the idea that she’s been having some trouble sleeping, and finding gaps in her memory, and generally not feeling well. That is the essential gist of it, and she hopes it’s enough to start.

After more waiting than seems necessary, the doctor finally comes in. He’s middle-aged and doesn’t seem thrilled to be there. As he looks at her over the top of the clipboard, any temptation she might have had to be fully honest with him shrivels in the back of her throat.

“So my nurse tells me you’ve been having trouble sleeping,” he says.

She nods. Tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Sort of. I think I might be sleepwalking?” This isn’t a detail she told the nurse, but it feels like the key piece he ought to know. “And that’s never happened before.”

He looks down at his clipboard again. He clears his throat before looking back at her. “Are you currently under a lot of stress?”

She shifts on the table, the white medical paper crinkling beneath her. She knows she must look nervous now—is that what he’s commenting on?

“Um, not really,” she says. “I mean, there haven’t been any major life changes or anything that—”

He cuts her off with a raise of his hand. “It also says here that there’s been memory issues? Is this like brain fog? Or forgetfulness?”

She shifts again. She isn’t sure what to tell him, because the whole trying-not-to-sound-crazy thing is getting harder and harder by the second. At last, she swallows and says, “It’s not really either of those things. Really the thing that worries me most is after these . . . sleepwalking episodes, it’s like I’m having amnesia?”

“Well—” He scratches his chin with the end of his pen. “People don’t normally remember their sleepwalking episodes.” His condescending tone is enough to curl her toes, to make her feel withered from the inside.

“I guess,” she says, trying to steer the conversation back to her symptoms. Back to the problem before the doctor decides she isn’t worth his time anymore. “What I’m wondering is . . . why now? I’ve never had a history of sleepwalking before and nothing’s really changed—”

“Stress,” the doctor says confidently, surely. He puts his clipboard down. “Stress can manifest in a lot of different ways.”

“Well, I told you, I haven’t really felt stressed lately—”

He shrugs, sighs. “Hormones, then. Are you on birth control?”

“No.”

He raises an eyebrow, as if he disapproves of this, but doesn’t comment.

“I’ve also been feeling flu-like. Once this month and once last month.”

“Well, it is that time of year,” he says, even though it’s really not, at least not yet.

“Yes,” she agrees, even though she doesn’t. “Still, I can’t help but wonder if that has something to do with the sleepwalking—”

“No. Likely incidental. Try melatonin if you haven’t already. And avoid caffeine before bed. Try exercise, some yoga might do you good. I know a lot of girls your age like that.”

He grabs the clipboard again and moves to stand. Fear shoots through her as her one chance moves toward the door. It’s taken her a lot of time and effort to get here today. If this doctor leaves now, she fears what might happen if she goes back home. How much longer until this happens again?

“Please,” she says, and she hates how her voice sounds. So high and panicked, like she’s ten years younger and on the verge of tears, and maybe she is. “Please, isn’t there something that we can—”

The doctor sighs as if her question is a personal burden. As if she’s just asked him to move heaven and earth for her.

“All right,” he says as if placating a child. “I can run some blood tests. If this is a monthly thing, it could be your hormones.” He scribbles down something on his clipboard. “Go check out at the front desk, and tell the receptionist where you’d like your lab orders sent.”

Her face falls and a chasm of hopelessness opens up inside of her. She had wanted them to see her. To extend a hand to a girl treading water and on the cusp of drowning. To sprinkle a crumb of human kindness at her feet. Instead, the doctor leaves the room without a backward glance, and the nurse points her back to the front desk without another word.

