The Choice: Part 4

The Choice
Part 4

I went home that day with a lot on my mind, but as it got closer and closer to night, the tremors got worse and worse. It got to the point where I was lying prostrate on the floor, listening to music as loud as I could to distract from the pains. I was barely able to hold myself together in front of my parents.
Then night came, and while I wanted to go outside, something told me to wait. I laid there thinking about Caroline, wondering what would happen if she decided not to turn me, how I would live my life like this if that were the case. I felt validated that all of this was actually happening. I worried that maybe I was just really good at deceiving myself. What proof did I have besides my own first-hand experience, which could easily be pretended?
Such thoughts came and went with the tide of my tremors, and vanished completely when I felt myself sit up, and I looked out my window to see the pale glow of the world, and I knew it was time.
I snuck through the house, feeling almost reverent of the silence, and went outside. There was a spot I had picked on top of a hill, and I made my way there with my eyes planted firmly to the ground.
I felt a pressure on my back, and I longed to turn around and see the moon with my own two eyes. My hands were trembling, and the tremors seemed to have passed into another sensation entirely. When I reached the top of the hill, I took a deep breath and looked up.
The moon. Sitting low on the horizon, a ring around it from the thin cloud cover. The tremors ceased entirely, and the panic, fear, and excitement all drained away entirely. Suddenly, all was peace.
I took a deep breath and sat down, and felt a smile on my face. Nothing else mattered anymore. In my mind and my heart, I felt like I could do anything.
I must have sat there staring at the moon for almost an hour before I yawned and decided I needed sleep. This feeling defied my understanding of werewolves, but that made it all the more interesting. It was calm and peace, and I never wanted it to end. I was excited to tell Caroline about it, and I wanted the next day to come as quickly as it could.
When my head hit the pillow, I fell right asleep. I had very abstract dreams that exuded peacefulness, and I didn't stir once.
I woke up the next morning and got ready for school the same way I always did, except the feeling from the night before was still prevalent.
Caroline listened and nodded as I described the sensation, a dumb smile on my face. When I asked her if she thought I was still crazy, she only shrugged.
Over the next couple weeks, we continued to talk during lunch and after school. Eventually she gave me her phone number, and we started talking late into the night as well. It turned out that we had a lot of things in common. Besides our wolfy similarity, I mean.
As time wore on, however, she continued to wait to deliberate on her decision. Did she want to turn me, or didn't she? The longer she waited, the more doubtful I became.
Then, after two weeks, I confronted her about it, and she decided that she would make her mind up over the weekend. We made plans to hang out at a bookstore.
We met there on saturday and sat around drinking coffee like a couple of hipsters, and had an extraordinarily mundane conversation about manga. I for my part didn't want to rush her decision, and she seemed very distracted.
Eventually, she looked around at the store, disgusted, and said, “Can we get out of here?”
I obliged, and we went for a walk. We were silent for a long time, making our way down the streets. She'd stop to look at flowers growing in the bushes every once in a while, and I'd watch her with curiosity. She seemed to have an abiding love of nature, an aspect of her character that had never come out before.
When we reached a railroad crossing that circled around into a forest, we looked at each other with knowing smiles and decided to see where the tracks would take us. When we were out of earshot of the street, she spoke.
“I haven't decided yet.”
“But Caroline, if this is what Luna wants-”
“Please don't get into that right now,” she said, “I can't take it. You have no idea how little sleep I've gotten over the past couple weeks. And you...” She sighed. “I know you think you're in this circle because of the call, but you're not. I can tell just by looking at you that you haven't felt an iota of what I do.”
“Then help me reach that point,” I urged. “I want to help you.”
“You want to help me because it gets you what you want,” she replied. “Why do you want to be a werewolf? What could you possibly stand to gain?”
“I've already told you.”
“I know you have, but...” She shook her head, “We're just kids. I know how we feel now, but what about in the future? How can we possibly know if we'll still be together five, ten years from now?”
“Together?”
She continued without acknowledging my statement. “What if you end up disappointed? What if you-”
I said, “What if I'd never talked to you in the first place? What if either of us had never been born? We can ask what-if's all day long, but it doesn't change the situation we're in.”
“You don't get it-”
“No, I do,” I said. “We can't change the past but we can change the future, that's what you're trying to say. If we do this and something goes wrong, there's no taking that back. You're so focused on the threat of everything going wrong, have you even considered the possibility of everything going right?”
“How often in your life have things gone right?” she asked.
“How often in my life have I ever had to make a choice like this?”
Caroline said nothing in response.
“I know enough about myself,” I said, “to know that even if this is a bad decision, I won't regret it. The past is what it is, and regrets only make things worse. What I want is for you to trust me that we can make it work.”
