Wild Child
You teach kindergarten. You work with children eight hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year, and you have done this for the past eight years — you know when one of them is a werewolf.
The signs are all there: The inability to sit still. The ferocious irritation caused by too-tight clothing or the approach of inclement weather. The fur and the fangs and the tail. All red flags.
It isn’t that she’s a bad kid, you tell your coworkers, your bartender, your mom. During new moons especially, you can see her be curious and silly and kind. She likes to bring in show-and-tells of things she finds in the woods at night, owl-pellets and luminescent moss and animal bones cleaned white as snow. She is the first to rush over to a crying friend and lay her head on their shoulder. She loves to run and climb and leap. Her laugh is infectious and loud.
For most of the month, however, it’s like she’s winding up to an explosion. Slowly, she starts to swipe more, snap more, lean her head out the window and howl more. The full moon itself makes you reconsider every life choice you’ve ever made up to this point. You sit in your room at the end of those days, staring at the upturned tables and the heads of decapitated dolls. You know you should begin the cleanup, but you have no idea where to start.
You try to talk to her parents, but they don’t want to hear it. These are proper people, country club people, trace-their-ancestors-back-to-the-Mayflower people. They do not have werewolves in their family. You show your boss the claw marks that now score your walls and tables, the monkey bar she snapped with her jaws like a snack-time pretzel. You bring in the mangled rabbit she dragged in from the playground and toss it floppily onto his desk. He looks up with what seems to be genuine sadness. It’s a real shame, I know, he says. But we simply don’t have the money for supports.
Day after day in the classroom, “the worst it can get” redefines itself on the hour. No one can get near her without her ears going flat, her teeth coming out. Any lesson you try to give her winds up scattered across the floor in shreds. One day she grabs your assistant by the pantleg and shakes it back and forth with an almost joyful abandon. When you finally pry her jaws away, your assistant quits on the spot. You replace one hamster and then another before giving up on a class pet entirely.
You alternate between raging, artless attempts at authority and withered, hopeless surrender. One day you are yelling at her to stop, just stop, STOP, and the next you can do nothing but sit there as she rips the stuffing from the pillows in the Cozy Corner.
Finally, one day at recess, you see her playing tag with some other kids. You know that something is coming — running like that never tires her out, only winds her up more and more — and then it does. One of the boys, chasing, grabs her by the tail and pulls. She turns on him, furious and startled, and rakes her bright claws across his face. You snap. NO! you snarl, and the sound is so ferocious, that for once, you seem to be speaking the same language. You rush to the aid of the other child, seeing when you scoop him up that the wound is superficial, just a scrape. Still, the boy is wailing, stinging and surprised and scared. You look and see your wolf-girl cowering by the swings, her face pushed low and buried in her paws. She is whimpering, shaking, and you realize with a sinking feeling that she knows what she has done. She has made someone cry when she only wanted to play, and the knowledge of this has shocked her and broken her small heart.
You open your arms for your wolf-girl and she slips into them, gasping for breath. You hold both of these crying children, completely clueless as to what to do next, and softly, you start to cry too.
That night you go home and open a bottle of wine. You spend a few solid hours lying motionless on the floor, and it is during this time that you realize you are simply out of options: If you want things to get better, you will have to figure it out for yourself. The care of this young werewolf has been entrusted to no one but you. It is up to you to help her, because if you do not, who will? You have not been trained for any of this, and you will not have anyone’s help. It is an absolutely impossible job.
You cannot do it.
You have to anyway.
You turn to the internet. Every spare minute you have, you are reading books and articles. You compile a list of tips and techniques, things that someone somewhere claimed worked with their werewolves, sometimes. A few are actually proven, but most just seem to be theories. You consider yourself a fairly progressive educator, but some of them seem a little hippie-dippy, even for you. You swallow your pride on these ones. You are determined to try them all.
To help her concentrate in class, you buy some noise-cancelling headphones, ones strong enough to block the construction she can hear three blocks up. You buy nose plugs to filter out all the distracting smells that you and the rest of your students are unaware even exist. At the butcher, you buy some lamb bones that she can gnaw on to focus during circle time. All of this comes out of your pocket. You start a GoFundMe that nobody gives to.
