All Its Teeth

The metal of the bleachers was cold through my jeans, a familiar, dull ache that seemed to seep into my bones. Down on the field, the Beacon Hills High lacrosse team ran drills, a chaotic scramble of shouting boys and the hollow thwack of plastic on plastic. I wasn't really watching the game. I was watching him.

Scott McCall. Team captain. He moved differently from the others. While the rest of the team ran with a kind of clumsy, teenage desperation, all flailing limbs and wasted energy, Scott’s movements were economical. Efficient. There was a coiled tension in the way he held himself, even at a distance. He ran low to the ground, his lacrosse stick an extension of his arm, his focus so absolute it was unnerving. It wasn't the focus of an athlete trying to win; it was the focus of a predator.

They were playing shirts versus skins, and he was skins. The autumn air was cool, but a fine sheen of sweat coated his back, catching the weak afternoon light and defining the hard planes of muscle that shifted beneath his skin. I watched the sharp line of his spine, the way his shoulder blades moved like tectonic plates when he pivoted. He never seemed to get tired. He just kept going, a relentless engine of muscle and will.

I noticed I wasn't the only one who saw it. The other players gave him a wide berth. When he had the ball, they didn’t so much try to defend against him as they tried to get out of his way. A freshman, probably terrified of making a mistake, fumbled a pass when Scott turned his attention on him. The kid froze for a half-second, his face pale, before scrambling for the ball. Scott didn't say anything. He didn't have to. He just looked, and the space around him cleared. It wasn’t respect, not exactly. It was closer to fear. A kind of reverence reserved for things that are beautiful and dangerous in equal measure.

From my seat, I could see the other girls dotted along the bleachers, their conversations hushed when he was near our side of the field. They looked at him with a simple, uncomplicated hunger. They saw the dark hair, the sharp jawline, the body built for things high school boys weren't supposed to know how to do yet. They saw the captain of the lacrosse team. I saw something else. I saw the way his eyes scanned the field, missing nothing, the stillness in his body before he exploded into motion. It was unnatural.

He scored, a brutal, efficient shot that slammed into the back of the net. There was no celebration. No triumphant yell. He just stopped, his chest heaving, and turned to walk back to the center line. His face was a blank mask of intensity. It was that lack of emotion that was the most unsettling part. It was as if the game, the other players, the entire world outside of his own physical experience, simply didn't exist. He wasn't playing with them. He was hunting among them. And I sat there on the cold metal, unable to look away, feeling a quiet, cold thread of something unspooling in my stomach. It wasn't excitement. It was recognition.

The smell of burnt coffee and stale grease clung to my clothes within minutes of my shift starting. At Beacon Hill Diner, everything was sticky. The vinyl on the booth seats, the menus, the counters I was supposed to be wiping down. I moved through the motions, refilling ketchup bottles and stacking clean mugs, my mind a million miles away, replaying the image of Scott McCall’s back, slick with sweat.

A low murmur of conversation came from the corner booth. Two old men in flannel shirts, regulars who nursed the same cups of coffee for hours. I was only half-listening, tuning out the usual complaints about property taxes and the high school football team’s abysmal season. Then I caught the words.

“—tore it to pieces. Dale from the forestry service said he’s never seen anything like it.”

“A bear, maybe? Coming down from the mountains.”

“No bear does that. Not like that. It was… clean. Too clean.”

The preserve. They were talking about the preserve again. It was the third time this month. Another hiker, some tourist who’d wandered off the marked path. The official story was always a mountain lion or a bear, but the stories people told in here were different. They spoke in low tones, leaning over their chipped ceramic mugs, their words laced with a kind of grim satisfaction. The woods around Beacon Hills had always had a reputation, and these attacks felt like a confirmation of something they’d always known.

The bell over the door chimed, a harsh, tinny sound that made me look up.

It was my father. He stood there for a moment, framed in the doorway, the setting sun backlighting his Sheriff’s uniform. He looked tired. It wasn't just the end-of-a-long-day tired; it was a deeper exhaustion, something that had settled into his bones after my mother died and never left. His shoulders slumped, pulling the fabric of his uniform taut across his back. His face was pale, his eyes scanning the diner with a professional vacancy that didn't quite hide the weariness underneath.

Our eyes met for a fraction of a second. I felt a familiar, stupid little leap of hope in my chest. I stopped wiping the counter. I waited for a nod, a small smile, any acknowledgement that I was his daughter and not just another part of the scenery.

He looked right through me.

