Page 23 of Shaped to Be Yours

“The work or the boredom?”

“Train’s leaving in five minutes!” she deflected, meaning her Elantra.

Supposedly, some people could use tedious tasks to help clear their heads and refocus. I hoped that was true for me, but I was more struck by déjà vu when we finally pulled up to the school and parked in the staff lot. It had been years since I’d been here. Even with Mom working here every day of my life, it wasn’t as if I’d visited after moving on to higher grades.

Yes, it looked smaller than I remembered. I was two feet shorter back then! But the real slap of nostalgia was thesmell. Not a bad smell, necessarily, but hard to pin down. Maybe books, steel from the lockers, preteen hormones, but damn, did it bring me back to being twelve, confident and fearless that I would do something monumental with my life and make my mother proud.

Fucking childhood optimism.

“You’ll be using Nancy’s desk. You remember Nancy,” Mom said as she led me into the office. I hadn’t spent much time in here as a kid. No, I’d saved my detention for middle and high school, where my mother wouldn’t be sitting at the front desk when I came in.

It was eerie being in the building when it was mostly empty. Summer school wasn’t much of a thing pre-sixth grade. There were two main desks when entering the office. More like one giant desk that had a section take out in the middle to allow people to get to the farther back desks and the doors to the vice principal and principal’s offices and school nurse. The current receptionist, Nancy, was usually on the left, but it worked out that I could help with summer tasks, because she was on some anniversary cruise with her husband. Mom sat at the desk on the right, and the two back ones were generally empty during the summer.

After Mom explained what she needed me to do, the boredom was real not twenty minutes in. Filing and data entry were my kryptonite. I needed sun. Fresh air. Space to run. I had been called a golden retriever long before anything canine was a literal part of my body chemistry. The monotony did start to clear my head, but instead of career path options, all I could think about was…

Glowing eyes in the dark.

In the trees.

Teeth.

Pain—

Patchouli slapped me in the face, overtaking the book, locker, and hormone smell for what felt likeminutesbefore I heard footsteps announcing someone approaching the office.

“Good. You’re here.” A man, maybe early to mid-30s, in a business suit and no tie with the air of a car salesman about him, strode in and didn’t give any greeting or introduction before saying, “It seems I need to express my concerns in person to get concrete answers about next year’s enrollment.”

He had addressed my mother, and one glance at her told me she knew exactly who this was and was already aggravated by his arrival. I vaguely recognized him, certain I’d seen him around before—it was a small town—but I wouldn’t have been able to guess from where.

“I think it perfectly reasonable to demand that all enrollments be available for public viewing—”

“Mr. McPherson.” My mom held up a hand to stop him which, according to her, was an exceptionally rude gesture that should only ever be used on rude people. “As I explained in my emails and over the phone, student directory informationispublicly available—”

“But parents have the option to opt out!” he interrupted back. “How can I be certain whether my daughter will be safe nextsemester, if some monster family decides to wait until day one of the school year to be upfront about enrolling one of their spawn?”

I snorted. Spawn? Seriously?

McDickhole ignored me and focused on Mom.

“As I have explained,” she said again, “it is district policy—”

“I came here on my lunch break,” he blew right over her, slamming his hands on the desktop, which made my hackles raise because this was no longer funny, “and you still won’t answer my concerns directly?”

The way he was so clearly blowing off that he’d already communicated with her multiple times andhadreceived direct answers was starting to piss me off.

“They have thatoneregistered at the high school, despite the scandal already about human children licking its skin to get high.”

“What?” I choked on another laugh, because, okay, that was funny again.

“Mr. McPherson—” my mom was a paragon of patience “—as we’ve discussed, that rumor was proven false—”

“Propaganda,” he dismissed. “There are two known monsters who will be attending the middle school as well. At least that information was made available to me.”

“Because those parents chose to leave the information public—”

“It shouldn’t matter what the parents think if there is danger involved!”

“Then it shouldn’t matter what you think if there isn’t any.”

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