Fire Moon

    I can’t believe he didn’t know my middle name.  After all, we have been friends since middle school.  I hated my middle name. “BARBARA...BARBARA!” Nicky was laughing. “All this time I never knew your middle name was Barbara.  Little Miss Jordan Barbara Cross.”     I shot him an evil glare. “Oh c’mon, it’s not that bad,” he started to sense he was being irritating. “Whatever, Nicky!” I was trying to tease him back by putting an emphasis on ‘Nicky’ but it didn’t bother him when I called him that anymore.       I once heard his mom call him ‘Nicky’ and then I just started doing it.  No one else calls him that. His real name is Nikolai, Nikolai Ellis Hote, and he was basically my only friend.     We were quite the pair.  He was tall and gangly.  His mom still cut his hair and it was really short.  He had green glasses and always wore some sort of printed t-shirt that had a comic book character on it.  He was pale.  We were both pale because we never went outside.  We enjoyed being inside watching tv or gaming.  Nicky’s poor jeans always looked too short for him because he was still growing.  I on the other hand was average height.  Five foot seven and I was definitely not the super thin toothpick that Nicky was.  He was almost too thin but I swear he ate more food than me. I was self-conscious about my body.  I had thick thighs and my butt was ‘filling out’ as my grandmother put it nicely.  My stomach was not flat and I didn’t have much muscle tone anywhere.  I had brown wavy -sometimes frizzy- hair.  I did like my eyes though.  They were light blue like everyone else in my family.   “Jordan?” he said realizing he was annoying me. “Okay, no more Barbara, I’m done,” he said still chuckling.     It was almost the middle of June and I was growing more anxious every day.  I go to school on the reservation, like everyone else in our pack, and it’s a bit different than a public high school.  We go to school starting in the late fall and continue until two days before the Summer Solstice.  Which is around the twenty-second of June, or at least it is this year.  I’m a senior and the graduation ceremony will be on the day of the Summer Solstice.  It’s a big celebration for our whole pack.     Typically, by the time the solstice rolls around every graduating senior is eighteen years old already.  Which means that they are ready to officially pledge their allegiance to the pack.  The night of the solstice triggers their first shift.  Shift into a werewolf.  It can also be triggered for the first time by some other phenomena but it’s unlikely.  Summer Solstice. 18. Shift.     And I was dreading it. “Jordan? Hello? Are you ready to play?” Nicky asked.     Nicky was trying to snap me out of my trance.  He had already got the Nintendo set up and placed the controller in my lap.  “I suck at Rainbow Road!” I said when he was selecting a world on Mario Kart.     Nicky and I played against each other for a couple of hours until he realized it was almost ten o’clock in the evening.  “Crap, I gotta go now, my mom is still making me come home by ten,” he jumped up and said.     He stretched and then farted. “Ew, gross,” I said.     He farted again before opening the door to walk out.  I wanted to laugh but he had been teasing me all night and I was over it.  I could only take so many jokes and farts from him. “Later, Jordan.” “Later, Nicky.”    *      The beeping of the alarm on my phone woke me up.  Just five more days, Jordan. I told myself while forcing my way out of my bed.      After I showered, got dressed, and did my hair, I plotted down the stairs to the kitchen.  Like any other day, my grandfather was sitting at the head of the table in the kitchen scrolling on his phone and drinking coffee.  My grandmother was sitting beside him scrolling through her phone as well while drinking tea.  They didn’t look old enough to be grandparents if you asked me and they definitely did not act like it.  “Good morning, Jordie,” my grandfather said looking up from his phone. “Hey, Gramps,” he was ‘Gramps’ to me but he was known to whole pack as Alpha Josiah Cross.      I mean, yeah, he was definitely an older guy but he could still put fear into you.  Since he was still the Alpha, he was still channeling the energy and strength from being the leader of the pack.  Once you pledge yourself to the pack then you are connected to everyone in it.  You can better sense your packmates emotions and communicate in different ways.     Truth be told, in an ideal situation he wouldn’t be the Alpha anymore. The role of Alpha takes its toll on the person.  That’s why it is meant to be passed onto the Alpha’s son when he becomes an adult.  My dad got very ill when I was a young girl and while he was incapacitated my dad appointed my grandfather as the acting Alpha of our pack.  That responsibility would have normally fell to my dad’s Beta but he was brand new to his Beta role at the time and wasn’t ready.  My grandfather immediately accepted because it had only been about three years since he retired and my grandmother was still the pack’s Luna.  No one expected my dad to pass away.  Least of all my grandparents.      Without an Alpha, my grandfather just stayed in the role.  Which was a constant reminder of my dad’s death.  A Beta can’t take the over the role of Alpha officially because they do not have Alpha blood, but they can step in for short period of time.  The Luna role, the female leader of the pack that is only second to the Alpha, belonged to my grandma because my mother passed away when I was born and she never had the chance to have a Luna ceremony and formally accept the role.  