His gaze slid past my face and settled on an empty booth by the window. He walked over, his boots making heavy, deliberate sounds on the linoleum. He slid onto the vinyl seat, the movement stiff. He picked up a menu, holding it with both hands, his knuckles white. He stared at it intently, as if it held the answers to something important.

I stood there behind the counter, my hand still holding the damp rag, the smell of bleach sharp in my nose. A hot, tight feeling started in my throat. He knew I worked here. He knew this was my shift. He was making a point. Since Mom, he didn't know what to do with me. He saw her face when he looked at me, I think. Or maybe he just saw a problem he couldn’t solve with a warning or a pair of handcuffs. A moody teenage girl. A disappointment.

Brenda, the diner’s owner, bustled past me. “Go take the Sheriff’s order, Ash,” she said, not looking up from the ticket she was reading.

“He’ll wave if he needs something,” I said, my voice flat.

Brenda gave me a sharp look, but my father saved me from having to explain. He raised a single finger, not looking up from his menu, and beckoned Brenda over. He didn't want me. He wanted her.

She went, her pen and pad ready. I turned my back to them, facing the coffee machines, and started wiping down the clean steel. I could hear his voice, a low rumble, ordering a black coffee. Nothing else. I didn't have to look to know the expression on his face. It would be closed off, professional. The Sheriff. Not my father.

The men in the corner were still talking.

“Whatever it is,” one of them said, his voice dropping lower, “it’s staying in the preserve. For now.”

I gripped the edge of the counter. The cold metal bit into my palms. I thought of the woods bordering our backyard, the deep, impenetrable darkness of them at night. And I thought of Scott McCall, his unnatural grace on the field, the way the other boys feared him. The two thoughts connected in my mind, a sudden, sharp click. A wildness in the woods, a wildness in a boy. And my father, the man trying to hold a line against it all, who couldn't even look at his own daughter.

He came home an hour after my shift ended. I heard the front door open and close, the soft click of the deadbolt. Heard his footsteps on the stairs, heavy and slow. He didn't check on me. His door closed at the end of the hall, another soft click, and then there was only the silence of the house settling around us. Two separate people living in the same set of rooms, moving around each other like ghosts.

I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. The faint glow of a streetlamp filtered through my thin curtains, casting long, distorted shadows across the room. Outside, the night was alive with its own quiet rhythm. The drone of crickets, the rustle of leaves in a breeze that was getting colder. Our house backed right up against the Beacon Hills Preserve, and most nights the sounds were a kind of white noise, a familiar lullaby of a town pressed up against something wild.

I was thinking about the way his back had looked, the muscles shifting under his skin. The absolute, unnerving focus. I thought about my father’s face in the diner, how it had been easier for him to look at a menu than at me. The two images felt connected in a way that made no sense, a loneliness in me that recognized a loneliness in them, though theirs was a different kind. One was the loneliness of a predator, the other of a man who had lost his way.

That’s when I heard it.

It started low, a deep vibration that seemed to come from the ground itself, felt more than heard. Then it rose, a long, guttural sound that tore through the quiet hum of the night. It wasn't the yipping of a coyote or the bark of a dog. This was bigger. Deeper. It was a sound full of aching loss and a terrible, violent power. A howl.

It wasn't miles away on some distant ridge. It was close. In the trees just beyond our fence.

My body went rigid. Every muscle locked. A cold wave washed over my skin, raising goosebumps on my arms and the back of my neck. The sound ended, and the silence it left behind was heavier, more threatening than before. I held my breath, listening. My heart was a frantic, hard thing against my ribs. I thought of the men in the diner, their low voices. Tore it to pieces. Too clean.

I should have been scared. A part of me was. The primal, animal part of my brain was screaming at me to pull the covers over my head, to hide, to make myself small and invisible. It was the sensible reaction. There was something large and dangerous in the woods behind my house.

But another part of me, a part I didn't recognize, wasn't scared. It was listening.

The sound had been one of profound loneliness, but it was also a declaration. I am here. It was a sound of absolute, untamed freedom. It was a call that expected no answer.

An involuntary shiver went through me, but it wasn’t just from the cold or the fear. It was something else, a strange, deep thrum of resonance. The sound had scraped against something inside me, a part of myself I kept locked down and quiet. The part that felt trapped in the sticky diner, in the silent house with my father, in the metal bleachers watching a life I wasn't a part of.

