Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(6)
Claire splits open a college catalogue, one of two dozen she has stacked in a leaning pile. She has shot off hundreds of emails, it seems like, requesting information from admissions offices. This is her senior year and she is planning her escape, hunting for something other than the eternal cold, the Friday fish fries, the polka music and pine-paneled, steel-roofed taverns northern Wisconsin has to offer.
She makes notes in a yellow legal tablet about tuition, class size, acceptance rate, student population, renowned programs, touristy info about the town or city, and—of course—distance from home. Distance being one of her priorities. She doesn’t care how strong the English Department is at Macalester College—if the school is within five hundred miles of home, she isn’t interested.
It is not as though she comes from a broken home, an unloving family. Her mother is a bit of a scold. Her father spanked her—once, when she was little more than a toddler—for wandering out of their house, their yard, and down the street. The two of them bray constantly about politics and rarely take her on vacation to anyplace other than Wisconsin Dells. Otherwise, she is lucky, even spoiled. She knows this. But she also knows—has known since she was a child, her head buried in a book—that she craves something more, almost like a taste filling her mouth, spreading through her body, into her very marrow, the deepest part of her. Adventure. The kind that cannot be found here, in this wooded hamlet, where the pines are thick and the lakes are clear and cheese is never far from hand.
Palm trees would be nice. She imagines reading a textbook on a white sand beach running up against water as blue as the antique bottles her mother keeps lined up on the bathroom windowsill.
The lamplight burnishes the catalogues with a golden color. She flips through them once for the pictures, again for the information, the way some of her friends work their way through fashion magazines. She is a sucker for the pictures. The clock towers, the brickwork paths, the sunlit campus lawns. Celebrity speakers standing before packed auditoriums. Dark-wooded libraries aglow with light streaming through stained-glass windows. Shirtless boys in hemp necklaces tossing Frisbees. Thick-necked mud-splattered girls chasing each other on rugby fields. Circles of students sitting under elm trees with their laptops and notepads open while an oddly dressed, wild-haired professor stands over them. The sight of them warms her belly with a feeling not so different from hunger.
Some schools, she notes, advertise the percentage of lycans, the support groups, the dorms and fraternities and sororities, and others do not. Somewhere in her pile is a William Archer catalogue. Her parents are alums of the university—and though her father hasn’t insisted she apply, he has brought it up several times, what a remarkable experience he had there, how they offer legacy scholarships, how safe and comfortable she would feel surrounded by her own kind. “Especially in these difficult times,” he said.
She isn’t interested. As it is, she hangs out with too many lycans. Her parents are always hosting meetings and potlucks—and most of the people who come are like them: obsessive, always slamming their fists into their palms, speaking in earnest, almost pleading voices about how unfairly lycans are treated, how U.S. troops remain in the Lupine Republic only to maintain control of the uranium reserves. How things must change. She gets it. She does. But they’re always so violently leftist, and sometimes she wants to argue with them—point out how the Republic’s leadership actually supports the U.S. role in extracting fuel and maintaining order, how only a select group of extremist lycans seem upset about the occupation—but she never feels educated enough to speak and doesn’t want to rile them up further.
And she wouldn’t mind talking about other things too, like, you know, her favorite episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or how Mike Romm has sewer breath or how she can see the defined bulge of Mr. Bronson’s crotch when he wears his khakis in AP Calculus. Or whatever. She doesn’t particularly like being a lycan. Her parents would hate to hear her say that, but it’s true. The duality of the condition makes her feel sometimes split in two, as if she is at war with herself. Life is easier when that part of her remains dormant, neglected.
And though William Archer is located in Montana, outside Missoula, and satisfies her five-hundred-mile-radius requirement, the campus sits at the top of a bowl-like valley walled in by mountains, and—for the next four years, at least—she is done with cold. She is staring at the window as she thinks this, staring at the feathery snow dancing past it, and then her eyes focus on the nearer distance, where her reflection hangs in the glass.
She looks pale in the window and knows that the color in her face, the tan she has worked so hard on over the summer—smearing her skin with baby oil when she mows the lawn, when she water-skis at Loon Lake or sunbathes on the rocks that ring its shore—will soon drain from her skin as the clouds pile up in the sky, as she mummifies herself with hats and scarves and coats to scare away the wind that comes whistling down from Canada.
Again, the beach comes to mind, the white sand beach. She is sprawled out on a red towel that matches her painted toenails and the stripes running across her peppermint bikini. Her belly is as tan and flat as a pancake. Her nose is sugared with the freckles the sun brings out of it. She has set her textbook aside because a man—a lean, muscled, shirtless man with a black shock of hair—is walking toward her with a picnic basket full of wine and strawberries and chocolate. This is Raúl, her boyfriend. They will meet in a freshman honors seminar and will make love for the first time in a hammock strung between two palm trees. His skin will taste like salt and his smile will be as white as the meat of a coconut.