Micah pulled away from Zeke and looked him dead in the eye. His eyes were swirling with color, all greys and blues and browns, greens, and golds, alight from within.

“You mean to tell me you’ve thought about this?” Micah asked.

“Well...I didn’t mean to tell you,” Zeke admitted. “But I appear to have done just that.” Zeke flushed dark under the moonlight and shifted uncomfortably.

“For how long?” Micah demanded.

“Um... since our first swim meet.”

“In tenth grade?!”

“Uh...yes.”

Micah dropped his hands in exasperation and turned away, caught between laughing and screaming with frustration. How stupid could they both be? He turned back around to find Zeke looking pained and ashamed, and the laugh won over the scream.

“Me too,” Micah told him. “Eleventh grade, but close enough.”

“Really?” Zeke asked.

“Really.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Why didn’t you?” Micah shot back.

“I....” Zeke stopped short as a twig snapped somewhere in the woods beside them. “I think we better finish this conversation in town.”

“Agreed.” Micah quickly refilled the gas tank with the spare fuel, capped it, and started the quad up again. Zeke anchored himself securely against Micah, and they sped onto Herschel highway and away from whatever lurked in the dark. Zeke’s body pressed to his, his confession ringing in Micah’s head, the taste of him lingering on Micah’s lips. It all felt like a dream come true; but Micah couldn’t help but wonder if it was just the adrenaline talking. If it was nothing more than the rush of being alive when he expected to die, the heady intoxication of an honest to God adventure, that had moved him to behave that way. Zeke could be extremely impulsive. If he hadn’t acted on his feelings in the last ten years, how could Micah be sure that those feelings had really been there? Could Zeke be giving weight to an aesthetic appreciation in retrospect, now that his emotions were heightened? Adrenaline was a hell of a drug, he reminded himself.

It was just after one thirty in the morning when he pulled the quad up to park behind Zeke’s truck. He unloaded their things into the truck, then he and Zeke loaded Zeke’s new toy into the truck bed. It felt surreal, being back in their usual surroundings after everything that happened.

“I’ll drive,” Micah said.

“You’ve been driving,” Zeke argued.

“How are you gonna start the truck, Zeke?”

Zeke glanced down at his useless right arm and sighed. “Alright, you drive.”

A gum wrapper fell out of the truck as Micah opened the driver side door, a physical remnant of the ride over here. Two days of forever ago, back when he was mildly frustrated and mostly content, when life was still relatively normal. He stared at the scrap of trash for a full minute before shaking himself and climbing into the truck.

“You good?” Zeke asked.

“Yep,” Micah said shortly. “Just intensely weirded out.”

Zeke laughed. “That’s the feeling,” he said. “I’ve been trying to put a name to it.”

“Yep, that’s the one,” Micah grinned. “Intense weirdness.”

“Which hospital are you headed to?” Zeke asked.

Micah half-turned, surprised, then pulled his eyes back to the road. “Not going to a hospital, Zeke.”

“What? Why? I might need surgery on my shoulder, and we definitely need tetanus shots.”

“We might,” Micah admitted. “But look, if we go to the doctor we’ll have to report an animal attack. They’ll identify the marks. Next thing you know, there’ll be a witch hunt, we’ll be isolated if we’re lucky, imprisoned or shot if we’re not. I don’t want that.”

“I don’t either, but I sure as hell don’t want to die or lose my arm.”

“Which is why we’re going to go see my mom,” Micah said firmly. “She’s a doctor, and she knows things.”

“Well yeah, she’s a smart lady, but....”

“About this,” Micah interrupted. “She knows about werewolf stuff, Zeke. We’ll have to wait till morning to talk to her, but your shoulder doesn’t seem to be bothering you too badly. Think you’ll last till dawn?”

Zeke shrugged with his good shoulder. “It doesn’t hurt too much, you’re right, but...wait, dawn? Why?”

“Why do you think?” Micah asked suggestively.

“Is she working a night shift?” Zeke asked, frowning in confusion.

“She never works night shifts during the full moon,” Micah said, willing him to understand.

“Then why...oh! She’s not...is she?”

“A werewolf? Why no! But she’s real close to someone who is,” Micah said with a grin.

“Then who? And why did I never know this?”

“It’s not exactly something we talk about openly,” Micah said wryly. “I must have been about twelve, I think. My dad’s a big hiker, likes to hunt and fish too, so he was always out doing something on the weekends. Usually he’d take us with him, but this one weekend I was really sick so my mom stayed home with me. He went out...didn’t come back for a week. When he finally did, he looked deathly ill. Took my mom into the bedroom, and they had this huge fight. I figured he cheated on her or something while he was gone. I was sure they were going to get a divorce...but after that, everything seemed fine. I asked about it a few times, but she brushed me off. Then, when I was sixteen, I got my driver’s license.”

“I remember. That’s when we all started going and doing things.”

“Yep, every weekend, just like my dad. Except for the weekends that happened to align with the full moon. She tried to be subtle about it at first, but pattern recognition is my thing, and I called her on it. That’s when she told me about the werewolves. Didn’t take long for me to put two and two together.”

“So, your dad’s a werewolf?” Zeke asked, sounding shocked.

“He is.”

“He seems so nice! And really, really passive.”

“He’s that too,” Micah said earnestly. “Being a werewolf doesn’t require a particular personality type or anything. It’s just something that happens to you. It isn’t a moral judgment or anything. The point is, my mom will know what to do about it. She just won’t be able to until she’s done babysitting my dad for the evening.”

