Hannah couldn’t sleep that night, either. She spent a long time staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling. They had been bought in the Curnow Hospital gift shop, and she hadn’t wanted them very much. They barely glowed at all – just emitted a soft, dimly yellow haze.

It was like her family was wrong, Hannah thought. There had been something wrong for a long time, but it had been small enough to ignore. Now it was staring Hannah in the face, and she couldn’t look away. Something had changed, and she didn’t know what it was. It was almost as if moving to Curnow had set some kind of mysterious force into motion – something that was only going to grow. But she couldn’t put a name to it.

She gave up on sleep, put on her slippers, and tiptoed downstairs. The new house had a few stairs that squeaked,but her brothers were notoriously heavy sleepers, so she wasn’t worried. She went into the kitchen and found a box of Oreos in the pantry. Grabbing a handful and wrapping them in a paper towel, she moved into the living room and sat down on the sofa.

Only what she sat on wasn’t a couch cushion – it felt suspiciously like someone’s feet. Hannah gave a yelp and investigated further. It was Tom, fast asleep on the couch.

Something about Hannah sitting on his legs must have woken him up. His head jerked upwards and suddenly he was staring at her, his eyebrows furrowed.

“What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” said Hannah.

“Andrew and I had a fight.”

“So you didn’t even want to sleep in your room?”

“You don’t have to share a room,” said Tom. “It doesn’t work when you’re mad at someone. Especially when they won’t speak to you.”

“Andrew won’t speak to you?”

“No.”

“Do Mom and Dad know?”

“No.”

“Are you going to make up?”

Tom hesitated. “Probably. At some point.”

“You have to make up,” said Hannah. “Twins are supposed to be best friends.”

“Ugh, Hannah, it doesn’t work that way. Not anymore, not when you’re older. Look. Andrew and I – he doesn’t understand. You’re in middle school now; you get it – middle school is different. You have to do things differently. But Andrew only wants to do things his way. He doesn’t even try.”

“What things?” said Hannah. “What doesn’t he try?”

“It’s complicated,” said Tom. “It’s just the way things work. You have to be a part of a group to be part of the school. And Andrew won’t. People make fun of him.”

“Well then, you should tell them to stop!”

“I can’t,” said Tom. “There’s no way they’d listen to me.”

Hannah turned this over in her mind. It didn’t make sense. If there was one thing she knew, it was that when people didn’t want to listen, you had to make them. You had to keep going until they couldn’t fail to hear you. Tom knew this – Hannah knew he did. Tom was the one who had taught it to her in the first place.

“Is that why he’s mad at you?”

“That’s why he’s mad at me,” said Tom.

They didn’t speak for a few minutes. Hannah toyed with the idea of turning on the TV, but there was always the chance that it might wake her parents, who already grumbled about the amount of TV Hannah watched. She sighed dramatically, because a dramatic sigh sounded better in the echoey stillness of the living room at night. She tapped her toes. She worked on peeling off the edge of her littlest fingernail.

“Hannah?” said Tom quietly. “Um. What’s it like? Being a –”

“What?” said Hannah.

“You know. Having lycanthropy.”

The instant sense of betrayal in the pit of Hannah’s stomach hurt. Could she pretend, later on, that he hadn’t said that? She thought she probably could.

“It’s fine,” she said glumly.

“Really?” said Tom. “Because… it’s just that, I mean, Mom and Dad… they act like… and everyone at school, too, you know? You’re sure? It’s really, definitely okay?”

“Yes,” said Hannah.

“Good,” said Tom.

They sat on the sofa for a while longer, and then Hannah went upstairs to bed.

***

Summer came, and with it, the unbearable heat that still felt to Hannah like an invisible stranger was choking her. Her mother wanted to sign her up for camp, but Hannah said no.

“Ella’s going,” her mother pointed out. “That kayaking camp in the woods. For three whole weeks. It doesn’t conflict with the moon, and I’d have thought you’d want to get out of here for a while. No brothers getting in your space – a break from this God-awful weather –”

“What makes you think you know what I want?”said Hannah.

Something showed in her mother’s eyes that sent a guilty pang into Hannah’s chest, though she evicted it at once.

“I guess,” said her mother. “It’s the best I can do. But I do think it would be good for you.”

“It wouldn’t. It would be good for me to lie in the sun and eat popsicles and sleep really late and not be told what to do by counselors with whistles around their necks.”

Her mother threw up her hands. “Suit yourself.” She turned her back and headed to the kitchen to make dinner.

Hannah watched her go. For a strange moment, she thought she saw something dark and strangely gauzy trailing behind her. But then she blinked, and the image was gone.

“I’m not going,” she said, and thankfully, that was the end of it.

And so she had the summer to herself. At twelve, she was old enough to walk around the neighborhood alone, and since Curnow was essentially one big neighborhood, this meant that she could visit her friends whenever she liked.

Because Harry had a large, air-conditioned basement with comfortable leather couches and a big-screen TV, his house soon became their home base. At least four days a week, she, Harry, Aimee, Kieran, and Chloe would sit shoulder to shoulder on the sofas and luxuriate in the fact that they had nothing more important to do than chat and watch movies. Occasionally, Connor decided to join them, and on those days,time passed more slowly, because he always wanted more of Hannah’s attention than she felt like giving him – but she tried her best to be nice.

