The Wisconsin Werewolf Read online

  Then in high school, Miranda dated the captain of the varsity football team. After that boy cheated on her, she moved on to the captain of the varsity basketball team. Once she hit her junior year of high school, she started dating college guys, to our father’s dismay. Then once she hit college, Miranda graduated from the land of dating arrogant jocks. She next went through a phase of dating artistic types. There was Russell the painter, Jack the singer, and Trevor the writer.

  I detested Trevor more than anyone else, even more than the monster who ate all my double-stuff Oreos. When Miranda would occasionally bring Trevor home, he would constantly make negative remarks about fiction writers not being overtly creative. He enjoyed bragging that he was bound for a successful career as a sportswriter because that was more practical than writing fiction. Considering I mostly wrote fantasy and young adult novels or short stories, Trevor’s comments irked me to no end. Luckily, I went off to college and avoided having to see or hear from Trevor. After a few months, Miranda broke up with him to give Jack the singer another chance. But he and Miranda eventually broke up just as his crappy band did. Jack then left for London to pursue a solo singing career while breaking Miranda’s heart in the process. I could never remember to look Jack up on the internet to see if the dork ever did make it famous. My guess is probably not; his band was awful with their sappy love songs that lacked lyrical creativity.

  Miranda stared at me in horror as Matt looked to be resisting a smirk.

  “Everly! Apologize!” Miranda scolded me hotly. I resisted rolling my eyes for such a dumb scolding. Miranda never quite treated her siblings as equals growing up. She always thought of herself as the big sister constantly looking after younger siblings. It didn’t matter how old Simon and I became; we would always be her baby brother and sister that she needed to be a mother hen to. Still, she didn’t need to talk to me as if I were twelve and not twenty-one.

  “I’d apologize if I wasn’t accurate.”

  “We didn’t exactly get off on the right foot,” Matt explained mildly to Miranda.

  My eyes widened. “Is that what you call being a judgmental ass for no good reason?”

  Matt smiled at me, amused. “I was realistic. You won’t last a full month in the department. There’s no point in training you.”

  I threw my hands up in exasperation as I looked to my sister. I wanted to be mad, but the jerk was assisting in proving my point.

  Miranda looked at me with confusion. “Are you bad at the job, Ev?”

  My face fell as I realized that Miranda was already siding with the new boyfriend and not her own sister. I was far used to this behavior, but typically my sister dated guys longer than a week before she showcased her disloyalty to her own family.

  “What? No! I just started today! He didn’t want to train me because he doesn’t think I can handle the job.” My voice was becoming annoyingly squeaky and high, what it usually did when I was mad.

  “There’s never been a female that’s lasted,” explained Matt calmly. His eyes never left mine. He looked to be enjoying our verbal squabbling.

  “You have got to be the biggest ass-hat I have ever encountered!” I replied hotly.

  “If that’s the best comeback you have, then I think you’re proving my point that you won’t last. The other guys will eat you alive in comebacks alone.”

  “Stop arguing!” I snarled.

  “I’m not arguing. We’re merely having a discussion, and you’re getting defensive,” said Matt. It was annoying how calm he was while he could clearly tell he was getting under my skin. The hint of a smile tugged at the corner of his lips.

  “I am not getting defensive!” I said while stupidly feeling quite defensive.

  “Well, you wouldn’t be talking so loud and your voice wouldn’t be so squeaky if that were true,” Matt replied lazily.

  Miranda looked rather awkward as she looked between the two of us. “We should probably get going,” she said sheepishly, obviously wanting to defuse the escalating situation. She awkwardly looked between Matt and me as we glared at each other. Standing from the couch, she ushered him to follow her. Nothing more was said. I stomped my way out of the room as the two of them headed out the front door.

  Showering didn’t help soothe my already damaged nerves. I only became sourer as I thought about my traitor sister dating someone I now deemed my proverbial nemesis.

  I joined Simon later for frozen pizza and Netflix binging. We had made it through an entire hour of The Office before Simon finally spoke.

  “So, our big sis is out dating and you’re sitting here watching TV with your baby brother.”

  I ignored him and continued watching the not-stellar plot play out on TV. I didn’t need my little brother to remind me I didn’t have friends in this town. We both knew that all of mine resided back in sunny California and we only kept in touch via social media. That was probably the sole reason Simon and I had taken to doing anything and everything together as of late. We were both near outcasts in this small Wisconsin town. Simon had at least made a few friends after starting school last month. I hadn’t been as lucky with a few months of working at the resort. “I feel your pain. I don’t have a date, either,” said Simon with a serious nod.

  I resisted rolling my eyes. I knew he was attempting to be sincere, but I didn’t want sincere pity from a teenager. “I don’t care that she’s dating and I’m not,” I explained before taking a bite of pizza. I considered my words as I chewed slowly. “I care that yet again she sides with a guy she barely knows instead of her own sibling.”

  “I know the feeling,” he snorted in agreement. “Remember Jack the singer? Miranda still doesn’t believe me when I say he stole my lucky sock.”