My dad was the only child my grandparents had so given all those circumstances, they had to wait for a new Alpha to come of age.     The plan was for me to find my mate, hopefully someone with Alpha blood, and for us to lead the pack and finally relieve my grandparents of their extended commitment.  No pressure.  “Here you go, Jordan, I wrapped up your breakfast so you can take it with you,” Marie said as she handed me a sandwich in a napkin.      Marie was one of my grandparents’ employed pack members that managed the pack house.  She was about ten years younger than my grandmother.  She’d been around for as long as I could remember.  She helped raise me just like most of the other pack members that worked for us in the house.      It is traditional to try to provide jobs within your pack and on your own reservation as Alpha.  Some wolves don’t get along in society and some would rather not leave the reservation.  I would say almost three-fourths of the pack lives on the rez.  The rest live on their own or in different cities.  There are plenty of jobs on here or at the companies that are owned by my family. “Bye guys, love ya,” I turned and hurried out the door. *     Class.  Hated them all probably because I didn’t have any friends in my morning classes.  I didn’t really have any friends at all.  Being the Alpha’s granddaughter, you’d think I would be popular but that wasn’t the case.  With everything that had happened in my life it made me kind of an outcast and gave people a lot to talk about.  It had been what, almost fifteen years since this huge tragedy in my life and in the pack’s life happened?  I wish they would move on but nope.  Now everyone had even more things to whisper about with the solstice coming up.  The pressure would be on for me to find an alpha mate or my family would be scrambling to come up with a plan B.  I wasn’t sure what the plan B would entail or if they even had one.     The bell had rung and I was still sitting at my desk.  Everyone else had left minus Mr. Tooley who let out a fake cough.  I gathered my things and headed down the hallway.      The hallway was covered in banners and flyers that had to do with graduation and the Summer Solstice.  Walking by them every day reminded me of the approaching events.  I wanted to vomit from anxiety as I turned down another hallway to get to the cafeteria.  I always got nervous to the point of getting sick when I would have to attend a large event.  Even if I was just standing beside my grandparents while they spoke, I was still in front of a crowd of people who had nothing to do but stare at me.  It was torture.     I went to the lunch line and I got a carton of milk.  I wasn’t feeling hungry.  I awkwardly looked around for Nicky. He wasn’t in the cafeteria so I looked out the windows and saw him in the courtyard.  “Why are you out here?” “It smells better out here than in there.  Plus no one cares if you are on your phone out here,” Nicky replied. “I didn’t notice any weird smell inside,” “You probably didn’t but I did, I think my senses are getting stronger,” he was referring to the fact that he was about to turn eighteen on Sunday.  Turning eighteen and gaining your werewolf abilities.  My birthday is shortly after Nicky’s but I didn’t feel any different.    “Oh, okay sure, you’re not eighteen yet,” “It is just a few days and I swear I am starting to feel…like…different.  Like things are starting to change, ya know?” he said it awkwardly which made me feel uncomfortable. “Ew stop. This conversation is starting to feel like a puberty talk,” Okay maybe I made it awkward.     Nicky just looked at me and rolled his eyes.  “I can’t eat, I am freaking out about next week…” I started ranting. “What if I can’t shift at the solstice?  Everyone will be watching me and you know it.  What if my nerves mess it up?  OH MY GOD!  I will probably throw up in front of the whole pack!  My grandparents will be so embarrassed.  I will have to move away.” “Ugh stop worrying, for the thousandth time, you will shift.  Your dad was an Alpha.  It probably won’t even hurt when you shift the first time,” Thank God I had him as a friend.  He knew how nervous I got even if he acted annoyed he was sympathetic to my situation. “Maybe I could try shifting once before the ceremony so that I won’t look like an i***t,” I said. “You won’t be able to,” Nicky replied while looking down at his phone. “Why not? You said it, I have Alpha blood and shifting should come a bit easier to me,” I don’t know why I was even suggesting it because I was scared at the thought of shifting the first time.  “No one shifts until the solstice after the eighteenth birthday,” he said this in a monotone voice.  “Pete Key did!” I said a little bit more loudly than I intended. “Uh-huh and that was because his little brother fell through the ice at the lake and he was the only person around.  It was an extreme adrenaline rush,” Nicky was still looking down at his phone while arguing this with me.      I stared at him.  He was playing a game on his phone.  We were sitting in the grass with our legs both crossed.  He was wearing his old tennis shoes and his socks were showing.  His jeans were about four inches too short.  He was wearing his nerdy watch just like he did every day.  Who even wore those things anymore?  It was black and looked like it was made out of plastic or rubber.  The thing was too big for his wrist.  I kept watching his boney fingers move around on the screen of his phone then I got my phone out and played a game until the bell rang summoning us back from lunch.