The howl had been a sound of pure existence, stripped of all politeness and expectation. And it pulled at me. It was a terrifying, exhilarating feeling, like standing on the edge of a cliff and feeling the urge to step forward instead of back.

I slid out of bed, my bare feet silent on the wooden floor. I crept to the window, pushing aside the curtain just enough to see out. The backyard was bathed in weak moonlight, the line of trees a wall of impenetrable black. I couldn't see anything. But I could feel it. A presence.

My mind, unbidden, went back to the lacrosse field. To Scott McCall. The way he moved, the way the other boys feared him. The way he looked when he scored, not with triumph, but with a kind of grim finality. The wildness I’d sensed in him.

I stood at the window for a long time, my breath fogging the cold glass. I was waiting. Hoping to hear it again. The fear was still there, a cold knot in my stomach. But now it was tangled up with a sharp, inexplicable longing. I wanted to know what it was. I wanted to know what it felt like to make a sound like that, a sound that could hold so much pain and so much power all at once.

The next morning, the memory of the howl felt like a dream. The world was aggressively normal. The sun was too bright, the toast was too dry, and my father had already left for work, leaving behind only a dirty coffee cup in the sink. The silence in the house was its usual, empty kind, not the charged, listening silence of the night before. I felt foolish for my reaction, for standing at the window like a character in a Gothic novel. It was a dog, I told myself. A big dog.

The feeling of normalcy held until third period. English with Mr. Harris was usually a reprieve, a quiet hour where I could get lost in someone else’s story and forget my own. I found my usual seat, third row from the front, and took out my copy of Wuthering Heights. The spine was cracked, the pages soft from use.

Mr. Harris was already writing on the board in his spiky, barely legible script. ‘The Byronic Hero. Brooding. Arrogant. Rebellious.’

I started copying the words into my notebook, the familiar scratch of my pen a comforting sound. Then the seat behind me scraped against the floor. I didn’t look. People were still filing in. But a warmth settled against my back, as if someone had opened a furnace door. It was a dense, living heat that penetrated the thin cotton of my shirt and the back of my plastic chair.

I stopped writing.

I knew, without having to turn around, that it was Scott McCall. He never sat back here. He usually sat in the last row, near the door, slumped in his seat as if the whole process of school was a physical burden.

I tried to focus on Mr. Harris, who had started his lecture. His voice was a familiar drone, but the words wouldn’t connect. The heat at my back was a constant, distracting pressure. It felt like a hand resting between my shoulder blades. I shifted, trying to create some space, but the warmth was pervasive. It seemed to radiate not just from his body, but from the very air around him.

Then I smelled it. It wasn’t cologne. It was something clean and elemental, like the air after a thunderstorm, and underneath that, the sharp, dark scent of pine needles crushed underfoot. It was the smell of the preserve after it rained.

My own breathing became a conscious effort. I could feel the rise and fall of my chest, and I was suddenly certain he could hear it. I was certain he could hear the frantic, uneven beat of my heart. I kept my eyes fixed on my notebook, on the words I had written. Brooding. Arrogant. Rebellious.

“Heathcliff is not a hero in the traditional sense,” Mr. Harris was saying. “He operates outside of society’s norms. He’s a force of nature, more elemental than human. His passion isn’t gentle; it’s a destructive, all-consuming thing.”

Behind me, there was a complete and total stillness. He wasn’t fidgeting. He wasn’t tapping a pen or turning a page. It was a heavy, watchful silence. The kind of silence a predator makes when it’s observing its prey. The thought came out of nowhere and made the skin on my arms prickle.

I tried to will my focus back to the lecture. I picked up my pen, my knuckles white. I stared at the blank page, but all I could think about was the boy sitting behind me. I could feel his presence as a physical weight. The air in the small space between us felt thick, charged with an energy that made the hairs on my neck stand up. My entire body was a tightly coiled spring.

I thought of the howl from last night. The loneliness of it, the raw power. The scent of pine and rain filled my head, and I imagined him standing in the dark woods, the sound tearing from his throat. The idea was insane. It was the kind of fantasy a bored, lonely girl would invent to make her life seem more interesting. And yet.

He shifted, just a fraction, and the leg of his desk bumped the back of my chair. The small jolt went through me like an electric current. I flinched, a small, involuntary movement. My pen slipped from my fingers and clattered onto the floor.

The sound was loud in the relative quiet of the classroom. A couple of people glanced over. My face burned. I stayed frozen for a second, my heart hammering.

