They were staring at her. Tom and Andrew and her parents.

Hannah shifted in Tom’s bed. Having everyone lean over her like that made her feel as small as if she was still a wolf.

“Hey,” said Andrew softly.

“Hannah,” whispered her father. “Do you remember what happened?”

Hannah pulled the covers over her head, creating a dark, private tent. “Leave me alone,” she said. “My head hurts.”

“David is waiting for us to call back,” said her mother. Her voice reminded Hannah of terrible things. “He needs to know what you remember.”

“Do you remember eating my homework?” said Tom. “Because you literally ate my homework. Not that I don’t appreciate it, but –”

“Go away,” said Hannah. Her stomach was doing something funny, something painful, and the only way to make it stop was to make them all leave. The sooner the better.

“What do you remember, Han?” said her father. His voice was both hard and pleading, and it made her want to slap him. “Please.”

Hannah stayed under the covers. She kept her mouth closed. She shut her eyes so tightly that tiny pink sparks danced behind her pupils.

“We could go over what happened,” offered Andrew. “I’m sure you remember coming into our room and hanging out for a while, right?”

Everyone waited.

“I guess,” muttered Hannah finally.

“You guess you remember, or you do remember?” said her father.

Hannah glared from beneath the covers. “I remember.”

“And then, after a few minutes, you – you changed,” said Andrew.

“Changed,” said Hannah, feigning blankness.

“You, um – I don’t know if you remember. We had to get Dad. We had to shut you in, shove Mom’s wardrobe against the door –”

“Do you remember that?” whispered her mother.

Hannah listened to the sound of her own breathing for a few long seconds. Inside the tent, it was louder than any of her family’s voices.

“Hannah,” said her father.

“No.”

“No, you don’t remember, or no, you’re not going to answer my question?” He was clearly getting frustrated; she allowed herself to hate him more. “Because I don’t want to ground you again, but if you won’t answer me –”

Hannah swallowed. “I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember anything?”

“My legs felt weird.”

“Weird how?”

“Kind of – prickly?”

“Okay,” said her father. “And… you don’t remember anything after the prickly feeling?”

Hannah did not want to answer, but her mother’s hands were lifting her tent from her face, and the light burned her eyes, and she knew they would make her.

She shook her head.

“Okay… okay. Do you remember when you went back to normal? Because, uh – clearly you did.” He gestured at the wastebasket, and the flurry of feathers scattered around it. Hannah looked quickly away.

“It was only fifteen minutes later,” lied Hannah. “I saw Andrew’s clock.”

“Fifteen minutes,” murmured her mother, and Hannah’s stomach seared.

“You’re sure you took all your pills this month?” said her father. “Every day?”

“Max, I told you – we keep a calendar for that – I wouldn’t be stupid enough to let her miss a dose –”

For the second time, Hannah thought she saw a dark, foreign shape hovering behind her mother. But as before, when she tried to look at it more carefully, it was gone.

Her father’s voice went even harder. “You never threw a pill down the toilet? Hid one under your plate?”

“No.” She tried to make this apparent in the way she glowered at him. He flinched, which pleased her.

“You’re sure.”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” said her father slowly. “Well, that’s probably enough for now. Go back to sleep. Try to relax. We’ll talk about this later. It’s Christmas, and God knows we have enough to do already.”

***

Daniel turned out to be burly, brown-haired, and constantly smiling. Hannah liked him almost as much as Aunt Marissa seemed to. When Christmas morning arrived, he and Aunt Marissa were the first adults awake. Gulliver and Moe ran ahead in their pajama feet, yelping with excitement. Hannah trailed behind, reminding herself that she was too old for such things now.

“Look inside your stocking,” said Daniel, riffling Hannah’s hair. “I know you probably don’t believe in Santa anymore, but someone left some good stuff in there.”

Hannah looked. Aunt Marissa’s visit had resulted in the best Christmas stocking she had seen in years. There were foil-wrapped cookies the size of her face, lumps of coal spun from sugar, twenty dollars wrapped in a pair of fuzzy socks, a new set of noise-blocking headphones for her iPod. Even the bog-standard Christmas clementines were so juicy that one bite made liquid dribble down her chin.

“Merry Christmas,” said Aunt Marissa, giving her a warm, rib-crushing hug, the kind she always associated with being tiny and breathless in Wisconsin.

Hannah had no idea if Aunt Marissa knew what had happened on the full moon. After emerging from Tom’s bed on Christmas Eve, Hannah had watched her for a little while, trying to determine whether someone had told her. But Aunt Marissa seemed exactly like she always did, plus a little bit extra that Hannah supposed came from Daniel. If Aunt Marissa knew, then either she didn’t care, or she was doing a very good job of pretending she didn’t. Which only strengthened her place in Hannah’s mind as her favorite relative.