She cries on her drive home.

~~~

The days that follow aren’t easy.

She feels as if she’s holding a grenade and she’s already pulled the pin.

She goes through the motions of life but always, always with a feeling of distrust, as if at any moment the reality before her might shatter, leaving a gaping hole beneath. Everything feels less real than it used to.

There’s a shift she can’t explain, as if something in her body is coiling up and readying itself to spring. She almost feels a . . . presence inside her, as if she’s not quite alone. It comes at strange times, when she’s leaning over the sink to wash her face, when she’s looking out a bus window, or lying still and alone in bed.

Everything is tainted by a distinct feeling of unwellness.

She wants to reach out to someone, to vent the building pressure inside of her, to voice the deepest fears stirring instinctually in her gut. But she doesn’t; she can’t. Several times she opens her phone only to put it away again. She has no idea who the hell to even text. Because what does she know? Nothing. And who could hear her story and not immediately be concerned? But concerned in the wrong way, concerned in a way that wouldn’t be a comfort but a hazard. No one. She has no one.

So she shoves it all down and soldiers on.

It’s not with any real surprise that she begins to feel sick again. At first she thinks it’s just her period. Stronger PMS than usual. Her legs feel stiff and heavy, her back aches, and the flu-like symptoms return. She’s exhausted even after sleeping hours at a time. She’s late to work from unintentional naps, but spends each night trapped in an insomniac’s daze, watching as the sky slowly lightens toward dawn.

Her coworkers ask her if she’s okay (she’s been told she looks rough lately), but she fears that if she tells them she’s sick, they’ll send her home, they’ll dock her pay. So she smiles and lies and takes deep breaths in the walk-in freezer to swallow back tears and make it through her shift.

She’s struggling through another shift at work, her sickness waxing to an almost-crescendo, when the realization flashes over her, sharp and insistent: It will be tonight. It will happen again tonight. She doesn’t know how she knows but she does, and the dread that has been a constant breath on the back of her neck is, for a moment, gratified. The buzzing of her phone is enough to make her jump, wound up as she is. She steps into the back room to take it.

She answers even though she doesn’t know the number, half expecting it to be a scam call. Instead, a chipper voice answers:

“Hello, this is Nina from Dr. Randolph’s office. I’m just calling to tell you your test results.”

“Oh! Oh yes!” They told her the results would be back in a week. It’s been two and a half, and she’d almost forgotten.

“Yes, Dr. Randolph just wanted me to call and tell you that everything came back normal.”

Oh. She isn’t sure what she expected, and for some reason, disappointment sits heavy on her shoulders. “Well, when does he want to see me next?”

There’s a pause. “He didn’t say to schedule a follow-up appointment, but if you’re wanting to see him, I can send you over to scheduling . . .”

“Oh, I um—” She doesn’t quite know what to say, because that sounds like it’ll take a while and if Michelle catches her on her phone when she’s not on break, she’ll get an earful. “No, that’s fine. Only, did Dr. Randolph say what the next steps would be?”

Another pause. “Has he already talked to you about birth control?”

She hangs up, takes a minute to blink away tears.

Michelle steps into the back room, practically growling. “Why are all of our customers so pissy today?” As she switches out her apron for a clean one, Michelle says, mostly to herself,  “Must be the full moon.”

Full moon.

The phrase hits her like a hammer between the ribs. Tonight is the full moon. And she will black out tonight. She will wake up with her apartment trashed, claw marks scraped over available surfaces. She will—

No. No. That’s crazy. Impossible. She cannot possibly acknowledge the theory, the fear blooming in her chest. But then the bell on the door dings, and she welcomes the distraction.

She slips back behind the counter and looks upon a girl about her age. She’s wearing a black leather jacket, a sequined crop top underneath, and high-waisted jeans, knees torn out and patched with a collage of fabric swatches. Her skin is the same shade as the mahogany wood on the counter and her hair is a mound of twists atop her head. More interesting is the cane she holds at her side, black with red roses painted on it. The girl leans on it as she stares—not at the menu behind the counter, but directly at her.

