Harry started transforming at home instead of in the hospital. This was made possible by a new set of laws, which had barely squeezed past the state governor. There were a number of people, Harry said, who were worried about Type Ones transforming in private.

“I was reading about it in the newspaper,” Harry said, ignoring Hannah’s smirk – Harry was the only kid she knew who ever bothered to look at the paper. “Some people think we might bite somebody. Even though we can control it. They said it’s like having a bomb in your house. It might go off and hurt people.”

“Only if you set the bomb off,” said Hannah, frowning. “But why would you do that?”

“Exactly,” said Harry. “But I don’t think they trust us very much.”

Hannah thought. “What if there was a Type One who was evil, though? Like, who just wanted to bite as many people as they could? Maybe they would be really angry that they got bitten in the first place and decide they want to turn the whole world into werewolves.”

“I guess that could happen,” said Harry. “It’s just – there are evil people too, and I think they forgot about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t have to be a werewolf to hurt people. There are some kinds of people who want to go out with their guns and shoot everybody. And they do.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Hannah. “I’ve never met one.”

Hannah wasn’t going to get to transform at home the way Harry was, at least not for a while. There were some scientists working on a way, David said, but they hadn’t finished testing it yet. They needed to make sure it was absolutely safe.

“Safe,” Hannah repeated. “What does that mean?”

“The medicine that they’re making would essentially turn you into a Type One,” said David. “Make you capable of making your own decisions. Eliminate the need to lock you up.”

“Oh,” said Hannah. She had heard it before. Her mother talked about the scientists’ magic medicine – or “Moon Pills,” as they were apparently called – endlessly. Only she never said anything about them being safe or not safe. She just gabbled about how great they were going to be. And then she looked at Hannah meaningfully, as if she were supposed to have an opinion on the matter.

Hannah made him play checkers with her so that he would stop talking. David had proven to be very competitive with his checkers.

The hospital was lonely without Harry, although she would never have admitted it to him. The other kids never talked unless she spoke to them first. There were fewer of them, too, than there used to be; Eva had also left. Occasionally there were visiting children whose parents had taken them to Curnow in order to find out more about their condition. They were usually recently bitten and even less likely to speak than James, Tristan, and Nicolas. Out of sheer boredom, Hannah made a game of forcing conversation with anyone who happened to be around on full moons.

“Why do you think we turn into wolves?” she asked Nicolas, tapping her fingers in the way he hated on the frame of Rose’s sofa.

“Because we got bitten,” said Nicolas, glaring. “Quit it.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Hannah, still tapping away. “I mean, why not some other animal? The moon comes up and we turn into wolves? Why a wolf? Why not a pig or a duck or something? Who decided that?”

“Science,” grunted Nicolas. “Evolution, maybe.”

“I guess a wereduck wouldn’t be able to spread it,” said Hannah thoughtfully. “Because they don’t have teeth. Ducks don’t have teeth, do they? Do you think ducks have teeth, James?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it isn’t like other animals don’t have teeth, either. What about hippos? My brother Andrew told me that hippos have the biggest teeth of any animal in the world. So why aren’t there werehippos? They’d be much more interesting.”

“I’d rather be a werewolf than a werehippo,” said Nicolas.

“Also, it’s funny that it doesn’t work the other way around,” said Hannah. “Humans can get a disease where they turn into wolves, but there isn’t a disease where wolves turn into people, is there? Wait, what if it’s just that nobody’s discovered it yet?”

“What?” said James nervously.

“Well, maybe at the full moon, people are so busy worrying about werewolves that they never check on the actual wolves. Maybe when the moon goes up, some of them turn into humans and spend the whole night running around naked.”

“That image is going to stay with me for the rest of my life,” said Nicolas.

“Good,” said Hannah.

She spelled her name in Morse code on the back of the sofa. H-A-N-N-A-H.

She tried as hard as she could to think about werehippos and wolf-people after Rose locked her up to make herself laugh, but it didn’t work very well. Without Harry to practice Morse code with, and James and Nicolas to annoy, she didn’t feel like there was much of her left. And when the wolf arrived, there wouldn’t be any of her left at all.