Later, other people began to trickle in, people Hannah wouldn’t have suspected she would get to know and like. There was Min, who had been new that year and told the most amazing stories about having lived in Ghana and South Korea. There was Ross, who hardly said a word at school, but turned out to be one of the funniest people Hannah had ever met. And there was Seb, dark-eyed and clever – and on whom, Harry whispered to Hannah one day, he had a crush.

“You like boys?” said Hannah. “You never told me that before.”

“Yeah,” said Harry in one breath. “But could you, um – could you not tell anyone, please? I mean, I feel like other people – they might not understand. At least not until we’re older, and I don’t want them to think –”

“You care about what they think?” said Hannah, still gawking.

“I just don’t want people to say things,” Harry mumbled. “Or think things. Because maybe they don’t understand. And I want to wait until they do.”

Hannah blinked rapidly. “But you’re the one who doesn’t care about what people think!”

“What do you mean, I don’t care?”

“You were the one who said to ignore – I mean, you said – I thought none of that mattered to you! You said – and it’s so stupid, Harry! So stupid!”

He looked at her calmly, in that Harry way that had been quietly annoying since the day she had met him. “I’m stupid because I want people to like me?”

Hannah crossed her arms. Betrayed-feeling bubbles were rising in her chest and threatening to pop. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, you are.”

“I think Seb likes me, too,” said Harry softly.

“Good,” said Hannah. “Then I hope you go to the Halloween dance with him and I hope everybody finds out and I hope you see that we all love you, because you’re being a stupid idiot, Harry Lucas,and if you keep being stupid you’re just going to get even stupider, and I don’t want a stupid idiot for a best friend.”

It was the mildest thing she could come up with to say. He was the one who had shown her in the first place that it didn’t matter about being a werewolf, that it didn’t matter what people might think –

“I’m your best friend?” said Harry, as if he hadn’t heard the rest of it.

“I don’t know,” said Hannah gruffly. “I thought you were.”

“Well, you’re mine,” said Harry, “and I’m sorry if I’m being a stupid idiot.”

“Don’t apologize. That only makes you sound worse.”

He smiled. Hannah punched him in the arm. And that meant they were allowed to talk about other things.

Hannah couldn’t help being annoyed, though. He was pretending to be someone he wasn’t. She would have never expected that of Harry.

***

Seventh grade was much like sixth, except for one addition: Supernatural Smarts. While Tom and Andrew had begun Supernatural Smarts classes back in Wisconsin, Trevarthen students didn’t start until they were twelve.

“They used to do it earlier,” said Ella. “But a girl in my sister Ava’s class started having nightmares, and her parents were really important lawyers or something, so Trevarthen almost got sued. She had to change schools.” She grinned. “They say she was never the same again.”

This story made Hannah look forward to Supernatural Smarts even more than she had before. She anticipated it eagerly until the day of their first class, imagining discussions about hydras and huldras and hedley kows and other things she’d only ever seen on the news before her mother hurriedly turned it off.

But Hannah was soon disappointed. Supernatural Smarts turned out to be almost exactly like the classes on puberty she’d had to take in fifth grade, except that the subject matter was different. And Trevarthen seventh graders didn’t even get to learn about the more dangerous creatures – maybe because of Ella’s story, that part was reserved for high schoolers. Instead, their American studies teacher, Warren, droned on and on about things Hannah had heard about since childhood. A few things were new, like the way dust spirits could create quicksand if the conditions were right and how you always had to be hospitable to a brownie, but since Hannah didn’t live in the Sahara or the Scottish Highlands, she found herself gazing out the window for most of these lectures.

Towards the end of March, however, Warren announced a field trip that didn’t sound boring at all.

“We’re going to an eidolon farm,” he said. “We haven’t learned about eidolons yet, and that’s because I need you all to take them far more seriously than anything else we’ve studied this year. Eidolons aren’t threatening – I don’t want you to get that idea – but they are found all over the world, and you’re at the age where you’re starting to become susceptible to them. We want to make sure that if you ever see one outside an eidolon farm, you’ll know what to do. And you won’t get a shock, which is really the most important thing as far as eidolons are concerned.”

Eidolon farms, Hannah knew, were places where all the worst kinds of supernatural creatures were rounded up and locked away so that they couldn’t hurt anyone. They always had more eidolons than anything else, since they were so widespread, and they’d become famous for that, even though eidolons were less dangerous than anything else the farms contained. They weren’t like zoos, because not everybody could go and see them.You had to get permission, and if you were under eighteen, you had to come withan adult. Hannah had never been to an eidolon farm before.

Her mother’s face tightened when Hannah showed her the permission form, but she signed it. “Don’t bring an eidolon home as a pet, okay? I can’t stand them.”

“Wait, have you seen one before?” said Hannah enthusiastically. “Outside of an eidolon farm?”

“Help me with dinner,” said her mother. And she wouldn’t elaborate, no matter how hard Hannah tried to make her.