The Friend Experiment
Plan B begins the next morning and does not stop.
Kickball, first — Finn drafts him onto the team, and it turns out a boy with a wolf inside can kick a red rubber ball into next week, and the whoop he makes rounding first base startles even him, like a sound that had been waiting years for the door to open. Then Priya's joke rotation (he laughs in the wrong places, then the right ones, then at everything for two days straight — laughing is apparently morish once you start). Pancakes on Saturdays, standing invitation, Finn's mother's orders.
He never asks about unusual animals anymore. You all notice; nobody says it.
It's on the ninth evening, on Finn's porch steps, that Finn finally does the enormous thing, the way Finn does — no ceremony, mid-sentence, passing him the lemonade: “We should fix the name situation. 'Hey you' is getting stupid. Want us to help you pick one? A given one. That's how it works here — somebody gives it, you keep it forever.”
The new kid holds the lemonade very still. On the road behind you, dusk is coming down; and far off toward the hills, so faint that only you catch it — because only you know to listen — something howls. Once. A summons. His grey eyes flick toward it, and back, and in them you see the whole war, both columns of the dossier at once, a creature pulled by two names — one he'd be given, one he'd be ordered to earn.
“I want—” he says, and stops, and stands up. “I have to go,” he says instead, in the flat far-off-weather voice you haven't heard in a week, and walks off the porch into the falling dark, toward the hills.