She inches closer so we’re practically sharing the same air. Maybe we are, because I’m light-headed.

On my first day of kindergarten, I bit a kid. Hard. In my defense, he deserved it.

I'm some sort of guinea pig in a home economics crash course for werewolves.

To them he’s the slightly less frightening alternative to the grim reaper.

He makes it sound so Zen. Or Jedi. Like some kind of Wolf Yoda. There is no try. And maybe that’s all there is to it. Don’t over-think the shift. Just embrace the form that I want to be in.

The cold reality of what he is ― what I am ― sets in like cement and our former selves have been buried and smothered to death beneath the thick concrete of our separate fates.

Think wolf; be wolf.

There’s a long, uncomfortable silence in which I contemplate what might happen next. Maybe like the villain in a movie, this is where she gives me a long spiel about her hard-up life before she kills me. Not that I totally believe she’s nefarious. Real life isn’t made up of heroes and villains. Just ordinary people making choices they have to live with.

If only I could handle my problems like a video-game style battle against a boss. But there are no power-ups in real life. No FTW moment when I can declare total pwnage. I don’t even know who the bad guys are.

She goes very still and I can count on one hand all the times we’ve been here before, standing at the precipice of almost and staring down into the abyss of what-if.