***

Despite what Tom and Andrew had said, Hannah liked middle school at Trevarthen. She liked the fact that she was in a smaller, cozier building all the way across the makeshift forest. She liked the wooded pathway she got to walk down every morning, giving her time to catch up with Ella and Aimee and Chloe before the school day began. She liked the fact that the walk had made the four of them closer, having sleepovers almost every weekend and making up secret jokes that they could allude to in passing. She liked giggling madly when other people tried to figure out what they meant.

Hannah didn’t mind the learning part of middle school too much, either. It was exciting to have different teachers for each subject. Even the homework wasn’t as bad as it could have been. She always felt a pleasant jolt of maturity when she was able to come home, toss her backpack onto the floor, and gripe about how many assignments she’d been given that day.

“No sympathy,” said Andrew, bent over his geometry textbook. “I’ve got forty-five math problems for tomorrow.”

“I wasn’t asking you,” said Hannah.

Andrew and Tom had made up their fight, but they were more irritable than Hannah had ever seen them. When Tom’s voice started to change, Hannah naturally mimicked him, yodeling back every sentence that came out broken. But Tom didn’t laugh once. And when Andrew brought home his study partner from his accelerated chemistry class, a pretty dark-haired girl named Kamala, he ordered Hannah to go upstairs rather than letting her stick around and tease them.

That, along with certain other changes Hannah had begun to notice in herself, convinced her that her teachers had been right about the hormones. It was way too depressing to think about, so she didn’t.

Another new thing was dances. Trevarthen’s middle school had four of them per year – one each academic quarter – and the first one took place on the night before Halloween. Nobody talked about anything else for weeks. Kieran, flushed deepest purple, asked Ella to go with him by way of a secret note in her locker. After school, girls Hannah had never spoken to flocked around Ella, begging her to tell them every last detail. Ella reveled in the attention. Hannah took mental notes.

The grown-ups were all very disapproving. “At least wait until high school,” said Katherine, Hannah’s American history teacher. “The pickings will be better then, anyway.”

But Hannah knew it wasn’t really about the “pickings”, whatever that meant. It was their first dance. Did she really expect them to want to go alone?

“Yes,” said Aimee, shaking her beaded cornrows. “People are being so silly.”

“It isn’t just to impress people,” said Hannah, sighing. “And Kieran’s not just a random boy.” (It was often difficult to explain things like this to Aimee, who never cared very much about what anyone else was doing.) “We’re not in elementary school anymore,” she added. “And maybe we might even find someone we really like at one of the dances. There’re a lot of couples who met when they were eleven, you know.”

Hannah didn’t know any, but there had to be some.

For two weeks, she waited patiently to be asked by someone – anyone. Preferably Jeremy Pryce from her gym class, with his smooth dark skin and wicked sense of humor. For two weeks, she talked to him every chance she got. She brought up the dance again and again; vaguely at first, and then completely unapologetically. But he asked Natalie Grace Pullman instead, and Hannah spent several days in a sulk. Finally, she decided it was time to take matters into her own hands.

She marched over to the lunch table across from her usual one, where a group of boys she was friendly with liked to sit.

“Who,” she said, “wants to go to the Halloween dance with me? I need a date.”

The boys gaped at her.

“We’re supposed to ask you,” said Joe. “That’s how it works.”

“Not anymore,” said Hannah firmly. “It’s the twenty-first century. Does one of you want to go with me?”

“Well,” said Sean. “Wasn’t Connor saying something about that? I mean, I’ll go with you if you want, but I’m pretty sure Connor mentioned –”

“Yeah,” said Connor quickly. “Yeah, I did. You want to go to the dance with me, Hannah? I’ll go with you. No problem.”

He gave her a wide, goofy grin. The other boys whooped.

Connor still picked his nose – Hannah had seen him – but that was only sometimes, and he was nice, and she didn’t want to be too choosy.

“Cool,” she said. “I’ll meet you in front of the gym, then.”

***

The October full moon rose a week before Halloween, and David had finally gotten his hands on the Moon Pill. Hannah took it every day from the new moon onward. It was so big that it scraped her throat going down, and it tasted the way mold smelled.

