Re: Pat & Lou: boxes
Small towns were funny like that. They wanted to box you up, slap a label on it and keep you in it as long as you were there. Tossed in collective memories until you were crammed in with the town recollection of the night when you got so drunk joyriding a truck seemed like a good idea until you crashed it into the neighboring farmer's fences, or the time you fell asleep in church and swore a blue streak when shaken awake. It could get pretty crowded, those boxes. Preconceptions and wiggle-room weren't best buds, and Lou was a big fan of wiggle-room and space you could grow into.
50%. It was a little - not a lot - like walking around her home town looking all fifty percent like a guy who had never attended a coffee morning at church or pitched in to fix someone's house. It was half in, half out and Lou recalled what that was like. The ear was weird but no weirder than fur, once a month and Lou leaned away from the mattress and toward the kid to get a look.
"Killed people?" Wasn't her recollection of pack, but the wolves she'd had to count on knew the score. If people around here were so backwards on how to hide, either they'd gotten too comfortable with being wolf when people expected there to be wolves in the woods - or they were fucked without a center to hold them together. It was another migraine, ready to pulse, and Lou cleared her throat.
"Never killed. Had a pack once, not interested in joining a new one. Thanks for the warning. I've been a wolf in the center of a city, I know to stay hidden." She didn't think of it as distinct, wolf and her. Sometimes it felt like a million miles apart, sometimes it was on the brink. She didn't separate them because it wasn't like the wolf was checking out any time soon.
The kid didn't say what the other fifty percent was, and Lou didn't push. Maybe it was need to know, in the kid's head, and she had a nose full of rain and green and ozone-earth to give a good indication whatever it was lived outside.