I started toward the kitchen.
“Hey, wait,” Lorenzo called.
I turned back to him.
“It’s Enzo. My parents are the only ones who use my full name.”
“Enzo. Got it.” I smiled and then scurried into the kitchen.
• • •
I paced back and forth in front of the stove, still carrying the coffee carafe. I didn’t know what I was doing. Emily was right. Everything about the situation was getting out of hand. Vinny, the cook, watched me with a bemused expression, which I didn’t really appreciate.
Enzo. People called him Enzo. His friends called him Enzo. Was I a friend? Of course not. I didn’t even know him. Could I be his friend? Maybe. Did he kill his girlfriend? Certainly not.
I peeked into the dining room. Enzo was hunched over his coffee mug again. He looked like the kind of guy who shopped at thrift stores and wrote poetry, which was considerably different from the kind of guy who dismembered beautiful young girls in the woods.
But how did I know that? I didn’t. I hadn’t even known he went by a nickname until five minutes before. I’d spent so much time thinking about Lizzie and Enzo but hardly knew anything real about them. It had started to feel as if they only existed in my head. As if I’d made them up or could make them into anything I wanted them to be.
Meeting Enzo changed everything.
It was Mark Twain getting on a bus and sitting down next to Huck Finn. Or F. Scott Fitzgerald running into Jay Gatsby at the grocery store. It was meeting someone I invented and realizing I hadn’t actually invented him at all.
For once, I wasn’t just pretending.
Something interesting was really happening.
Vinny pulled me out of my thoughts. “You got a crush or something?”
“No,” I said with as much scorn as I could muster. “I don’t have a crush.”
“What then? You’re blocking the grill.”
“Oh, because we have so many customers putting in orders?” I moved to the other side of the kitchen anyway, because there was no point in arguing.
Enzo. I’d met Enzo Calvetti, the guy with a missing girlfriend. But not a dead girlfriend. And for sure not a girlfriend he’d killed.
I thought about the full moon and Wolf Creek and the two of them in the tent that night. Something had happened to Lizzie; that was for sure. And maybe Enzo had been there, but her disappearance wasn’t his fault. No matter what people called him, he wasn’t a murderer.
Maybe he just had the bad luck of dating a werewolf.
I could see Lizzie so clearly, rushing into a clearing, not knowing what was happening to her and being afraid but at the same time feeling more alive than ever before. She would have understood that she was finally becoming what she was always meant to be.
I saw Lizzie tilt her head back to look at the swollen moon, saw her golden hair falling over her shoulders. Her lips pulled back to reveal her perfectly straight, white teeth starting to lengthen, and then the beautiful young girl snarled and fell to her knees as the snarl became a howl and her bones reshaped themselves.
I wished I’d been there to see it.
When I looked at the dining room again, Lorenzo Calvetti was gone. Enzo, I corrected myself. I wished I’d had a chance to talk to him more, but it wasn’t too much of a concern. I was sure he’d be back.
• • •
I was sitting outside on the porch reading The Werewolf of Paris, which a lot of people consider to be the werewolf novel, when a car door slammed shut. There were muffled voices and shuffling sounds and then another door slam.
It was around midnight, and the neighborhood was dark. I got off the swing and walked to the edge of the porch to see a shape emerging from the darkness. It was looming, too big to be a person, and moving in an inhuman way. It figured that just when something fascinating was finally happening in my life, a monster would come along and kill me, ruining everything. The monster drew closer and split in two, and I saw that it wasn’t a monster after all. Rather, two people, one leaning on the other for support.
My brother was clearly very drunk, and Connor struggled to keep him upright. When they neared the house, Connor noticed me.
“Thorny. What are you doing out here?”
“I live here. Is he going to throw up?”
“I don’t think so. He already lost most of his dinner in my car.”
“Gross.”
Connor half dragged Rush up the porch steps.
“Where’d you park?” I asked.
“Down the street. I didn’t want to wake up your parents.”
I helped Connor dump Rush on the swing, where he instantly passed out. He reeked of beer and vomit, which was not a combination I enjoyed. Since my seat had been stolen, I sat at the top of the porch steps. Connor sat down next to me.
“The Werewolf of Paris,” he said, pointing to the cover of my book. “Any good?”
“Yeah. It’s pretty dark. There’s a lot of rape and incest and stuff.”
“Sounds charming.” He paused. “I hear you’ve taken an interest in werewolves lately.”
I winced. How many people had my brother been babbling to?
“Rush told you about the Lizzie thing, huh?”
“He did.”
“And you think I’m crazy.”
“Nope,” Connor said.
I looked over at him, surprised.
Connor grinned. “I’d only think you were crazy if you really believed it.”
“I do believe it,” I protested.