They made her come to the hospital several hours early, to talk the plan through. Hannah didn’t want to be there. She had gotten used to full moon days lying on the sofa, watching old black-and-white movies that Aunt Marissa sent in the mail, eating as much bacon as her mother would agree to make her. She did not appreciate having her routine messed with.

“Have you had any side effects, Hannah?” said Rose.

“What?” said Hannah vaguely.

“From the Moon Pill,” explained her mother. “She’s had headaches, especially at first, but so far, giving her ibuprofen has seemed to do the trick, and she hasn’t been getting them as much lately. She’s also had some trouble sleeping. That worries me a little more, since she needs as many hours as she can get at this age. But Max thinks it’ll taper off the way the headaches have.”

“Anything to add to that, Hannah?”

“No,” said Hannah, rolling her eyes. She crossed her arms and went back to looking out the window. She knew that her mother was giving Rose a look at my difficult adolescent face, and she knew Rose was giving her a sympathetic one back. She didn’t care.

“Right, then,” said Rose. “Well, you’re the only one out of our regular three to be trying the Moon Pill this month. James’ and Nicolas’ parents have opted to wait until the trial ends in December, so you’re going to be a bit of a pioneer today! That said, we’ve got a lot to discuss beforehand, since we’ll need to keep a special eye on you tonight. Do you want your mum around for that, or do you want me to talk to you on your own?”

“I want my mom to go.”

Hannah’s mother exasperated her by looking stricken. “Are you sure, sweetie?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know if you really want to be alone for this –”

“I’m not going to be alone. I’ll have Rose.”

“My big girl.”

Hannah hated it when her mother got weepy on full moons. It hadn’t happened in months, and Hannah had hoped she’d started getting used to them. Apparently not.

“See you tomorrow,” she said. She maneuvered her way around a smothering hug.

Rose gave her mother a hug, too, which irritated Hannah.

“We’re still going to have you transforming downstairs,” Rose said, once Hannah’s mother had left. “In a truly tiny percentage of cases, the Moon Pill doesn’t work at all. Or it doesn’t work well enough. While I’m almost positive that won’t be the case for you – especially as you’re still so young – it’s our job to check and make sure. And so, just in case, we need to see that you really are operating as a Type One before we let you do what Harry’s doing. Which is why I’m going to give you this.”

She held something out, which Hannah took cautiously. Hannah pressed the flat blue button on top of it. A shrill, piercing sound rang out from somewhere within Rose’s office. Hannah almost clapped her hands to her ears.

“It’s… like a pager?”

“Yes, a bit. What I want you to do – once you’re transformed and kind of settled – is I’d like you to press it. Ten times. We need to know that you’ve got your own mind for long enough to keep pushing it consistently.”

Hannah frowned down at it.

“So… like… you want me to press it with my – with the wolf paw?”

“Exactly. Think you can do that?”

Hannah squirmed.

“Yeah. I know,” said Rose. “It’s weird. But that’s the way it’s got to be. State law. Now, if you’ve managed to press it the ten times, David and I will scurry over into the room. We’ll run a few more tests, fill out a few forms, and then that’ll be that.”

“What kind of tests?”

“Just little things. I don’t think they’re really necessary, but there’s been a lot of fuss over the whole Moon Pill thing, as I’m sure you’ve heard. People don’t want to take any risks.”

“Risks?”

“It’s understandable. They want to make sure they’ll be safe. We’ll ask you to walk back and forth across the room, look us in the eye. Nothing too horrible.”

Hannah stiffened. It was all about safe again. Safe behind locked doors, safe under laws that other people made, safe because Rose and David said so. It left a bad taste in her mouth.

“Sounds pretty horrible to me,” she said.

Rose sighed and sent her to the bookcase to find something to read until James, Tristan, and Nicolas showed up. It was difficult to read when her head hurt so much, but there was no chance Hannah was going to explain that to Rose. She grabbed C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and looked at pictures of dragons until the boys arrived.

Eustace was lucky. At least he got to breathe fire.