The girl’s gaze is clearly meant for her alone, and she isn’t sure why, but her mouth runs dry. There’s something oddly . . . familiar about this girl. Like she’s seen her in a dream. She doesn’t believe in past lives, but she wonders if that’s a belief she should reevaluate.

She finds her voice. “Can I . . . can I help you?”

The girl considers this, purple-painted nails tapping against her chin.

“Cappuccino, vegan whip,” the girl says. “And a scone too.”

She nods and rings up the total, glad the girl has given her something to do so she can focus on her task and not on her uncomfortably direct gaze. “Name?”

“Cleo.”

“Here or to go?”

“Here.”

She makes the cappuccino, grabs the scone from the display case, puts them on a tray, and slides it over the counter.

The girl—Cleo, she supposes—looks at it, then back up to her. “I’m gonna chill here for a while. Can you help me take these to a table?” She gestures to her cane. “I’m one-handed at the moment.”

“Oh. Um. Sure.” So she grabs the tray and though her wrists protest, she follows Cleo deeper into the cafe.

There’s not many people here this morning, just the old guy who always comes here to do his crossword and a couple of moms sipping coffee next to their matching strollers. Cleo chooses a table in the back corner.

Her wrists are weak now, and she barely makes it to Cleo’s table without dropping the tray. She’s about to turn away when Cleo says:

“You don’t feel well.” It’s not a question.

She doesn’t know what to say to that, so she settles for, “Just a cold.”

“You had one last month about this time.” Also not a question.

She whirls around to face Cleo, who is sitting now and picking up her cappuccino, a knowing, certain look in her eye.

She doesn’t even have the wherewithal to ask Cleo how she knows this. Cleo simply smiles and says, “Look, I know a sick girl when I see one. But I can tell . . . you’re like me.”

Her eyes dart to Cleo’s cane. But Cleo shakes her head.

“It’s just a tool that helps me in the days leading up. I don’t always use it.” She tilts her head to the side. “How many months has this been going on for?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Her heart is loud in her ears now and a panic is swelling in her chest.

“The waking up not knowing where you are or how you got there. The pain. The sickness.”

Her eyes dart around the room. Thankfully the moms seem too deep in conversation, and the old man too engrossed in his crossword to eavesdrop. She leans on the table, more as a way to keep herself steady than to make this a friendly chat. When she speaks, it is low in the back of her throat, fierce, in an effort to hide her panic. “Who the hell are you?”

Cleo looks unperturbed. “I said, I’m someone like you.”

She can’t have this conversation. Not here. Not right now.

She’s gotten so used to hiding it over these past months, so used to pushing it away. To have it all suddenly laid bare is too difficult, too fresh, like this girl has ripped bandages off still-weeping wounds.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she repeats. And this time a bit of pleading creeps into her voice. She needs Cleo to drop it.

“In denial?” Cleo asks. She’s spreading a healthy dose of plant-based butter on her scone, her knife making a scraping sound as she works. “I was, too, at first. But, honey”—and her purple-tinted lips quirk—”you don’t need to lie to me. I can smell the lycanthropy all over you.”

“Ly—” The word is unfamiliar, but not wholly so. Something stirs in her memory, like an echo of déjà vu.

“Look it up,” she says. “Just don’t believe most of the stuff they say about it on the internet.” Cleo takes a bite of her scone, crumbs leaking out of the sides of her mouth.

“I . . . I need to get back to—” She makes a vague gesture back toward the counter.

Cleo smirks at her, as if amused by her embarrassment, by her temptation to flee. “Sure. Go ahead. But I’ll be back after the moon tonight. See if you want to chat then.”

Somehow, this is intolerable. For her to have to wait for an inevitable and uncomfortable face-off.

“There’s nothing to talk about.” She turns to walk away.

“Ignoring it isn’t going to make it go away,” Cleo says.

Maybe not. But she’s willing to try. She’s almost to the doorframe of the back room when Cleo calls out behind her.

“Set up a camera tonight. Then maybe you’ll want to talk.”

She doesn’t dare look back.  She tucks herself in the storage room, and her hands shake like leaves.

