Hannah managed to eat all of the whipped cream and two more bites of waffle. In that time, her parents pretended to eat waffles of their own while asking her what seemed like an endless list of questions. They wanted to know if she was tired, if she felt sick, if she wanted to leave the table and go to bed. Tom asked her if she wanted to have a water fight with the hose in the backyard, and Andrew offered to give her an igneous rock from his collection. Hannah shook her head at all of them and looked away.

“I got a new Nerf gun!” said Gulliver, plonking it excitedly onto the table. “It can shoot five bullets at once, not just three. I’ll let you use it if you want.”

“Okay,” said Hannah grudgingly, then went silent again.

“What’s wrong with you?” said Gulliver. “You’re not being you. Be you again.”

Hannah rolled her eyes until he slumped away.

After breakfast, it was even trickier to decide how to act. Part of Hannah wanted to go upstairs and sit in her room, where she wouldn’t have to decide anything, but she also didn’t like being alone very much. She knew that after only a few minutes, she would prefer being downstairs with people than being upstairs by herself. Even if she wasn’t going to talk to anyone.

Eventually she went to the living room sofa, where she hugged her knees to her chest and turned on the TV. There weren’t any cartoons on – only a show for preschoolers about a family of fox puppets who were learning to read. Hannah changed the channel. A man with an ugly beard tried to sell her a meat cleaver. A tired-looking newscaster told her about bombs falling over the Middle East. A cartoon rabbit hopped through a commercial for toilet paper. Fine, she thought. She could deal with foxes.

Someone came in and sat next to her. She turned her head a few degrees, so she could see who it was. Tom.

“I’m mad at you. Go away.”

“I know,” said Tom. “But I don’t want you to be.”

“Well, I am,” said Hannah. She turned up the volume.

“Vixen starts with the letter ‘V’!” said Mama Gingertail in a bright voice. “Like me! I’m a vixen.”

“But I thought Vixen was one of Santa’s reindeer,” said Baby Redtop. Hannah hated his character; he was stupendously slow. Andrew always said it was to make the children who watched it feel smarter.

“No, no,” laughed Mama Gingertail. “I meant the other kind of vixen. Did you know that a girl fox is called a vixen, too?”

“Han, you don’t even like this show.”

She stared intently at the screen.

“Does that mean you get to drive Santa’s sled on Christmas?” asked Baby Redtop.

Tom grabbed the remote and turned the television off.

“Turn it back on!”

“No. I want to talk to you.”

“But I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Well, you have to,” said Tom, breathing heavily enough that Hannah could tell he wasn’t as calm as he was pretending to be. “Or you have to at least listen, okay?”

“No, I don’t,” said Hannah, trying to take back the remote. “Give it back.”

“Not until you listen. It’s not our fault. Don’t you get that? It’s not my fault. It’s not Andrew’s fault. It’s not even Mom and Dad’s. They were doing what the stupid nurses told them to, okay? They didn’t know.”

Hannah glared at him. “I don’t care. You didn’t tell me.”

“We didn’t tell you because Mom and Dad asked us not to! Because that’s what Dr. Trapp told them. Anyway, they only told me and Andrew the day before you found out –”

“I told you I don’t care,” Hannah repeated. She kept her eyes carefully trained on the blank TV screen. “Go away.”

Tom made a lofty noise in the back of his throat.

“Go away before I hit you,” said Hannah, and she meant it. She took a couch pillow and lifted it high in the air, at the perfect angle to throw it hard into Tom’s face.

Tom ducked, threw up his hands, and left the room. Hannah felt a brief second of triumph before she realized she was alone again.

She reached for the remote, but the show was over. She dangled upside-down off the couch. The words her father had spoken during their conversation that morning came unbidden into her mind. The official name and the word he didn’t want to use.

“Ly-can-thro-pee,” Hannah muttered, still upside-down.

It sounded awful coming out of her mouth. Even “werewolf” sounded better than that.

***

Hannah’s attempt at the silent treatment failed. She had known that it would. When she saw people, her mouth opened before she had time to think about what she was going to say – she had always been that way. She started talking to her parents again by dinnertime, and Tom and Andrew by the next morning.

But that didn’t mean she had to stop being mad at them. Just because she was speaking to them didn’t mean that what her family had done was okay.

Aunt Marissa stayed for a week. Hannah found herself spending as much time with her as she could. Hannah knew she had been talking to her parents about her – she could tell by the way they sometimes nodded at each other – but she never mentioned it, because Aunt Marissa was the only person who treated her exactly the same way she had before the camping trip.

“Three scoops or four?” said Aunt Marissa, pacing around Luna’s, the ice cream shop down the street. “Or maybe five? They definitely don’t have –” (she squinted at the chalkboard listing the flavors) “– smoked salmon at the Ben & Jerry’s back home. But maybe that’s a little too exotic?”

“Ew,” said Hannah. “No way. But yes to five scoops. And two of them have to be cake batter flavor.”

Aunt Marissa ordered the biggest sundae Hannah had ever seen, smothered in hot fudge and rainbow sprinkles, and narrowly avoided dropping it on the floor as she tottered toward their table. Hannah dug in greedily. Her cake batter blended a little strangely with Aunt Marissa’s bittersweet chocolate, but she decided she liked the taste.