She stopped walking, her head facing the ground. It took me entirely too wrong to realize that she was crying.
“What's wrong?”
“You don't know...” she said, “you don't know...”
“What is it?”
I held her arms and tried to peer into her face. Eventually, she looked up at me.
“There aren't very many werewolves in the world. The only reason I know I'm not the only one is because... I met one, when I was a kid. And he...” Caroline shook her head and said, “I didn't first start... being a werewolf until I was eight. He met me right around then, in time enough to keep me from revealing myself to my parents or the people at school, or whatever. He taught me how to control my urges and gave me pointers. We shared a full moon together, which was...amazing, and then he left. A few weeks after that, I told a friend of mine, and she asked me to turn her. I did, because I thought it would be really cool, and Michael said that I could turn people, I just had to be sure. He showed me how. The only restriction was that the other person had to be...close. Wolfish at heart, I guess. I just wanted to have someone to share this experience with me, so almost that same day, I turned her.
“Over the next three months, I watched her become more and more dissatisfied with herself. She started to notice faults in the people around her, in the culture they lived in, in the world... She wasn't ready for it, and she grew up in ways she wasn't supposed to. She hated the pain, hated perspective...hated me. She asked for a cure and I said there wasn't one. She tried to tell family and friends on me, cried for help, but all she got was laughs and a forced visit to the psychologist. One night on the full moon, she went into her father's office and found a gun he kept there, and she came after me. She knew my favorite place, and sure enough I was there. The moon hadn't come up yet, and I was just waiting, and...
“She gave a speech about how hateful the world was, how unsympathetic... and she said she hoped I lived forever so I could feel the pain of it the rest of my life. And she shot herself. I ran home and locked myself in my room, had one of the most painful transformations of my life... The police questioned me because they found innumerable mentions of me in her notebooks, with everything about us laid out plainly. I told them it was just a game we played, and I'd stopped playing it with her because she'd started taking it too seriously. Everyone seemed to blame me for what happened, because no one could conceive of why an eight-year-old would shoot herself in the head. A few weeks later, we moved to the other side of the country, but my parents never stopped watching me after that. They've loosened up a little since then, but they're always keeping tabs on where I am and what I'm doing.”
I asked, “How did you get away today?”
“They're out of town, and they believe I don't have any friends. But do you understand what I'm saying? I've been through this once before. I know how it ends. As much as I want to, I already... Her death was my fault. I can't deal with that again.”
She put a hand on my chest. “I can't lose you like I lost her.”
I was quiet for a few moments.
“I'm sorry,” I said, hugging her. “I didn't know.”
“It's okay,” she said.
“I can't imagine what that must have been like,” I said, “and I'm sorry it happened, but... That's not me, Caroline. The situation is different.”
“How is it different?”
“It's not obvious? Your friend, she had probably never even thought about werewolves. I've been obsessed with them for years. And she didn't hear the call. I'm ready for this, Caroline. I want it. For both of us.”
“It's the same decision-”
“But for different reasons. What do you expect me to do, Caroline? Walk away, after all this? Can you even do that? You keep acting like terrible things are going to happen if we do this, but if you really didn't want this then you would've walked away a long time ago. We've already made our decision, you're just trying to give me a reason not to go through with it. And -and if I thought this was the wrong decision, I wouldn't make it. Ever since I heard the call, I've felt so...alive. So empowered. For the first time in my life! I've felt like I'm actually living! If there's more to be felt, I want to be a part of it. And you... you're the only friend I have. Every time I look at you I see this -this sadness just below the surface, and it drives me mad. I don't want to see you like that anymore, if I can help it. And I think, this way, I can. I'm willing to hide myself from the world if it means I don't have to hide myself from you.”
She wiped a tear from her cheek and laughed, “God, we're so melodramatic.”
Without saying a word, I leaned in and kissed her. I'd never kissed anyone before, and it scared me half to death that I was doing it. But at the same time, it was the only thing to do. The only way to prove that I didn't care about the drama, the difference in perspective.
I only cared about her.
And when I pulled away, she looked at me with such vulnerability, and I realized that the toughness, the harsh words, they were all just a front. Inside, she was just as scared and just as doubtful as I was. Up until that moment, she'd been fighting with herself as to whether or not I was like her.
She hugged me as tight as she could and cried into my shoulder, and I held her, remembering my life, remembering all the tiny, pointless tragedies that had led me to this moment. I never thought I could measure whether my life had been worth living, but in that moment I knew that, no matter how lacking I had been as a human being before then, things were different now. Because of Caroline, I could be a better person.
I said to her in a soft voice, “You and I were meant to be.”
She replied through sobs, “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”