~~~

As much as she wants to forget them, wipe them off as easily as water, Cleo’s words cling, sink in, needle her. If she’s going to set up a camera as Cleo suggested, then she had better do it before she goes to bed. The fact is, she isn’t sure she wants to.

She wants the pain to stop. The tiredness to stop. The fear to stop. She wants all of this to end more than she can say. But if she finally figures out what’s happening, then she’ll have to face the fact that this isn’t all in her head. And she isn’t sure what’s worse, to be crazy or to be ill.

The thing is, she’s googled the word “lycanthropy.” And if anything, it’s Cleo who’s crazy. Lycanthropy: the delusion that one has become a wolf.

Cleo said she could smell the lycanthropy all over her. Maybe Cleo’s crazy enough to think she’s a wolf, but that’s definitely not what she believes. At least . . . not in the parts of her mind she prefers to examine in the daylight. And if she sets up a camera—and it shows what Cleo implied it would . . . Well, she isn’t sure she can handle that.

There must be other explanations for the gouges on her doors, the shredding of her couch cushions, the monthly debris. She’s sleepwalking, that’s it. She’s not turning into a fucking werewolf.

Maybe if she records herself sleepwalking, maybe the doctors will finally believe her. And then, if Cleo does come back, she can tell her with the certainty that she did record herself and there was nothing unusual to see.

That’s the hope that compels her to climb with aching limbs onto her kitchen counters and set her laptop on top of the cabinets. While she hasn’t wanted to face the truth, she won’t let a little test like this intimidate her either. This may be a horrible thing to live with—but it’s nothing otherworldly. So what does she really have to fear?

~~~

She wakes up with her head in the pantry, surrounded by cornflakes and shredded cardboard. It would be funnier if her whole body weren’t on fire.

It takes a long while to pull herself upright. To begin to put the pieces back together. This time, there’s gouges on the front door. This time, all the sheets have been yanked from her bed. But this time, she herself is relatively unscathed.

She almost forgets to check her laptop and the video recording software that’s been running all night. It’s mid-afternoon before she has the strength to climb up on a chair and retrieve it.

She settles onto the couch to watch. Part of her is curious, like she’s about to stream a long-awaited movie. Another part of her feels like she’s about to see something she shouldn’t—like something horrifying excavated from the deep reaches of the dark web.

She clicks “PLAY” anyway.

For the first hour, there’s nothing to see.

She fast-forwards through footage of her empty kitchen until, at the far reaches of the shot, her bedroom door, cracked open, swings wider on crooked hinges.

And there, stepping into the pool of light spilling from the bathroom further down the hallway:

Is a thing. A monster.

Its body is vaguely lupine in form. It’s unlike anything she’s ever seen.

It walks farther into the kitchen, canine snout sweeping along the floor as if smelling for something. And as it comes fully into the light—with a twist of dread, she realizes that the thing is wearing her oversized T-shirt. The T-shirt she wore to bed last night. The T-shirt she is wearing now.

She pauses the video and closes her laptop and scoots it away as if it might combust. Her mind reels. Nausea crests.

She can’t believe what she’s seen.

And yet . . .

She balls up her fists and presses them to her eyes and leans forward. For once, her mind is completely blank. All she can hear is her own heartbeat in her throat, and even that is far too loud. The dam inside her breaks and she cries until her throat is raw.

~~~

It’s three days later when Cleo returns. It’s with fear as much as relief that she hears the bell announcing her arrival.

They make eye contact over the counter and it’s like Cleo knows. Knows about the video footage. Knows about the three days she’s spent in panic and numbness and disbelief and horror. Knows about the desperation that’s been chewing her apart from the inside.

Cleo orders nothing. They just stand there, held together by the strength of their gazes.

Finally, Cleo speaks. “Do you . . . do you want to get out of here?”

She finds herself nodding; she’s already taking off her apron.

She sticks her head into the kitchen and calls out, “Michelle?! I’m taking my break.”

She doesn’t wait for a response before she steals out onto the street, Cleo behind her.

They don’t walk far. Her limbs are still too leaden with exhaustion, and though Cleo has opted for a single crutch looped around her forearm today instead of her cane, she walks with a slight limp.

They walk around the corner wordlessly, Cleo one step behind. Cleo sits beside her after she sinks down on the bench behind the coffee shop.

A long moment passes. She clasps her hands in her lap and stares at them. Her eyes well with tears. She’s trying to think of something to say, and all the feelings from the past days swim up in her throat, and suddenly she’s choking on unshed tears.

