No way in hell am I calling my parents.

Mikayla and Finn are watching me go--I can feel their eyes on my back, like twin lasers. I think I wanted her to come after me, but I'm not sure anymore. Relief fills my lungs when she's out of eyesight, which just about rejects that hypothesis, but when I exhale, the air I breathe in is unseasonably cold, tinged with my own adrenaline. The air is beating around me, my backpack is so light that it feels like it's been filled with feathers, and instinct points me back home. I can see the future lit up before me, feel its warm hands around my neck, and I carefully walk the streets, every light in the houses like a white eye. The sun disappears behind clouds, as if reluctant to accompany me, and I begin to accelerate. When I hit the large roads at the end of town, next to the winding paths where the affluent families build their sprawling houses, I'm already running.

I can't get onto four feet, but I find a gait somewhere between man and beast, muscle straining in my body as it tries to find an equilibrium, pushes it, drives me forwards. I'm running up a hill, out of the view of the road (I can smell the asphalt from here. I can smell carrion and smoke and exhaust and metal on the roof of my mouth), but it feels like hurtling straight down. I have passed these roads a hundred times in dreams, hundreds more in reality, and I know the trees. They stand like giant racks of antlers, the kind mortal animals could only imagine, and I'm certain I know the mythology of other species. It's been proven that animals dream. I'm imagining deer and what they see in the woods, recasting the trees as dead stags, their corpses tilted upwards so one antler rises from the ground, grows out of them and consumes the body.

Derrick, you're entirely delirious right now.

There are animals nearby, just out of view, save for an exceptionally brave squirrel and a bird who knows I can't get to it. White feathers. The pain sets on again. My breath practically stops and my throat dries up, which is enough to make my whole face burn with pain. I remember you choking. I couldn't forget it.

I am half a mile into the woods, alone, at least an hour from my house, and there's no service for miles. I could be in legitimate trouble right now... from who? Who cares? The government is more concerned about you than your parents, and that's only because you're dangerous.

Damnit.

We used to have coping mechanisms for episodes like these, when we just wanted to get out, but there was nowhere to get out (at the time this seemed worse, but I don't think we knew what we would do if there were no box to constrain us anyways). Most of our methods for handling ourselves involved each other. I am walking through the forest with the left side of my body torn clean away, raw to the world.

"Sorry," I say, hunger bristling at the pit of my stomach. "Sorry, Amy."

Amy's not listening. You're somewhere you can't hear me.

I approach the back end of my--our--my parent's property, which is marked by barbed wire. I move to the singular toppled fencepost, an old friend of mine, and step over. This makes the whole fence ineffective, of course, but I'd imagine my parents stopped maintaining it when there was no longer anything to keep out. There are no hoboes in this neck of the wood, so people have never been a problem, but there are... other unsavory things out there.

The back door is locked. The front door is also locked. The side door is locked. All the back up keys have been removed. I ring the doorbell once, tentatively, and nothing happens. I ring it again, and realize that no sound is echoing in the front hall. I slam my fist into the door, then draw it back with a sharp inhale, dozens of repercussions for scratching the door down like a dirty animal playing in my head.

There's a hose out back, in the garden.

I bend my head down and run the water through my mouth, gulping down as much as my throat can handle until my body gives up on me, bloated with tasteless, cold nothing, and begins begging for food again.

A deer pokes its head close to my face, likely aware the fence is down and its favorite object of ridicule is back in the area.

"I told you to leave me alone."

Predator instinct coils in my stomach. The deer lowers its head, as if to say, at your service, but instead of leaving, it turns a circle in the yard and returns, pushing over one of my mom's mint plants, which I catch before it can break against the pavement of our garden patio.

"Get out of I'll eat you." I say.

The deer widens its big, sad eyes.

"Seriously. Leave." I repeat.

The deer steps slowly away. I raise a hand, tipped with claws, and it bolts for it.

I stay up with my head pressed to the back door, the hellish glare of the porch light staring down at me with unbridled contempt. Of course the deer are back tonight. I don't know what they could possibly want. No one has ever done two quests. They've used me up. I'm done.

I'm so done.

Luckily, I'm also used to starvation, so I press myself against the wall, use my backpack as a pillow, and manage to fall half-asleep.

I'd love to tell you I dreamed about my quest or something equally dramatic, lived it out in glorious, sepia-toned detail, but I didn't. My dreams after the experimentation are nothing but sensation and memories I didn't live through of woods I've never entered, like my subconscious mind forgetting that it's human, and they scare the crap out of me.

Instead, I mull in half-conscious delirium, turning the things I do remember over in my head until they pass for dreams.

Your laugh.

My earliest memories: sitting in the back of a car, looking out the window as endless landscapes past us. Nature in dominion over all the earth.

My parents' first fight after I got back:

"They turned our son into some kind of wolf mutant-"

"Fox."

"Of course," she says. "Of course."

The of course, of course, follows me everywhere, the teasing, sly irony of it.

My breath catches. Part of me begins begging open the door tear it off the hinges knock until they have to open open it and I tilt my head to ignore it. It's not always the fox that wants things out of me.

Fuck, a more distinctly human part of me argues, we're going to be so dead for school tomorrow.

Can't argue with that.