Breakfast was ready by the time her parents made their way downstairs. Hannah had forgotten the way Aunt Marissa’s waffles melted into buttery oblivion on the tip of her tongue. She ate five in quick succession, giving her parents a wide and careless grin every time they glanced over at her. She wanted them to know that she was ignoring the worry lines in their foreheads.

Presents were next. Her mother had given her the hair chalk she had wanted – Hannah had jubilant visions of arriving at school with different colored streaks in her hair every day of the week. She got a ukulele from Tom (“I’ll teach you,” he said), and a telescope from Andrew (“There’s a meteor shower this August. We’ll watch it together.”) With help from Aunt Marissa, Gulliver and Moe had even pitched in to get her a new box set of 1940s film noir.

Aunt Marissa gave Hannah her present in private. It was a cell phone. And not just any phone, either – it was a fancy one, with a metallic yellow case she could snap on and off. The kind of phone that Hannah knew Tom and Andrew coveted. She wasn’t even supposed to have a phone until she started high school.

Hannah beamed.

“I figure it’s lonely, sometimes, being the only girl,” said Aunt Marissa. “I want you to know you can call me whenever you feel like it. About anything, okay? School, friends, your smelly brothers, the way your dad pretends he doesn’t snore when he really sounds like a foghorn – anything at all.”

Hannah called her right then and there. Aunt Marissa had her own phone in her pocket, and it was identical to Hannah’s right down to the phone case, except that it was blue.

She spent the rest of the day gloatingly showing her phone off, dancing to Christmas music with Moe, beating Andrew and Daniel at video games, being bad at the ukulele with Tom. She pretended it would last.

Aunt Marissa and Daniel left for Wisconsin in the evening. Hannah slept with her new phone on her night table, one hand curled around it.

***

Rose and David called the next morning. Hannah’s mother ordered her to take a walk so she couldn’t eavesdrop and then shut herself in her room. Hannah paced the loop that led from their house to Moe’s favorite playground, kicking at stones and fiddling with her hair.

By the time she was allowed back home, it was after noon. Her brothers must have been sent away – there was no sign of any of them. Her parents sat her down at the dining room table, looking grim.

“What?” said Hannah, trying to ignore the trepidation she felt. “What did they say? It was just a fluke, right?”

“Maybe,” said her mother, and this time there was no hiding it: There was a shadow wafting around her head, identical to the ones Hannah had seen at Pendoggett Farm. “But they think it’s more likely that there’s something wrong with the way you’re reacting to the Moon Pill.”

Hannah looked away from her mother and the eidolon. If she didn’t see it, she didn’t have to think about it.

“There’s a name for what happened,” said her father. “They’re called lycanthropic episodes. Nobody really knows what triggers them – I want to make sure you know that this isn’t your fault. I’m sorry if I insinuated that. The important thing is that we nip this in the bud.”

Hannah smiled until her eyes bulged. Anything to make him stop looking at her like that.

“Okay, so…?”

“There’s – well. There are laws in place – things that people need to do, in order to be allowed to transform at home again. Rose and David can explain it to you.”

“No,” said Hannah. “Tell me now.”

Her father’s eyebrows moved so close together that all Hannah could see of them was a woolly, wrinkled line.

“The law… it doesn’t really make sense; not from a medical perspective. The only way to fix this is for Rose and David to change your dose and then check you for the next few months, to make sure it’s working. But when the Moon Pill was being legislated –”

Hannah could still see the eidolon from the corner of her eye. She turned her head even further.

“What?”

“A lot of people out there don’t really understand lycanthropy.” Her father rubbed at his eyes, as if that might magically make everything less miserable. “When the Moon Pill was being legislated, a lot of people said they wouldn’t vote for it until the proposed law was amended. They worried that Type Threes who have these episodes could be – well, they were worried that people wouldn’t be safe. That the best solution would be to mandate a hospital stay.” He cleared his throat hastily. “Even though – as we all know – an untransformed Type Three is a danger to nobody. But people can be cowardly.”

“So, that means what, exactly?”

Hannah had a pretty good idea of what it meant, but she wanted to make him say it.

“I don’t want to – look. It’s not as bad as it sounds. A month.”

She did not look at him. “A month.”

“Yes. One month in the hospital. We all agreed that you don’t have to go until tomorrow. Your teachers will keep you caught up – they’ll send you your homework. You’ll be able to Skype in for certain classes. Four weeks, and then it’s over.” He tried to catch her eye. “You’ll be back before you know it.”

Hannah thought for a moment. Under the table, the fingernails on her left hand dug into the palm of her right. The pain helped her breathe.

“Well,” she said, as cheerfully as she could. “I guess I’d better go pack.”

Her parents stared after her as she pushed in her chair and trotted up to her room. She gave them a little wave and hummed as she mounted the stairs. Her mother’s eidolon drifted back and forth, as if to give her a wave in return.

She didn’t think she had ever been so angry.