“I’m Cleo, by the way.”

“I know. I remember.”

Cleo doesn’t ask her name, but then again, her name tag is still clipped to her work shirt.

Something between a laugh and a sob comes from her mouth, and she presses it closed with her fingers to keep more from spilling out.

“Rough one this month?” Cleo asks.

She nods, and treacherous tears leak from her eyes. She takes a shaky breath and suddenly, the words are spilling out. And she admits everything: the footage, the park, the damage to her apartment, the doctor and tests, the feeling that she’s drowning.

“I just . . .” She’s fairly gasping now, breathless from the force of her soliloquy. “I don’t understand how this happened . . . or why . . . and what the hell am I supposed to do about all of this?”

“This just started happening, huh? Out of nowhere?” Cleo says.

“If there were warning signs, I missed them.”

“Yeah,” Cleo huffs. “Me too.”

If she was more collected, perhaps she could have stopped the “why me” from coming out of her mouth, but she says it anyway. She’s in too much pain and she’s held this in for too long. She knows it sounds pathetic, but she says it and can’t find it within herself to regret it.

“Maybe someday we’ll know,” Cleo murmurs. She’s looking out at the street now, at a cyclist making his way down the adjacent sidewalk. “And I don’t mean that in, like, a ‘maybe someday we’ll be granted the proper wisdom or perspective so this all makes sense or feels purposeful somehow’ way, I mean—maybe science will figure it out. Doctors. Maybe they’ll actually take the time to study people like us, instead of pretending we don’t exist.”

“Have you . . . have you ever told a doctor that you—” And she can’t get herself to say “turn into a wolf,” it still feels too bold a statement to say—even if that is what happens.

Cleo shakes her head. “No. Oh God, no. When I first got sick I had to beg them to even check my thyroid. Do you think they’re really going to try and help me manage a disease they don’t think exists? If there is a doctor out there who knows about people like us . . . I haven’t met them.” Her fingers stray to the drawstring on her hoodie. “Who knows, maybe one of us will be the first.”

She attempts to smile at Cleo’s words, but it falls flat.

“Milo told his doctor once,” Cleo says with a grimace. “They put him in a psych ward. They let him out a couple weeks later. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if they’d kept him long enough that he’d been there over the moon . . .”

She almost asks who Milo is but doesn’t.

“I wish a stay in a psych ward would fix it,” she murmurs. “Or that it was just my thyroid. Or my hormones. Or literally anything else. Hell, I’d even take being completely nuts over being a—” Even here with Cleo, she can’t get the word to leave her mouth. Cleo raises an eyebrow at the conspicuously abrupt end to her sentence but doesn’t push.

They sit in silence. The cyclist is gone and now a woman walking a dog is on the opposite sidewalk. The dog is a large one, shaggy and grey. It reminds her uncomfortably of the video footage. She shakes off the feeling.

A fragile hope begins to peek through the self-pity, and she finds herself asking: “How did you find Milo . . . and others . . . like us? I can’t imagine there’s a lot of us—”

Cleo cracks a smile. She’s fiddling with her crutch as she talks. “You know, I like to pretend that once upon a time all the lycanthropes of the world were drawn together by some mysterious force and pack mentality that commanded them. That they met at night in the forest and instinctively knew of their kinship—” She huffs again. “Really, I got lucky. I stumbled across a blog Gabe started years ago. A lot of people online probably thought it was a joke or a creative writing piece or something—”

“Wait,” she cuts in, a memory stirring, “is this blog on Tumblr?”

Cleo raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, it is.”

She laughs, pressing a hand to her mouth. “I think I found that, like, a month ago; somehow the algorithm led me to it when I was googling my symptoms. I totally thought it was a fanfic of some kind.”

Now it is Cleo’s turn to laugh. “That’s great,” she says. “Fanfic, I haven’t heard that before. Well, it took me a while, but eventually, I believed him. And now . . . we have a group chat. There’s a dozen of us around the country. It helps . . . with learning how to live with all of this.”