“I don’t want you to leave,” she said, licking the last of it off her spoon.

“I don’t want to leave, either,” said Aunt Marissa. “There aren’t any Hannahs in Madison. But I have my job, and they won’t let me have more than a week off.”

“They should fire you,” said Hannah, with more emotion in her voice than she’d realized she felt. “Then you could come live with us forever and I wouldn’t have to deal with my stupid jerk brothers all the time.”

“Hmm. I like your brothers.” Aunt Marissa took a scoop of apricot ice cream mixed with pistachio and grimaced. “I understand, of course – your dad’s my stupid jerk brother, after all, and sometimes he still drives me nuts. But they love you a lot, just like your dad loves me. You should have seen how hard Tom and Andrew worked on that poster. There aren’t a whole lot of people Tom in particular would sit still for.”

Hannah tried to keep that in mind when Aunt Marissa left that weekend, but it was hard. Being mad at Tom and Andrew meant that she had no patience whatsoever with any attempt at teasing from them, no matter how gentle. She got into terrible trouble for throwing one of her soccer cleats at Andrew, and it was only luck that stopped her from being caught when she kicked Tom in the face. (She’d been aiming for his stomach, but she somehow doubted that would have made much difference to her mother.)

The weird thing was that Tom and Andrew got lectured just as much as Hannah did. Every time Hannah had privileges taken away for “reacting too strongly,” as her father put it, the twins got called into his office and left with tight, gloomy faces. It was almost enough to make her feel sorry for them.

The day after Aunt Marissa left, Hannah woke up in the middle of the night shivering and drenched in sweat. Horrible but familiar sounds echoed in her ears. Only later did she realize that they were coming from her own throat.

Her mother must have heard her, because she materialized next to Hannah’s bed.

“Shh,” she said. She lay down next to Hannah and rubbed her back.

Everything was on fire. “It wouldn’t stop.”

“Shh. I know.”

“I was hungry,” Hannah sobbed. “I didn’t want to be hungry.”

After a few minutes, the panic in her chest subsided, and she burrowed her head deep into her mother’s shoulder. Sleep now seemed dangerous, but Hannah had no power to prevent herself from drifting off.

“I didn’t want to,” she said in a small voice, and her mother shushed her.

***

The summer wore on, and Hannah grew edgy and lonely. All her brothers except Moe had been enrolled in camp, and her pleas to have friends over fell on deaf ears.

“You still look pale,” said her mother, looking Hannah over critically. “I want you to take it easy for a while.”

But she didn’t have anyone to take it easy with, and the TV was boring holes into her brain, and she didn’t feel sick anymore. Even the bruises had faded. The only unusual thing was that her eyes had changed again, replacing reds and purples with off-greens and browns. It happened so suddenly that Hannah wasn’t entirely convinced she had ever been able to see them.

She thought about the things her father had told her. Maybe he was wrong about lycanthropy. Maybe all there was to it was weird colors sometimes.

“Every month,” her father had told her. “We’ll tell you when. But you’ll probably start to figure it out for yourself.”

Well, they hadn’t told her.

So it probably wasn’t going to happen.

No, Hannah decided, and instantly felt better. It wasn’t. It wasn’t allowed to. It wasn’t going to.

***

She kicked and screamed.

They held her down.

Dr. Trapp hauled her into the ambulance and slammed the door. Her parents only watched.

A blue-suited employee met them in the hall, snapped a new metal bracelet around Hannah’s wrist, and locked her inside the same cold, dark room as before. She tried to hurt him, to make him see, but the blue fabric he was wearing seemed impervious to her attacks, and so did his expression. He smiled benignly as he closed the door behind her.

Hannah kicked the door. It made a nice echoey crashing noise, but it also made her feet tingle and burn.

“No,” she shouted. “I won’t.”

It could not and would not happen again.

She imagined her parents’ faces when they found out she had stopped it. Her mother would hug Hannah until her chest ached, would make one of her special steak and potato pies to celebrate. Her father would kiss the top of her head, would stop looking so serious all the time.

“We thought that lycanthropy didn’t have a cure,” he would say, and pride would radiate from his smile. “But you proved us wrong. You just have to be strong enough to stop it from happening. And you did it, Hannah. You’re the first one ever to do it.”

Dr. Trapp would be astounded. He wouldn’t stop writing in his notepad for days. “Tell me everything!” he would say. “I apologize for the way I treated you; I had no idea you were such an important person. Will you let me interview you?”

Hannah would shake her head modestly. “If you had kept them from locking me up in that room, then maybe I would. But I can’t. Sorry.”

Dr. Trapp would cry and beg, but Hannah would hold firm. Then maybe she’d be on TV. They’d put the evil nurses in jail. They would –

Hannah wheezed suddenly. Her breath had caught strangely in her chest.

There was something terrible crawling down her back. Like abnormally large spiders, or congealed egg yolks, or grasping, frostbitten fingers.

“It won’t happen,” she told her body, through breaths that had turned gasping. “It’s not going to –”

The feeling got stronger and worse, and then her spine cracked backwards. She experienced the world in sickening, dizzying waves. Her brain felt foggy and raw.

Her throat stopped being able to form words.

And then Hannah stopped, too.