Get It 2

Mom’s hands are still on my shoulders, thumbs tracing slow circles like she’s soothing a child she’s about to dismantle. “You remember what happened last time,” she says, and it’s not a question—it’s the key to every lock that’s ever been put on me.

I do remember. I wish I didn’t, but the memory has teeth and uses them nightly. “I was eight, Mom.”

“You were eight, and you killed someone.” She lets that sit between us, lets it do its work while her eyes stay soft and patient and absolutely merciless.

“Imagine what you’d do now if that wolf got loose in front of a pack that already thinks you’re nothing.” Her voice doesn’t rise—it never rises. “They wouldn’t just exile us, Kylie. They’d put you down.” She says it gently, the way a doctor reads a terminal chart—kind voice, killing words.

My stomach folds in on itself. I should be used to this by now—the careful dismantling, the love that leaves bruises in places nobody sees.

“I didn’t shift today.” My voice comes out thinner than I want it to. “I didn’t even come close.”

“Close isn’t about shifting.” She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear like I’m still small, still hers to arrange. “Close is someone noticing you exist.”

I want to argue. My jaw works around three different sentences and swallows every one because she’s not entirely wrong, and that’s what makes me want to drive my fist through the cabinet—her cage is built on a foundation of something real and I can never dig my way out of it.

“I’ll be more careful,” I say. The words taste like surrender, like swallowing glass and calling it medicine.

“You’ll be invisible.” She picks up her tea from the counter like the conversation is already settled, like she’s won and the rest is formality. “Not more careful—invisible. There’s a difference, and you need to learn it fast.” Her eyes don’t blink.

She walks toward her bedroom without waiting for my answer. The click of her door is the only punctuation she needs, and I stand in the kitchen with my palms still raw from the track and my chest so tight every breath comes shallow and wrong.

This is her gift. Packaging devastation as devotion—making me feel like the monster and the burden and the loved thing all at once, so I can’t hate her without hating myself in the same breath.

I go upstairs once my legs decide to cooperate. My room is the only space in this house that doesn’t belong to her performance—small, beige, exactly what a wolfless nobody would deserve.

I pull the bottom drawer open and reach under the folded sweaters until my fingers find the leather cord. Dad’s pendant—a wolf tooth on a strip of rawhide, worn glassy-smooth from years against his chest before it ended up hidden at the bottom of mine.

He died when I was eight. Border skirmish, quick and stupid, the kind of death the pack calls “honorable” so they don’t have to call it what it actually was—a waste of a man who deserved a longer story.

At least, that’s what Mom made them think. She never let them linger on me long enough, because then the truth becomes painfully clear—the fact that I killed my own father.

I wrap the cord around my knuckles and press the tooth into my palm until it leaves a crescent-shaped dent. He never once made me feel like a bomb with a fraying wire—but only because he didn’t know that I am.

Mom rewrote that story so completely that sometimes I wonder if I invented him gentler than he really was. But the pendant is real, and the worn-smooth curve under my thumb is real, and I hold both until my hands stop shaking and the ceiling stops blurring above me.

Morning comes and the academy greets me like an immune system recognizing a threat. Yesterday’s trial rankings are posted on the main corridor board—my name near the bottom like a bruise everyone can point to.

“Hey, thirty-one,” someone calls from a cluster by the lockers. Low laughter follows, and I keep walking without turning my head.

In combat theory, the instructor splits us into groups of four. Every cluster fills around me the way water avoids oil—naturally, effortlessly, like the exclusion is just physics doing its job.

I end up at the back table alone, textbook open to defensive formations, empty chairs flanking me like a quarantine perimeter. The instructor doesn’t notice, or performs not noticing, which doesn’t really matter to me.

“Oh, Kylie.” Mina appears at my table like a sunshine in human form—it kills with the same indifference, her smile bright enough to cause damage.

“You’re all alone? That’s so sad—let me see if anyone has room.” She turns to the classroom with exaggerated concern, scanning clusters that are conveniently full.

Nobody moves. Nobody was ever going to move—this is theater, and I’m the prop she built her whole scene around.

“I’m fine here.” I tap the open page and give her the world’s least interested shrug. “Plenty of space, great lighting, very exclusive seating.”

Her smile tightens a fraction. She leans down, voice dropping below classroom volume so it’s just for us—intimate, like she’s doing me a kindness by saying it quietly. “You’re so brave, honestly. If I had to do all of this without a wolf, I think I’d just stop showing up.”

The suggestion in it isn’t subtle. My fingers go rigid against the page, three responses stacked behind my teeth, each one a small grenade—because sharp means memorable, and memorable means visible, and visible is the thing I was forbidden from being fourteen hours ago and thirteen years ago.

“Noted,” I say—flat, bored, the voice of someone who couldn’t possibly be cut open by a girl like Mina Walker.

She drifts back to her circle and my name folds into their whispered laughter like a punchline everyone rehearsed while I wasn’t in the room. My hand cramps around my pen hard enough that my knuckles go white.

I release it one finger at a time and go back to reading about formations I’ll never be permitted to use. The words swim and resettle on the page.

The rest of the day sets the pattern in stone. Nobody sits with me at lunch—the chairs on either side stay empty like contamination zones—and two girls relocate their bags when I approach the library tables without a word exchanged.

During the afternoon conditioning run, a shoulder drives into mine hard enough to send me stumbling off the track. When I look back, every face is forward, eyes fixed on the middle distance—nothing happened, nobody saw a thing.

I walk home alone, replaying every moment for cracks in my invisibility, turning them over until my skull aches from it. Dad’s pendant sits under my shirt, warm against my sternum, the only steady thing pressing back against a life that’s closing around me, and one I definitely didn’t deserve to keep.