More than anything, you work on her anger, a rage that can come on so swiftly and strongly, it is clearly beyond her control. Time and again, you pull her away during some altercation with a friend. You attempt to calm her down, to name and understand her feelings. I can see that you are angry, you say, as she snarls and spits and tries to claw her way over your shoulder. You feel like a goddamn idiot. You do breathing exercises — smell a pawful of flowers, blow the houses down. When she is finally settled, you talk to her about how to solve her problems with her friends. Her first answer is always Eat them, and you work your way down from there.
There are times when you feel, truly, that you are at war with this little wolf. For every new helpful item or idea you introduce, she finds a way to destroy or misuse or ignore it. You have to keep coming back at her again and again and again, and you can tell that she gets as mad at you as you often get at her. Claws are not for scratching! you yell, nineteen times a day. Yes they are! she insists, and takes a swipe at you just to prove it. When you have to pull her aside to go over problem-solving, yet again, she stomps her paws and covers her ears and growls that she knows, she knows! She is trying, you come to realize.
She is trying oh so hard.
One day, when you have both just about had it with each other — her snarling and foaming and barking at you; you, pretty much, doing the same right back — you haul her to the gym and tell her to go ahead! To make an absolute scene if she wants to! To run and scrape and claw! You tell her to let it out, to haul off and howl as loud as she possibly can.
She does.
Really, you had no idea.
You reach the end of your rope with her time and time again. Your boss tells you to practice self-care, that at times like these, it’s important to be kind and nurturing to yourself. You are as lost about how to do this as you are about everything else. You grow to be on a first name basis with the guy who owns your liquor store. You once again start smoking. You are not a hero. You read online about the successes of your friends. The debut novels. The houses and families. The Whatever-under-Whatever, youngest vice-presidents, etc. You hear people on the subway complaining about their office jobs. You think about how soothing it sounds to sit in a shallow cubicle and type numbers into a computer.
It is after months and months of this that, finally, you witness a miracle. That same little boy from earlier, all the lessons of that previous day forgotten, once again pulls her tail while they are playing tag. You see her yellow eyes go actually red with fury. You watch the arc of fur along her spine stand straight up. You see her whirl. Her name is in your throat. And then, just like that, paw hanging in midair mere inches from his face, you see her curl her claws back in. You hear her explain to this little boy that pulling her tail really hurts, and that she’d like it if he could, in the future, please not do that. The little boy says sorry, and the two of them return to their game.
Your heart.
It is another small miracle that it doesn’t actually explode.
This is not the end of your troubles, yours or your wolf-girl’s. It is nowhere near as simple as smooth sailing after this. The very next day, in fact, another girl steps on her tail and she rips the sequin pattern on her flip shirt straight off. But it is, in a word, better. It is not as bad as it was.
With both of you fighting for it every inch of the way, by the end of the year, she has learned to read, to do some basic addition, to hold a pencil with her finger pads instead of a whole closed paw. On the day of her kindergarten graduation, she runs up to you after the ceremony and gives you a gigantic hug. You put your hands on her shoulders, breathe with her until she’s looking you steadily in the eye. You wait until she can really hear you, and you tell her, I’m so proud of you. She laughs that huge, contagious laugh and then walks off with her family, tail-wagging, snapping at butterflies. As a gift, her parents have given you a five-dollar Starbucks gift card, on which your name is misspelled.
You wonder, on the train that night, who her teacher will be next year. You wonder if you should write them a note, give them links to all your werewolf resources. You hope that at least some of the things you worked on will survive three months of not being worked at all. You hope that whoever has her next will be better at this job than you.
You spend the summer sleeping in and going for long, long runs.
You try to give up smoking again.
You wonder what September will bring.
Derek Heckman was born in Peoria, Illinois, and holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Montana. His work has been featured in Embark Journal, The Collapsar, Furious Gazelle, Not Deer Mag, Ellipsis Zine, Milk Candy Review, The Sissy Fuss, and Wigleaf. He currently lives and teaches in Maryland. You can find him making greatly underappreciated jokes on Twitter as @herekdeckman
