Every other day(4)

Bethany Davis was a cheerleader.

I was not.

Leaning back against the gymnasium wall, I did my best to disappear into the bleachers. It would have been easier to lose myself in the crowd if I hadn’t claimed a spot on the back row, but I hated letting people sit behind me.

Much better to keep my back to the wall.

The compulsion reminded me, as it always did, that even on my human days, I was anything but normal.

“Are you ready to beat the Trojans?” the principal asked, his voice booming from the loudspeakers as he leaned into a microphone positioned directly in the middle of the cheerleaders. To my right, some senior delinquent made a comment about “beating” and “Trojans” that I tried very hard not to hear.

“Are you ready to show them what Krakens are made of?”

A roar of assent went through the crowd, and I wondered for maybe the hundredth time how Heritage High had ended up with a giant, multiarmed sea monster as its mascot.

“Are you ready to slip your tentacles around the Trojans and crush them like the ships of yore?”

I didn’t wait to hear what the dirty minds of senior boys would make of the reference to “tentacles.” I really and truly did not want to know. Instead, I brought my feet up onto the bleacher, pulled my legs to my chest, and rested my chin on top of my knees. Sometimes, I felt like if I could just fold myself into a small enough ball, my body would collapse on itself like a star, and I could supernova myself into a new existence.

One that didn’t involve Trojans, Krakens, tentacles, or early morning assemblies of any kind.

With my right hand, I massaged the muscles in my left, tuning out the world around me and assessing the damage the hellhounds had wreaked the night before. There wouldn’t be a scar. There wasn’t so much as a scratch or a hint of redness. The only indication that muscle and bone had spent the night knitting themselves back together was the residual soreness.

If I’d had another hour before dawn this morning, even that would have taken care of itself.

Reflexively, I glanced down at my watch: twenty-one hours and seventeen minutes until my next switch. Twenty-one hours and seventeen minutes with no hunt-lust. Twenty-one hours and seventeen minutes as human as the next girl.

Twenty-one hours and seventeen minutes for the things I hunted to hunt me.

“Go Krakens!”

I was 99 percent sure this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. That if there were any other people out there with my … skills, they weren’t that way one day and not the next, but ever since the puberty fairy had knocked me upside the head with her little wand, that was the way things had been for me.

Every other day, I was human. And every other day, I was … not.

“Kra-kens! Kra-kens! Kra-kens!”

I put my feet back down on the ground and made a halfhearted effort at clapping to the beat. I even mouthed the words to the cheers coming at me from all sides. But what I really needed wasn’t a dose of school spirit; it was a glass of water, an aspirin the size of my fist, and the answers to the history exam that I hadn’t studied for the night before.

“As long as I’m dreaming,” I muttered, my words lost to the cacophony of the gym, “I’d also like a pony, a convertible, and a couple of friends.”

“That’s a tall order.”

I’d known that there were people sitting next to me, but I couldn’t begin to imagine how one of them had heard me. I hadn’t even heard me.

“Would you settle for a piece of gum, an orange Tic Tac, and an introduction to the school slut?”

I tried to process the situation appropriately. The cheering had finally died down, the principal had begun dismissing us section by section to go back to class, and the girl sitting next to me—who looked all of twelve years old, but was probably closer to my age—was holding out a stick of Juicy Fruit, a lopsided grin on her pixie face.

“Gum?” she repeated.

It wasn’t a giant-sized aspirin, but it would do.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the gum and eyeing the box of orange Tic Tacs sticking out of her jeans pocket. Gum. Tic Tacs. Based on the power of inference and the fact that she looked like she was on the verge of introducing herself, I concluded that must make her …

“Skylar Hayden,” the girl said, sticking out her hand. “School slut.”

I shook her hand and tried to process. “The school …”

“Slut,” Skylar chirped, the picture of perky. “Even says so, right across the front of my locker. The janitors have tried to paint over it, but the locker elves are a persistent bunch, so there it stays.”

“That’s awful,” I said, trying to imagine myself coming face-to-face with that word scrawled across my locker each morning.