Page 4 of Mate

“I don’t, actually,” I assured her as we flip-flopped to the car. “I don’t need a guy. They’re needy and smelly.”

“So are the other girls in your dorm,” she noted as she got into my car. “One of them smells like old oatmeal. I have no idea what that’s about. Maybe you should talk to her about it. Maybe it’s a medical condition.”

We both laughed. Certainly, the worst part about college was that Macy no longer lived with me. She lived five hours away, and this was the first time we’d actually gotten to spend time with each other since school started. Sure, when I lived at home, she was always stealing my clothes and going through my stuff, but we had somehow gotten the same sense of humor, and that sense of humor was type rare.

“Alright, so we did shopping, the coffee, a party, then we did love spells, we’re going for ice cream, and then what?” I asked, my car turning onto a street and almost hitting a coyote.

I honked and then looked at my sister, who shrugged and said, “It was still wolves I heard earlier. I stand by my statement.”

“Hm.” I skeptically glanced at her out of the corner of my eyes. “It’s hard being wrong. That’s okay.”

An hour later, we were parking much further away from the college than I wanted to, eating ice cream as we made the half-mile trek back to my dorm. “That’s sort of the problem with these parking lots,” I groaned as I stabbed into a frozen gummy bear. “As soon as you leave, some fucker comes and steals your space, and now we’re walking through Coyoteville in the middle of the night in the light of a creepy moon.” I gestured to the moon above us. It wasn’t as creepy and red as it had been earlier, but it was still looking pretty intense up there. We could certainly see where we were going.

“I know, it’s pretty awesome,” Macy said, then frowned as she poked her own ice cream candy. “You know, gummi bears always seem like they’d be a good idea… But then they get all hard and gross as soon as they hit the ice cream. I don’t know why I can’t seem to learn from this mistake, and I have to make it over and over again.”

“Yeah.” I poked around the cookie dough. “The cookie part’s pretty good.”

“Yeah, it makes me wonder why we don’t just get the cookie dough and not get the ice cream at all,” she hummed, shrugging her slight shoulders.

“Because, Mace, you have to earn it,” I promptly said with mocking firmness. We giggled around our spoons for a second, and then we heard a growl.

It wasn’t a chihuahua growl. It was the type of growl that you felt right in your legs. We both stopped when we heard it and slowly turned our bodies toward the direction of the sound.

There were two of the biggest fucking dogs I had ever seen in my life. They weren’t drooly dogs; they were fluffy, and normally that was the part I liked most about dogs, but there really wasn’t anything about these particular ones that I found any joy in.

One was ahead of the other, but the second dog in the back was even bigger and meaner looking. His teeth were bared at both of us while the dog closest to us seemed alert but watchful. Despite the growling, I didn’t feel like he was going to attack. The front dog looked at us, and then eventually lowered his butt to the ground and looked at me. The other dog stepped up, sniffed in our direction, and then watched.

We studied each other for at least a minute, maybe even two, and then my sister said in a small whisper, leaning carefully towards me, “Kaci?”

“Yeah?” I whispered.

“Those are wolves.” She pointed at them. “Bigfucking wolves.”

“It’s a possibility,” I allowed quietly, still not taking my eyes off the wolves. “Hey, you go right on ahead. Walk carefully…” I added, and I was internally thinking how brave I was. It was possible that I would be up for a sister-of-the-year award, letting my sister easily escape the wolves while I stood bravely in front of her. “I’m going to follow you very, very slowly.”

“No!” she hissed back like that was the stupidest idea I’d ever had. “You don’t know anything about wolves, you’re just gonna do something dumb!”

I turned to her. “Who the shit are you? Steve-Fucking-Irwin? Who died and made you the expert?”

The wolves began to growl again, and we whipped our bodies back towards them and looked much more properly intimidated; although we were still holding onto our ice creams, because there was a chance that they were going to go away. “Maybe they’re guys in a wolf-suit,” I said as I stared at them.

There was something amuck about these wolves, I decided, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. And my face was feeling hot. Probably because of the traumatic fear. I had a lot of emotions right now.

“That is no less terrifying,” assured Macy, who was slowly backing up now.

The wolves growled again, both of them, and moved closer.

“Nope, I don’t think it’s a wolf suit,” I decided, looking at the moon glinting off the wet teeth and the golden eyes.

“I think we should run for it.” Macy said this very decidedly as she slowly pulled off her flipflops, and it made me very nervous.

“We should not run.” I glanced to my right and realized she was going to anyway. “Macy!” I hissed. “We’re not running!”

“We’re fast,” she whispered quietly. She and I had inwardly and simultaneously decided that the wolves in front of us wouldn’t understand our plans if we whispered them loudly. Talking was out. “It’s only a quarter mile. We can make it. These wolves weren’t all-star hurdle runners,” she said, like this was at all relevant information. She was so confident that under any other circumstances, I would have been completely willing to risk it.

“No, because they’re wolves. They do that naturally!” I assured her as quietly as I could, but before I could further protest, she threw her ice cream at one of the wolves and turned heel and ran. “Fuck!” I said, doing the exact same thing, losing my own flipflops very quickly during the process.

“Run! Run!” Macy screamed shrilly as she ran, which wasn’t helpful. I was already going as fast as I could without shoes on. It was only concrete, yet it felt like everything under me was sharp. My sister had stopped as soon as she reached the stairway to my dorm, probably because she’d decided that we were playing ‘floor is lava’ and not ‘run for your life’.

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