In the beginning, everything was the same. Rose said good-bye; David locked her in; Hannah sat in the corner with her arms around her knees and a fierce need to pretend it wasn’t happening. She felt sick. She pretended it wasn’t happening. Everything ached. She pretended it wasn’t happening. Her body changed.

But then it kept changing. The fog that always descended over her mind never came. And then the stretching and pulling and reshaping stopped, and got slower, and stopped again, and then it felt like everything had stopped. Except that Hannah was still there.

Sort of.

She looked down at the wolf paws beneath her. She had never seen them before, not for longer than a few seconds. The nose was strange, too – long and stubbly and sticking straight out, blocking a good chunk of her vision. She had to shift strangely in order to get a look at her tail, but of course she had one of those, too – dark and bristly. She curled her tongue up inside her mouth and felt her teeth. They were very sharp.

She spent a few minutes moving experimentally around. Wolves were short. It was kind of like being a hairy dwarf with four legs.

Eventually Hannah remembered the pager and wandered reluctantly over to it. The idea of Rose and David examining her in this state had become even less appealing than it had been before. It wasn’t like she was embarrassed or anything – it wasn’t like she could help it – but she wouldn’t be able to say anything to them, and for some reason that bothered her a lot.

She pressed the pager ten times. Rose and David came in. Hannah walked back and forth across the room and looked them in the eye. They nodded and left her alone.

After that, Hannah got bored quickly. There was only so much you could do when there was nothing to do. What was more, she had realized that the sounds she had taken at first for some kind of weird basement plumbing was actually all the other Type Three werewolves howling from within their confines. It made her feel embarrassed for them. She didn’t like to think about Nicolas and little James spending a whole night doing that.

So she tried to sleep. But it didn’t work very well. It wasn’t possible as a wolf to curl up on her side in the way that she was used to. She had to wrap her tail around herself and twist her head into it, like wolves in the wild.

When the sun rose – not that Hannah could see it – she changed back, which she had been curious about, since she’d never had her mind for that part. Unsurprisingly, it hurt.

Then Rose and David came back and it was over and Hannah didn’t have to think about it again for another month.

“It worked!” said her father. “Isn’t that exciting?”

“Sure,” said Hannah.

She lay on the sofa and watched full-color movies and made him bring her waffles.

***

Hannah insisted on an orange dress for the Halloween dance. It took her and Ella three hours and six stores before they found one, but Hannah was more than satisfied with it. It was covered in gold glitter and had flounces in the skirt.

“It’s too much,” said Tom, frowning at Hannah as she got ready. “And it’s too long. Almost all the girls wear dresses that go above their knees.”

“Ha,” said Hannah, trying to French-braid her hair with little success. “You just don’t like dances because nobody would dance with you at your last one. Andrew told me. Tom and Patricia, sitting in a tree… K-I-S-S-I-N… oops, except not…”

It was a very good thing that Hannah’s mother appeared to fix her hair when she did.

Hannah was dropped off in front of the woodland path with Ella. Neither of them had told their parents about their dates. They were sure to get just like the teachers about it – and Hannah knew that if her mother knew, it was only a matter of time before her brothers did, too, and that was something she wanted to avoid at all costs.

Kieran was on time – with a bouquet of flowers for Ella – but Connor was late, and Hannah was forced to wait outside the gym, tapping her toes for a full fifteen minutes before he showed up. He was wearing a white shirt and a pair of jeans that were only a little less wrinkled than they normally were. He hadn’t brought any flowers, but Hannah decided that was okay. Kieran had known Ella for longer, after all.

Their class had voted for an Alice in Wonderland theme rather than a generic Halloween one, and the gym had been utterly transformed, covered with all kinds of brightly colored decorations. A giant papier-mâché rabbit’s head hung from the ceiling, bedazzled with sequins. Elaborate murals depicting dodos, the Queen of Hearts, and the Mad Hatter’s tea party had been painted on massive sheets of brown paper and hung on every wall. Each plastic cup of punch at the food table had a little sticker saying “drink me” and every cookie had “eat me” written on it in frosting. The music was louder than Hannah had ever been allowed to hear it, and every cell in her body wanted to dance.

“Come on,” she said to Connor, dragging him by the hand.

But he didn’t seem especially interested in dancing. As Hannah tugged him closer to the center of the gym, where a crowd of people were hopping up and down with their hands in the air, he kept turning awkwardly to look at what everyone else was doing.

Harry gave her a sympathetic look. He and Chloe and Aimee had gone as a trio, and they had been dancing since before Connor arrived.

“You just have to wave your arms around a little,” Hannah hissed at him. “My brothers told me. It’s supposed to be fun.”

Connor sighed, but he seemed to make somewhat of an effort after that.

Hannah had an excellent half hour dancing partly with Connor and partly with the people squashed in around her. She felt like everyone had changed a little from the people she saw at school. They were livelier, more prone to laughter, and yet slightly mysterious all the same. It took Hannah a few minutes to realize that the girl in the silver dress and the boy with the slicked-back hair ate lunch in the cafeteria with her every day.

After a while, the music stopped so that the teacher acting as the DJ could take a break. Everyone stampeded over to the food table. Connor squeezed into the crowd and emerged with four cupcakes. He handed Hannah two. That was better, she thought. He did have a chivalrous side after all.

“Want to eat these outside?” he said. “I’m getting kind of overheated in here.”

Hannah’s dress was lightweight and sleeveless, and she loved the way the usually spacious gym was packed so tightly with people, but she nodded and followed him out into the hallway. Maybe he was an introvert, like Andrew. Hannah knew that introverts didn’t like to be around too many people at once.

They ended up on one of the park benches a few yards outside the middle school entrance. Neither of them said anything as they ate their cupcakes. When they were finished, Connor took Hannah’s hand. Hannah wasn’t sure she liked it, since his hand was still sweaty from his vague attempts at dancing, but she let him. It was romantic, after all.

“Hannah,” said Connor, “do you think – I mean, since we went to the dance together and everything. I think maybe – I might –”

“What?” said Hannah eagerly.

“I’m supposed to kiss you,” mumbled Connor.

“You’re not supposed to do anything,” said Hannah, nettled. “That’s not how it works. You should only do stuff if you want to do them.”

“Well… can I kiss you?”

Hannah thought for a minute. “Sure,” she said.

So he did – a very light, quick tapping of his lips on Hannah’s. She was disappointed to discover that it didn’t feel much different from kissing her parents or brothers. But Connor wasn’t her parents or brothers. He was a boy.

“That was my first kiss,” she said to Connor, beaming.

“Mine too.” His cheeks were scarlet.

“Well, it was very sweet,” said Hannah firmly. “Should we go back to the gym now? Ella’s sisters said they always save the best songs until the end.”

“Yeah,” said Connor. He couldn’t seem to stop blushing. “Yeah, I guess we should.”

He was even worse at dancing then that he had been the first time around.