Adriana #4
She knew it was technically true; knew that if her own pack had picked up and moved away from the wolves that had neighbored them, things might have been different.
Her whole life might have been different .
. . But they hadn’t, and there was no point in dwelling over a past that had never existed.
The wolfpack had existed on the edge of the human city, and her smaller pack had clung to the fringes on the rim of that territory.
Scavengers. Mongrels. Find your own space.
It was clear that the werewolf population in this town was ample, but none of them carried the smell of a pack. Maybe it won’t matter. You don’t have to let it matter.
A groan went up as the thrower struck out, and the wolf on the platform celebrated by dancing in victory from his precarious seat.
The crowd erupted again as another throw narrowly missed the target.
The man continued his cocky celebration, earning a fresh round of laughter from the spectators below.
Adriana found herself smiling again, in spite of herself. There was something strangely wholesome about witnessing a community comfortable enough with itself to create traditions built entirely around publicly humiliating someone they liked, werewolf or not.
She heard one of the balls find its target, striking the arm that kept the popular man upright a moment before he dropped.
The assembled crowd seemed almost too shocked to react for a moment, erupting in laughter and cheers when he vanished, clapping and hooting as he pulled himself back onto the righted platform a minute later.
She could barely make him out, but she knew he was dripping with water.
A brand new start in a nice little town, where everyone knew and liked each other enough to come together for an event like this.
Nicer than anything she’d known before, but that didn’t have to matter either.
She was tired of feeling as though her life was a series of temporary stops.
Permanence. You can be anyone you want here.
Nobody knows you. You have nothing to prove.
Leave the anxiety behind and actually start living.
Her phone began to ring as she struggled to open her front door for the very first time a short while later, having hopped back on the convenient little trolley, juggling her lemonade, the second foil-wrapped sausage she’d purchased to bring home, and the bag of kettlecorn.
“Just making sure you didn’t have any trouble on the road. Everything go okay?”
Her mother never bothered with a greeting. Adriana was always vaguely mystified by phone conversations that started out with hi sweetie, hello dear, it’s mom, how are you? She and her mother simply started the conversation, no preliminary niceties involved.
“No problems at all. I got in a little while ago, no issues. Movers will be here early to unpack the trailer. I start work in a few days,” she went on hurriedly, not giving her mother a chance to tsk over the unneeded expenditure of saving her back.
“I can’t be hauling boxes up two flights of steps.
There’s a fair in town, so I went to grab something to eat before they shut down. ”
“How’s the place?”
The place. A place didn’t need to have sentimental value. A place wasn’t the setting of one’s every childhood memory, four walls and a roof that represented security . . . a place was simply wherever one rested their head for the moment. Where they stayed without accumulating too much. Transience.
“The place is . . . nice. Really nice, Ma. Maybe you can make it out for a visit once I’m settled in.”
“Nice how?”
She understood the question. The instinct that had shaped every woman in her pack.
Nice for people like us? Nice for the pack on the fringes, who made do with what they could?
Nice like a used car one inherited from a relative, that might juuust make it through winter?
. . . Or nice for people who took pictures for their Christmas cards wearing coordinated sweaters?
Nice enough for her pack, or nice for the wolves?
Adriana suspected this whole damned town was of the matching sweater variety, regardless of species.
“Nice nice. I really like it here. It seems like a good community.”
Her mother let her go shortly after to be up early for the movers, but the call had done enough. Too nice for someone like you?
She was collapsing under the weight of the emergency department’s stress.
It would break her if she stayed, had already broken her, and the thought terrified her .
. . but it was all she knew. The thought of saying goodbye to the adrenaline rush and constant pace was terrifying in a completely different way.
Who would she be, if she wasn’t Dr. Brunelli, fast and accurate, meticulous and thorough in the face of calamity?
Someone brand new.
Someone people liked. Someone with a life outside of work.
Maybe even someone in a relationship. This was a nice place, and she was going to figure out how to make it feel like home, even if she didn’t know how to act like a person who was meant to live in a town like this.
She’d not let her humble beginnings or lack of connections get in her way in med school, hadn’t let it slow her down at the hospital.
She had always excelled professionally, and she would figure it out.
She always had. Fake it till you fucking make it. No matter what.