  I wanted to argue against the stupidity of such a comment, but Simon may have been right. There had been a bright gleam in Jack’s eye when Simon had one day exclaimed how his lucky sock helped him win basketball games as well as ace his tests. Jack seemed gullible enough to believe such a tale, so I was on the fence as to whether or not Simon was right and Jack stole his “lucky” sock one day in a bid to get good luck on his solo career. I really needed to remember to do an internet search on the guy.

  “I think I want to quit working at the hotel,” I admitted quietly.

  “Because of one idiot?” snorted Simon. “Because of one bad day? Don’t be a baby. If Matt thinks you can’t hold your own, prove him wrong.”

  It was easier said than done. The next few days at work were challenging. Not only was I trying to prove myself capable of a job I had no experience in, but I wasn’t hitting it off with the rest of my new coworkers. I couldn’t relate to any of the boys except Darren, but he was rarely seen at the convention center given we had different schedules. I worked mornings, he worked nights. It was lonely not having him or anyone to talk to for eight-hour workdays, but there was nothing to say to my other coworkers given I had nothing in common with any of them. We didn’t listen to the same music or watch the same shows. Cale listened to eighties hair bands and Terrance listened to Nirvana and Radiohead. Not one of the boys seemed to listen to music from this generation except for Jamie and Chaz, but even with them, it was only gangster rap where you could barely understand the inappropriate lyrics. The Hispanic boy named Nico avoided me like the plague, enough to the point it reminded me of my experience in kindergarten when this brat named Gary Smith told the entire class I had cooties.

  I got lucky that not one member of this tribe of boys called me Cootie Queen, but I still felt like that first day of kindergarten. Any conversations I started with the boys slowly came to a dead end once it was discovered how little we shared in common. There was nothing to talk about. The downside to not being able to bond with my new coworkers, it meant I didn’t have anyone to teach me the ropes of how this new job was supposed to be done properly. Perry, my new boss, was hardly around. He had briefly said hello to me the day before and asked how I was enjoying the department. It was a simple exchange of pleasantries where I di
dn’t gather the impression he genuinely cared whether or not I was enjoying myself. He was just being polite. Other than that, Perry was like a ghost at the job. Never seen but occasionally spoken of as few had seen him haunting random areas of the convention center from time to time. I was starting to wonder if the only way to summon my manager would be to separate myself from the group of boys so Perry could swoop in out of nowhere to scold me for not “staying with the group.”

  “I hate that place,” I said to myself as I came home the next afternoon. I was physically sore and mentally exhausted from the long day. It was a workout stacking chairs and continuously moving tables and chairs on large carts. My day was made worse knowing I had to go back at six tomorrow morning. My schedule had been bumped to six in the morning to two in the afternoon.

  “You’re home!” Simon exclaimed as soon as I opened the front door. This wasn’t a jubilant exclamation. He looked relieved. Before I could ask why my brother looked so very alarmed, Simon motioned for me to quickly follow him. “Get over here!”

  I followed him without asking questions. Simon ran around the foyer of the house to the back-door patio. He whipped it open and shot down the porch, barely paying attention if I was even following him. “What the heck, Simon?”

  “Just follow me!”

  I did as I was instructed, too tired from the long day to argue. Simon did not reveal anything as he hurried around the house. He was specifically going to the area in the back where my bedroom was located. Soon, I was staring up three floors at the highest point of the house, where my bedroom window was. “What are you going crazy about…” I trailed off mid-sentence. Before my eyes lying on the ground against the house was a very gory sight. My stomach clenched uncomfortably. Lying perched against the edge of the house was a torn-apart deer. It was a very gruesome sight and yet a familiar one. The carcass was that of a dead doe, its hind leg ripped off. The poor creature’s throat had been ripped open, as well as its belly. Guts and intestines leaked out, almost as if someone had worked on gutting the poor creature. There were a few flies swarming around the carcass. The only sounds that could be heard was the buzzing of the flies and nothing else. Simon and I said nothing as we stared at the horrid sight before us. The dead animal looked nearly identical to the one that had been killed by the monster animal in the woods the other night. It wasn’t the same deer; this one was bigger and uneaten.

  “I found it when I was going to start painting the second coat like Dad wanted,” said Simon weakly.

  I nodded dumbly. Our dad had called earlier in the week and told Simon that to earn his allowance he would have to paint the outside of the house before winter weather came in late November or December. Given our wealthy parents allowed Simon a hefty allowance when he completed chores, the teenager quickly obliged to our parents’ wishes. The house was becoming a brick red, a lovely color compared to the previous stone grey it held when Dad first purchased the house.

  “How long has it been out here?” I wondered aloud as I resisted covering my nose. There was a horrible decaying stench attached to the dead animal. There was no telling how long it had been rotting out here. I suspected a few days given the flies and maggots that were covering it.

  “That’s not what’s scaring me,” said Simon quietly. “You don’t think this looks very familiar, Ev?”