“It’s a lot.” She presses the heels of her hands to her eyes. Now that she’s sitting down, she can fully appreciate how exhausted she is, and now that she’s cried, it’s made it even worse. For months she has wanted someone to vent to, but now that she has, she wonders if the pent-up adrenaline and anxiety were the only things keeping her going. Now that they’re gone, she feels rather deflated. “It’s like . . . nothing outward in my life has changed. I still have the same job, the same friends, the same place. But I’m not who I used to be, nothing has changed and—”

“Everything has,” Cleo finishes.

“Yeah. You got it.” It feels nice to hear Cleo complete her thought without prompting. It feels nice to have someone instinctually understand.

Cleo nods. “The first year’s the worst. But it gets easier.” She stops fiddling with her crutch and looks at her out of the corner of her eye. “I’m not saying there’s a cure. There isn’t. There are things that make it more bearable, though. I’d definitely drink some ginger root tea tonight if you can. And Sheila swears by red meat but . . .” Cleo shrugs. “It’s not my style.”

The simplicity of that—ginger tea and meat—is almost laughable. If someone else had suggested that to her along with essential oils, she would’ve been tempted to punch them in the mouth. It’s like trying to fix a sinking ship with duct tape. But she trusts that Cleo has tried everything, the extreme and the mundane, and that if she’s suggesting something, it’s because it works and isn’t just a feeble and naive attempt to fix the unfixable.

“You never really get used to it,” Cleo says. “And you’ll always miss the ‘before.’ After a while, though, you settle into this. And learn to live with it . . . not just in spite of it.”

Right now, such a thing feels a thousand light years away. Right now, that feels more impossible to her than if someone had told her a year ago that she’d soon become a werewolf. But she wants to believe Cleo, and so she lets herself, just for a moment.

“I’m not a pro or anything,” Cleo says. “Even after five years I still feel like I’m figuring it out. But I guess why I opened my mouth when I first saw you is, I saw a bit of myself in you and I didn’t— I don’t want you to have to do it alone.”

She thought she was done with the tears, but at Cleo’s words, she finds herself blinking away more. “Thanks,” she murmurs. It’s all she can manage. Along with: “Can I, um . . . Can I be a part of that group chat?”

She finds that she means it. While Cleo’s been talking, a fragile hope has been kindling. That maybe she won’t always be struggling so much. If Cleo’s going to offer her a lifeline, she’s going to take it. She’s tired of treading water. She’s tired of being alone.

So Cleo takes her phone and types her number into it, then hands it back with a tentative smile. “I got to get going. And you probably ought to get back to your shift. But hey, I’ll check back in a couple of days—see how that meat and tea are treating you. We can talk more then, yeah?” Cleo stands, stretches, her crutch clicking against the pavement. “I’m the only one that lives around town. Gabe and Milo commute in for the moon, though. If you want to join us next time . . . Well, we can talk about that. I just want you to know you’re not alone. And you can do this. And it’s not always going to be like this.”

She has to trust Cleo wouldn’t say it if she didn’t mean it. She breathes deep and swallows hard.

Fifteen minutes later, her phone starts buzzing. Cleo’s number is at the top of the screen:

Hey guys, I found another. Everyone say hi!

