New Girl

Being the new girl is the worst. Like, scientifically the worst. I would know because I have been the new girl four times now and it never gets easier. My name is Skylar and my mom moved us again, this time to a tiny town called Crescent Hollow which is the kind of place where everyone has known each other since they were babies and the new girl sticks out like a sore thumb. We moved because of my mom's job, which is the reason we always move, and I had basically given up on having actual friends. What my mom didn't tell me, and what I found out on my very first morning, is that Crescent Hollow High is a pack school. Okay so I should explain. We're werewolves. My family I mean. It's not a big deal, lots of families are, you just don't talk about it around humans. But my mom and I had always lived in human towns so I had never actually been around other wolves my own age before. I had never been in a pack. I didn't even really know what that felt like. I found out the second I walked through the front doors of Crescent Hollow High. It was like walking into a room where everyone was holding their breath. Every single person turned and looked at me. And they weren't being mean about it, they were just... sniffing. Tasting the air. Figuring out what I was. And one by one I watched them realize that the new girl wasn't human, the new girl was one of them, and that was somehow even worse because now they all had OPINIONS. I clutched my schedule and tried to find my locker and pretended I couldn't feel forty people watching me. "You're new." I turned around and there was a girl with curly red hair and the friendliest face I had ever seen, and honestly I almost cried with relief. "Is it that obvious," I said. "You're standing in the middle of the hallway looking like you're about to be sick, so kind of," she said, but she was smiling. "I'm Briar. I'm gonna adopt you, okay, it's already decided, you don't get a vote. What's your name?" "Skylar." "Skylar. Cute." Briar looped her arm through mine like we had been best friends our whole lives. "Okay, new girl rules. Don't eat the cafeteria meatloaf. Mr. Hargrove gives pop quizzes on Fridays. And —" she lowered her voice "— stay away from the alpha's table at lunch." "The alpha?" I said. "Like, this school has an alpha?" Briar looked at me like I had three heads. "Every pack has an alpha, Skylar. And ours goes here. Senior, like us." She made a face. "Dxxon Cole. He's... it's complicated. He's gorgeous, like genuinely unfair levels of gorgeous, and he's also the rudest person who has ever lived. He doesn't talk to anyone. He doesn't do friends. His dad's the pack alpha so Dxxon's gonna be alpha someday and I think it made him weird about it." "Sounds like a charmer," I said. "Just don't even look at him," Briar said. "Trust me. New girls who notice Dxxon Cole have a bad time." And I want it on the record that I FULLY intended to follow that advice. I had no interest in some moody rich pack boy. I just wanted to get through senior year, survive, maybe make one or two friends, and graduate. That was the plan. The plan lasted exactly until fourth period, when I walked into Advanced Bio, and the room went quiet the way the whole school had gone quiet that morning, except worse, except this time it wasn't about me being new. There was a boy in the back row. He had dark hair that fell into his eyes and he was slouched in his chair like the chair had personally offended him and he was, exactly like Briar said, unfairly gorgeous, the kind of gorgeous that makes you actually annoyed. And the second I walked through the door, he sat up straight. Everyone noticed. You could feel the whole room notice. Because apparently Dxxon Cole did not sit up straight for anyone, ever, and he was sitting up straight now, and he was staring at me, and his eyes were doing something that wolf eyes are absolutely not supposed to do in the middle of the day in a human-adjacent biology class. They were glowing. Oh no, I thought. Oh no no no. Because I might have been raised in human towns, and I might not know the first thing about packs, but my mom had told me ONE thing about being a wolf that she made me promise to remember. You'll know your mate the second you see them. And so will they.