  “I know it does. But you don’t think…”

  I didn’t need to finish my sentence to find my brother nodding at me. “Yeah, I think the werewolf did it.”

  “We don’t know it’s a werewolf—”

  “How many other animals are going to expertly lay a dead deer down against our house?” interrupted Simon impatiently.

  I opened and closed my mouth a few times. I couldn’t find words to speak. As bizarre and utterly impossible as it seemed, my brother made a good point. The odds weren’t likely that a coyote had hunted this doe down and just happened to kill it against the side of the house. Say one did, after ripping it open, the same coyote didn’t eat the deer but merely left it gruesomely out in the open and propped it against our house?

  “So, the werewolf killed the deer and left it by our house? How would that make sense? Why would it do that?”

  Simon looked at the dead deer for a few moments longer before his frightened face turned back to me. “Maybe it’s like the bad guys in scary movies. Maybe, just maybe, the werewolf left it here to show us something.”

  I snorted. Part of me had to hand it to my younger brother, he had a knack for storytelling. His words held genuine certainty. He really believed what he was saying. Simon’s green eyes were even wide and fearful. If Simon put his imagination toward writing and not reading comic books and manga, I suspected he had the prospects of becoming a great writer. “And what would it want to show us?”

  Simon’s face was quite pale as he stared at me. It was as if he felt his thoughts should have been obvious to me. “It’s showing us that it knows where we live.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Simon’s declaration had me spooked the rest of the night. I had waved off his ridiculous notion and told him to stop saying stupid things, but his words stayed in my mind even as I made our small dinner of homemade tacos. The sizzling of the raw red meat inside of the frying pan had my stomach churning as thoughts of the deer returned. I couldn’t make myself eat any of the meat when it came time for supper. Instead, I made myself a neat taco salad with all the taco ingredients minus the cooked ground beef. It was a rare moment for me to choose a salad over tacos. Simon’s appetite had not been harmed by the gruesome scene. After he wolfed down seven hard shell tacos, I wrapped up the leftovers and put them in the fridge for Miranda to warm up later. The thought of ever eating meat again was disgusting me as I put it away.

  When Miranda arrived home later that evening, Simon and I showed her the dead deer. Our squeamish sister squealed in horror and said she would call the police department early the next morning to tell them about the pack of coyotes.

  She neglected to listen to Simon’s persistence that it was a werewolf that killed the doe. Miranda had only laughed when he warned her that the werewolf was warning them it knows where we live. I stayed silent as Simon next angrily ranted that Miranda never listened to him. As much as I sympathized that our elder sister often neglected to listen to what we were saying, his words were hardly believable. I barely believed it, and I had witnessed the monster ripping the deer in the woods apart. Werewolves belonged in the realm of fiction. No sane person would take Simon’s words seriously and not burst into laughter or an eye roll. For the next few days, Simon ignored Miranda whenever she would try talking to him. He claimed to me he was making a point. If she couldn’t listen to him, then he didn’t need to listen to her.

  I was still struggling to keep my head above water at the new job. Thoughts of the hypothetical werewolf stalking my house were nearly forgotten. Perry was proving to be a pretty unhelpful boss the more time I spent at the convention center. He was either hovering constantly over his employees’ shoulders, or he wasn’t around at all. It was one extreme or the other. Matt was no longer rude to me, just uncaring. He didn’t bother explaining the work tasks or even acknowledging my existence when I was in the room. He didn’t do much of that to begin with, but previously he at least explained tasks to the group while I was standing in the room. It was a small act of kindness to make sure I overheard what to do, even if his words weren’t directly to me specifically. Nowadays it was as though Matt purposely made sure not to say anything if I was within earshot. It felt worse than his disliking me for no reason. At least when he showed he didn’t like me, he was acknowledging me as a person.

  Meanwhile, I couldn’t quite figure out why the other departments at the resort feared the banquet setup boys. Although the group of young men barely interacted with other departments, it didn’t stop servers or housekeeping from avoiding them in general. The maintenance people, line cooks, and sous chef couldn’t avoid them entirely, but they made sure not to interact too
much with them, either. When the setup guys swore or said something outrageous, people smiled or said nothing, not daring to challenge or contradict the boys’ twisted inappropriateness. I had met a very nice girl who was a bartender on the weekends. We immediately bonded over sharing a laugh at a bridezilla running around the convention center screaming that this was her special day only and not her husband’s. I felt like I had finally made myself a friend. Lilly was nice to me up until she discovered what department I was from. As soon as I revealed I was in set up, the girl’s pretty tan face fell. She murmured that was nice, but she then avoided me the rest of the night. When I saw the same girl the following weekend, I politely said hello to Lilly, only to be ignored. She then avoided me the rest of the day and even the next. It was as if we had never met and hadn’t originally spent an hour talking animatedly to each other. The same was being done with other female or male servers. Whenever I would attempt to start a friendly, innocent conversation, I was ignored or merely smiled at politely before being ignored. No one seemed to like me as soon as they discovered what department I was in.