“Sounds dangerous,” Zeke said doubtfully. “Isn’t she afraid she’ll get bit?”

“I figure she’s got some way of protecting herself,” Micah shrugged. “She refused to give me details, but she wouldn’t be around him if she didn’t have some way to keep his mouth off of her.”

“Lucky for you she didn’t always feel that way,” Zeke smirked.

“Ha, you’re funny,” Micah said sarcastically.

They drove on for another two hours until finally pulling off the highway into the little valley where they grew up. Micah’s parents still lived out here in Dogshead, an isolated little suburb of Copernicus, Nevada. The houses were arranged in a horseshoe on one side of the dry lake, and a ranch took up the horseshoe of land on the other side. Micah had loved growing up out here. It always seemed so wild, a breath away from an adventure. Zeke had lived out here off and on, which had enabled them to forge a friendship despite Zeke’s unstable home life.

“Does your dad still live out here?” Micah asked.

“As far as I know,” Zeke said with a shrug. “I haven’t talked to him for a few years.”

“Do your brothers talk to him?”

“Yeah, I think so. They give me updates occasionally. Guess his brain’s going faster than ever. Probably have to be in a home or something soon.”

“We could go see him tomorrow if you want to,” Micah suggested, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Or we could shoot ourselves in the foot,” Zeke replied in the same tone. “It would be more fun, and more productive.”

“That bad, still, huh?”

“Look, Micah, he thinks I stole my mom’s face. He calls me by her name. I couldn’t deal with it then, and I’m sure as hell not going to subject myself to it now. Drop it, alright?”

“Alright, alright, I’m sorry,” Micah said. “I just think you’d be happier if you had some closure.”

“The only closure I need is stitches in my shoulder,” Zeke said irritably. “I don’t want him in my life. I don’t need him in my life. As far as I’m concerned, the only people living in this valley that I know are your parents. Got it?”

“Yep.” Micah let it lie, and pulled off the main road into his parents’ neighborhood. The headlights reflected off walls of sparkling white stucco and red-clay roofs. The little Spanish-inspired neighborhood was in striking juxtaposition to every other neighborhood in the valley. The developer had cut out eight square miles for these houses and poured foundations and had given up the project after building only three hundred cookie-cutter, middle-class palaces. He hadn’t understood the flavor of Dogshead. He’d assumed that if he built them, they would come; they, in this case, meaning the upper-middle class. Only problem was, the sort of people who could afford what he was selling didn’t want to live in the middle of nowhere on the edge of a smelly salt flat. They certainly hadn’t wanted to live around those people. It took a special kind of freak to build a life out there. Dogshead was for the misfits, the losers, and the tired old men.

The houses had stood empty for years, even though he dropped the prices lower and lower. Finally, after bottoming out, he had been able to fill two-thirds of the houses he’d built. Rumor had it, he’d lost money on the land and foundations. Whatever the case, it had worked out well for Micah and his family. Their house was backed up against the miles of empty foundations, rows of deep ditches, and occasional concrete tubes, which Micah and his friends had immediately turned into their own personal skate park and BMX track. The long summer days in the boring little suburb were made tolerable by the clutter of failed investments.

The house was dark and quiet, as he had expected it to be. He used his spare key to let them in, and led Zeke down the hall to his childhood bedroom. It had been converted into an office, but his parents kept a futon in there for him, which he appreciated. Even though he’d moved out ten years before, he found himself in need of a reprieve every few months or so. His mother had always been his anchor, his voice of reason when he got too caught up in minutiae. He inhaled deeply, breathing in the scents of home that he had not yet been able to replicate in his own house.

“Futon or couch?” He asked Zeke, pointing to both pieces of furniture in the room.

“I’ll take the couch,” Zeke said quickly.

Micah made up the futon and couch, yawning.

“Tired already?” Zeke asked. “You literally slept all day.”

“Then drove all night,” he pointed out. “You can watch TV or get online if you want. I need to get some sleep.”

Micah rolled onto the futon and hugged his pillow, watching Zeke out of half-closed eyes. Zeke sat, then stood, then sat down again. He inhaled sharply as if he were about to say something, then let the breath out wordlessly. He did that a few times, then paced the room.

“Something on your mind?” Micah asked.

“Maybe.”

“Something you want to talk about?”

“Uh....”

“Speak! You’re driving me nuts.” Micah propped himself up on one elbow with his chin in his hand and gave Zeke a hard look.

Zeke sat down heavily with a sigh. “I’m sorry,” he blurted out finally.

“For?”

“That...back when we had to fill up. I shouldn’t have. I mean...I feel like a thirteen-year-old girl right now, saying this, but...you’re my best friend. I don’t want to fuck that up. So...I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, bro, no big deal. It’s all good.” Micah’s heart split in two and splashed into his belly, but he knew Zeke was right. Wasn’t Micah just thinking the same thing a couple of days ago? There were some lines that shouldn’t be crossed if they wanted to remain friends, and that was one of them. Zeke shot a searching glance in his direction, and Micah pasted on a reassuring smile. “We’re good,” he said. “Relax. Take a nap or something. Mom’ll be back in a few hours to patch us up. You’re going to want to be rested for that. She’s a real piece of work first thing in the morning after a full moon.”

Zeke smiled back at him, kicked off his shoes, and fell back on the couch. Mission accomplished, Micah fell immediately into an exhausted sleep.