Free After Eli by Rebecca Rupp

hairy. Nobody wants to be around a werewolf.”
    I thought of Valya Starikova, this Russian kid in my Book of the Dead. She was dragged into the forest and eaten by wolves. Nothing was left but pieces of her shoes.
    “Yeah,” Journey said. “Because werewolves bite. Like this.” And she started to gnaw on Jasper’s arm.
    Jasper began to yell.
    Then Journey said, “I’ll go tell Isabelle!” and cut off running toward the road, and Jasper hollered, “No,
I’ll
tell her!” and went batting off after her.
    So I went back to hoeing and hoed blue potatoes so fast that I came close to hoeing off my toes. I was that excited about having an invitation from Isabelle.
    It was just lousy timing that right then Peter Reilly called up to see if I wanted to go to the movies that next night, because his brother, Tony, was going to drive him and Amanda into Fairfield and if I came along, Amanda would bring her girlfriend Yvonne Boudreau, who has a belly-button ring and blue hair. Any other time I would have wanted to go. The blue hair makes Yvonne look like a Martian, but a cute Martian, and she talks a lot, which means you don’t have to say much but can just nod every once in a while and think about your own stuff and look at her chest.
    Peter got ticked off when I said no, I was busy.
    “Busy with
what
?” he said. “What have you got to be busy with?”
    I didn’t want to tell him, but he kept at it until finally I said, “I promised I’d go over to the neighbors’.”
    Then Peter wanted to know which neighbors and what were we going to do there, and I said it was sort of like a club meeting, which was the only thing I could think of to get him off my back. I’ve always been a lousy liar, which is one of the things Eli was always saying we had to work on someday. When he got back from Iraq, he said, we’d devote a whole Education Day to deception and prevarication.
    Peter said I sounded stupid, and what was wrong with me and was I turning into a douche, and then he hung up. Which is because the only kind of club Peter knows about is the one his father goes to at the VFW on Friday nights to drink Jim Beam and play poker.
    By Saturday, though, I was so nervous that I wished maybe I’d just
répondez-vous
-ed no to the twins and gone to the movies with Peter and Amanda and blue Yvonne. By seven, I’d changed my clothes three times, brushed my teeth twice, and had had a lot of time to get myself all worked up thinking about what a loser I was going to look like in front of Isabelle, what with not knowing what month I’d be if I was a month and not having a favorite poem.
    Then I decided that if things went really wrong, I’d just run away from home and come up with a new identity, like those people in witness-protection programs. I’d go someplace really far away, like Cincinnati, and I’d pretend to have lost my memory, which always works for people in the movies. I doubted anybody would even bother to look for me, because frankly I figured my parents would be relieved.
    Actually that all made me feel better, because like Eli always said, it’s always important to have a backup plan. Later I told Walter about it, and he said “Great scheme, Danny,” in a way that told me it wasn’t.
    I told my mom where I was going and she said “Fine” without looking away from where she was not exactly watching the TV, in the sort of voice that showed she really wasn’t paying any attention. It left me wondering, the way I always did, if she’d say anything different if I said, “Well, good night, Mom, I’m going out to knock over a liquor store,” or, “Gee, I’ve made this cool parachute out of an umbrella and I’m going to go jump off the Matteson River Bridge and see if it works,” or, “Good-bye, Mom, I’ve decided to move to Timbuktu.”
    She didn’t used to be this way. When Eli was home, we’d go out to the kitchen most nights and help Mom make dinner, and she’d say, “Well, tell me things, boys; I