I bent down to get it, keeping my head low, my hair falling forward to hide my face. As my fingers closed around the pen, I saw his shoes. Heavy black boots, scuffed and worn. They were planted flat on the floor, still. Unmoving.

I sat back up, my pulse throbbing in my ears. I didn't dare look back. I just sat there, rigid, feeling his gaze on the back of my head. The heat intensified, or maybe I was just imagining it. For the rest of the period, I didn’t hear another word Mr. Harris said. My entire universe had shrunk to the space of a few feet, to the warmth on my skin and the scent of the woods, and the unnerving, absolute stillness of the boy behind me. The bell was a shrill, violent sound that made me jump.

I gathered my books with clumsy, numb fingers, stuffing them into my bag without looking at them. I didn’t turn around. The chair behind me scraped back, and I felt the absence of his heat more acutely than I had felt its presence. I joined the flood of students pouring into the hallway, letting the current carry me, a body among bodies. The air was thick with cheap perfume and the smell of teenage sweat. Every accidental brush of a shoulder against mine felt like a violation. I just wanted to get to my car.

The student lot was a vast field of sun-beaten metal. My car, a faded blue sedan with a permanent dent in the passenger side door, was parked near the back, as usual. I walked with my head down, my keys clutched in my hand, the metal teeth digging into my palm. From a distance, I saw a flash of colour on my windshield and my stomach clenched. A ticket. My father’s face, tight with disappointment, flashed in my mind.

But as I got closer, I saw it wasn’t a slip of paper. It was a flower.

One single flower, tucked carefully under the rubber blade of the windshield wiper. I stopped a few feet from the bumper, staring. It was a deep, royal purple, the colour of a bruise. The petals were clustered together, forming a shape like a helmet or a monk’s hood. It was beautiful, but in a severe, almost menacing way. It wasn’t a friendly, open-faced daisy or a romantic rose. It was something else entirely. Secretive.

I looked around. Students were getting into cars, shouting to each other, peeling out of their parking spots with squealing tires. No one was looking at me. The gesture felt intensely private, yet here it was, on display for anyone to see. My face grew hot.

My fingers trembled slightly as I reached out and slid the stem from under the wiper. It was cool and smooth in my hand. The flower was perfect, not a single petal crushed or torn. There was no note. No explanation. Just this strange, silent offering.

A frantic energy seized me. I needed to know. My gaze swept the parking lot, scanning faces, looking for anyone who might be watching me. Nothing. I looked further, to the edges of the school property. The line of trees that bordered the athletic fields. The brick wall of the gymnasium, stained with graffiti.

And that’s when I saw him.

He was leaning against the wall, partially obscured by a concrete support pillar. Scott. He was alone, his arms crossed over his chest, his weight resting on one leg. He wasn’t trying to hide, but he wasn’t drawing attention to himself either. He was simply watching me.

I froze, the purple flower a cold weight in my hand. Our eyes met across the fifty yards of shimmering asphalt. The noise of the parking lot, the shouting and the car stereos, all of it seemed to recede into a dull, distant hum. There was only the vast, silent space between us.

His expression was perfectly blank. It held none of the arrogance he sometimes wore in the hallways, none of the feral intensity he had on the field. It was something else. A deep, unreadable stillness. He was looking at me, but it felt like he was looking into me, cataloging my reaction, my confusion, the slight tremor in my hand. It was the most unnerving thing I had ever felt. It was more intimate than a touch.

I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. I just stood there, pinned by his gaze, my heart beating a frantic, sick rhythm against my ribs. I felt exposed, as if he knew about the howl in the night, about the way my breath had caught in English class, about the deep, unnamed thing that had shivered through me in the dark of my bedroom.

He held my gaze for a long moment, an eternity. Then, with a slow, deliberate movement, he pushed himself off the wall. He didn’t smile or nod. He just gave me one last, lingering look, and then he turned and walked away, his long stride eating up the ground. He disappeared around the corner of the gym and was gone.

I was left alone in the noise and the sun, my breath coming in short, sharp bursts. I looked down at the flower in my hand. The name for it surfaced from the depths of my memory, a half-forgotten fact from a biology class. Wolfsbane. Aconite. A beautiful poison.

I finally managed to open my car door, my hand shaking so badly it took two tries to get the key in the lock. I slid onto the hot vinyl seat and placed the flower carefully on the passenger side, its purple head stark against the faded grey upholstery. It looked alien. Dangerous. I sat there for a long time without starting the engine, just staring at it. It was a question, and I had no idea what the answer was.