She finds herself smiling at the welcomes from the flurry of numbers she doesn’t yet know and the barrage of gifs and memes accompanying them. And for the first time in months, a little weight lifts off her aching shoulders.

~~~

It’s three weeks later when Cleo adds her to another group text, this time with only four members. This one is titled “Moon Squad.”

The first message is a pin on a digital map and Cleo’s caption: Same place as last month. Gabe’s uncle’s farm. Who’s bringing breakfast? I got blankets and robes again. Anything else we need? Anyone wanna give our newbie the debrief?

The messages after are from Milo and Gabe, describing in short terms when they are to meet (sunset) and where she ought to park (at the grain silo) and what they are going to do (turn into wolves together).

And for some reason, this conversation is overwhelming. Too much.

She leaves them on read. She does not reply. She does not answer their questions.

She knows that the way she has been handling this isn’t sufficient. Tearing up her apartment and waking up alone and aching and scared has been nothing short of hell.

Even though the group text has been her solace for the past month, and she’s found it a strange mixture of relieving and unsettling to talk so openly about . . . all of this, with people who (besides Cleo) she’s never met—this, this is a whole other world she isn’t entirely sure she’s prepared for.

A private text from Cleo sits unanswered on her phone: Hey, you’re coming tonight, right?

She has to make a decision soon. The afternoon is far spent and soon it will be evening and, according to her maps app, Gabe’s uncle’s farm is an hour away.

Something about this feels far too vulnerable. She’s used to this being private. She’s used to only sharing as much as she wants to share about all of this, through a screen, or over FaceTime with Cleo. She isn’t sure how she feels about letting the others see her—not only furry and beastly and slavering, but in the morning—naked and broken and dizzy and sick.

She can tell based on the checklist Cleo sent to the group that they have a system down. And Gabe has assured her that there’s enough fences on the property to keep them from wandering far—no cows to kill or neighbors to see.

But still. She’s frightened for reasons she can’t fully pin down.

She sits on the end of her bed now, a backpack open at her feet. She’s made a mental list of things she should bring: a water bottle, a heating pad, wet wipes, some pain killers, a change of clothes, her compression socks, her muscle rollers . . . but she stays rooted to her mattress, limbs throbbing with the imminence of moonrise.

What if she gets lost, separated from the others? What if they don’t take care of her and leave her behind? What if she can’t find the farm in time and changes in the car? (Though Cleo has told her that staying awake can delay the change for a while.)

How she copes now isn’t sustainable. But in some ways, it feels familiar. Safe.

Her phone buzzes.

She knows it’s Cleo even before she looks at the text.

Hey. If you want a ride, I can pick you up and drive us both. I still feel well enough.

She stares at the screen long enough that her eyes water.

She doesn’t feel ready to commit. But at this rate, she might never. And the moon is going to come whether she wants it to or not. And she’s done rejecting lifelines when they’re so freely given.

So she sends her address and types See you soon.

~~~

When Cleo’s Corolla pulls up outside her apartment, she feels, with her backpack on, a bit like a kid heading to her first day of school, wondering whether the other kids will like her.

She locks her apartment behind her and walks on shaking legs to the curb.

Cleo rolls down the window. She’s wearing sunglasses even though the sun has sunk behind the housetops. She smiles.

“Get in, loser,” she says. “We’re going full-mooning.”

~~~

The second time she wakes in the woods at dawn, it takes her a minute to remember where she is. The first things she notices are the smell of a campfire, then the humid breeze slicking sweat on her skin, then the dirt dusting her bare feet.

When she opens her eyes, the world spins before her and it takes a moment for the colors to come ambling back. Next to her lies a blanket and a packet of wet wipes.

Memories of the night crawl sluggishly back. Wolves. Wide-open spaces and the darkness of the forest. The stars overhead and the soft glow of moonlight. All else is a blur.

An attempt to prop herself up is met by swift dizziness and screaming muscles. Her pulse thrums in each one of her joints. But a hand reaches out and grabs hers, and Cleo pulls her to a sit.

Cleo stands with a blanket wrapped around her, and somehow she’s wearing a pair of fluffy slippers. “Hey,” she says. Her voice is tired, hoarse, but kind. “How are you?”

“Tired.”

Cleo nods. “We all had quite a night last night.” She opens her blanket to reveal a polka-dotted robe and fishes in the pocket until she pulls out a pill bottle. She shakes a couple into her hand and passes them over with a wink.

“C’mon,” she says. “Milo’s got some pancakes cooking on the campfire. Let’s get some food in you and then you can take those pills.”

Cleo pulls her to her feet and throws the blanket around her shoulders. And together they make their way to the campfire, where the others are waiting.

As they talk and laugh over pancakes and pain pills and electrolyte chews, her fatigue remains, but slowly, the aches and nausea recede. She doesn’t feel well. But she doesn’t feel terrible either. For now, she is content with this compromise.

Above them, the moon ebbs away with the rising sun.